From the Gilder Lehrman Institute:
"Edward Ayers, President of University of Richmond, discusses how to define an 'era.' He reviews African American history and women's history throughout the 20th century to illustrate the fact that one event does not necessarily lead to another, and that history does not always follow a logical trajectory."
From the Gilder Lehrman Institute:
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joseph J. Ellis explores the life of George Washington. He discusses the difficulties of writing about Washington due to his well known aversion to revealing his personal thoughts. He presents theories about Washington's personality based on what has been documented about his early life.
From the Gilder Lehrman Institute:
Charles Mann's most recent book, 1491, won the U.S. National Academy of Sciences' Keck Award for the best book of the year. In this lecture he looks at new research on pre-Columbian America. He concludes that the Americas had actually been heavily populated and developed before the arrival of Columbus but then were rapidly depopulated by the introduction of numerous European and African diseases, giving Europeans the mistaken idea that their new land was a vast, empty wilderness.
From the Gilder Lehrman Institute:
What does the Constitution say about racial equality? Larry Kramer, Dean at Stanford Law School, explains the role of the Reconstruction amendments and the challenges faced by the Supreme Court in shaping civil rights legislation in the years before Brown v. Board of Education.
From the Gilder Lehrman Institute:
Elliott West, Distinguished Professor of the American West and the American Indian at the University of Arkansas, describes how guns and horses changed Native American culture, while European diseases ravaged the indigenous people of the New World who had no inherent immunity to them.
From the Gilder Lehrman Institute:
Stephanie McCurry, Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, discusses the impact of war and conscription on the emancipation of slaves throughout the Western Hemisphere. Often, slaves have been able to exploit the conditions of war—such as a lack of manpower—to their advantage.
I am working to develop an activity around myths or controversial information about people, places, and events of the American Western Frontier (about 18501900). I'm looking for suggestions on people, places, or events. . . This is a high school level course.
One could spend an entire lifetime studying the mythic and historical American West, but with your unit coming up, maybe it’s best to get you right into some resources that you can implement in the classroom.
First, check out Exploring the West, a project of the Bill Lane Center for the Study of the North American West. They have three units available on their website, one of which is on the role of cowboys in the historical myth of the West.
Another good resource is PBS’s New Perspectives on the West. The website has a number of good lesson plans and resources, including Making Myths: The West in Public and Private Writings. If you have time, it might be worth browsing around on the New Perspectives website—it’s full of rich material.
Debunking the Myth of the West is a useful unit plan for your purposes. A project of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute, the plan includes three lessons and a guide to resources. And the Library of Congress’s American Memory page also has these great resources on the West, some of which explore the creation of a mythic Western past.
The Gilder Lehrman Institute on American History explores many facets of the American West. One page directly addresses your question on myth by examining the iconic Buffalo Bill. It also contains a teaching module that has complete lesson plans with primary and secondary sources listed.
Finally, if you have time to do some reading, the University of Virginia has Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land: the American West as Symbol and Myth posted as a hypertext online. It also hosts a companion page on the life of Buffalo Bill Cody, exploring the myth of the West through Buffalo Bill.
In February, Teachinghistory.org rounded up sesquicentennial resources state by state. Now, with April and the anniversary of the April 12 bombardment of Fort Sumter upon us, let's look at some materials that aren't state-specific.
Peruse the blogosphere for updates on new materials and tips on finding the best of preexisting websites and archives. Education Week's blog "Curriculum Matters" posted two entries looking at websites, curriculum, and blogs focusing on the sesquicentennial in March: one entry on the 21st and one on the 24th. Watch for more to come.
The American Historical Association blogged on teaching the sesquicentennial, and History News Network gave the anniversary a turn as a hot topic. Plenty of individuals have set up blogs of their own to track sesquicentennial developments—look around, and see if anyone's taking a tack that interests you. Remember to assess the credentials and viewpoints of any blog you follow—who's writing it, and what is their goal in writing?
Here are two blogs whose "authors" you might recognize: the New York Times' "Disunion" and the Washington Post's "A House Divided". Both blogs feature entries by historians, published authors, and others (remember to assess the credibility of these writers for yourself, just as you would with an individual blogger!) on Civil War topics.
"Disunion"'s short-essay-style articles often include links to primary sources, while "A House Divided" answers questions on the Civil War. (Browse the Post's "Civil War 150" feature for more videos, articles, and event updates related to the sesquicentennial.)
If you're looking for lesson plans, the Civil War Trust recently released a new free curriculum set , including nine lessons and an exam for each level (elementary, middle, and high). The Trust's website also includes primary sources, maps of battlefields, a directory of Civil War sites, and more than 50 other lesson plans.
EDSITEment has an abundance of lesson plans—more than 40 related to the war. Also try the Smithsonian National Museum of American History's History Explorer for more than 80 lesson plans.
The American Red Cross, working with teachers, academics, and legal scholars, has developed a series of lesson plans entitled The American Civil War: A Humanitarian Perspective. Through activities that use primary sources, students learn about the roots of the American Red Cross through Clara Barton's work, battlefield conduct laws created by President Lincoln that predate the first Geneva Convention, and basic principles of humanitarian law.
Looking for some orientation to all of those sources? Sign up for one of the Smithsonian's April webinars designed to show teachers around Smithsonian Civil War resources. Or explore the Library of Congress's guide to 21 sources related to Southern secession.
The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) invites you to examine the Civil War through "little-known stories, seldom-seen documents, and unusual perspectives" in their new exhibit "Discovering the Civil War", including lesson plans and other teaching resources.
The Library of Virginia's online exhibit "Union or Succession" also focuses on primary sources from the debate over secession. Check out the Library's "CW 150 Legacy Project," too—are any organizations in your area working on collecting sources?
How about primary sources such as letters from Lincoln, Grant, Lee, and other Civil War era figures? Today in the Civil War: Dispatches from the Rosenbach Collection reproduces Civil War-era documents from the Rosenbach Collection 150 years after their creation. Each day a new item is posted, accompanied by a full or partial transcript.
This barely scratches the surface of the Civil War materials available to you. Maybe you'd rather listen to your Civil War history—Gilder Lehrman offers more than 20 podcasts on the Civil War era. Longwood University also has you covered, with its "That a Nation Might Live" podcasts following the war week by week.
Would you rather follow (present-day) events as they unfold? Track commemorations nationwide with the National Park System's Civil War website.
Take a look around the Internet, see what else you can uncover, and share your finds in comments here! The sesquicentennial starts this month, but it will last for years. New resources will appear, and established ones will expand, so keep your eyes open!
Give our improved search engine a try to find even more Teachinghistory.org resources on the Civil War.
Effective collaboration is essential to successful implementation of Teaching American History (TAH) programs. Program leaders and partners need to collaborate well in order to effectively address problems, improve the program during implementation, and ensure that the program runs smoothly. Participants benefit from collaboration because it provides them an opportunity to learn from one another, and not just from the project leaders. Teachers, administrators, history education specialists, and historians bring different perspectives to the task of improving the teaching and learning of history in middle and high school classrooms. The experience of the Chicago History Project (CHP), shows that effective collaboration among all of these groups can contribute to programs that meet participants' needs.
The TAH grant program of the U.S. Department of Education funded the Chicago History Project (CHP) in 2002. The project involved several organizational partners, including the Newberry Library, the University of Illinois at Chicago, the Chicago Historical Society (now Chicago History Museum), the Chicago Metro History Education Center, and the Constitutional Rights Foundation Chicago. CHP leadership designed a project with components that allowed partners and participants to work together, provide feedback, and alter the program to ensure that it met the needs of its participants and the goals of the grant.
CHP aimed at addressing several problems in history education, including the lack of teacher preparation in the discipline of history. It also attempted to foster professional relationships among teachers by creating a program that linked 7th- through 12th-grade teachers with university history professors, history education specialists, museums, and libraries.
CHP evolved over time based on participant feedback and increasingly provided teachers with programs, partnerships, and resources that increased the depth of historical content in their American history courses. The emphasis on collaboration helped develop communities of inquiry that strengthened teachers' pedagogical content knowledge.
The initial design of CHP put history content at the center with the belief that the translation of the content to the classroom would be done largely by the teachers. Program leaders viewed historians as the experts in historical content and the teachers as experts in pedagogy with history education specialists having a foot in both arenas, but CHP also included an emphasis on collaboration that was responsive to teachers' needs and strengthened teachers' pedagogical content knowledge. As a result, feedback from participants led to a more collaborative approach in planning and implementing program activities that improved the integration of content and method.
At the outset, CHP mixed middle and high school teachers together in teams to articulate the American history curriculum. The logistical challenges of coordinating cross-grade level partnerships of paired schools led CHP staff to base Cohorts 2 and 3 on school-based teams rather than pairing schools. This change allowed flexibility in cross-grade relationships and allowed teachers and schools with particular interests to work together. It successfully addressed the logistical problem without sacrificing the emphasis on increasing teacher collaboration.
The most significant change made based on teacher input was the redesign of the summer institute. Whereas Cohort 1 met as a single group for many sessions, Cohorts 2 and 3 were each divided into two seminar groups that met daily, meaning each group now had a consistent facilitator who could help them make connections between seminars and assist in building from one conversation to the next. In this context, the facilitator provided a consistent and constant resource in discussion, and the redesign of the summer institute allowed for small groups with more focused facilitation.
Teachers also noted specific benefits of collaborating with colleagues from their school and other schools. One teacher described it as providing "a richer sense of professional collaboration among fellow CPS teachers," while another saw the school partnerships as a way to ensure that materials from CHP would be integrated into the curriculum.
CHP provided collaboration across organizations and between teachers and historians and history education specialists. The partner organizations found participation in the Chicago History Project to be beneficial in a variety of ways. They appreciated the opportunity to interact with a group of dedicated teachers over a sustained period of time. The partner organizations forged closer relationships with many participants and saw significant crossover of CHP teachers participating in other professional development programs. Partners also noted that the long-term nature of CHP provided them with time to refine and tailor their offerings and materials to best suit the needs of CHP participants.
The commitment to a rich content-based program and the collaborative structure of the professional development project were instrumental in leveraging these changes. The response to teacher feedback and the commitment to provide teachers deep engagements with historical content made the project at once responsive and challenging.
My students have been participating in National History Day since my first year teaching in the public schools—more than a decade ago. Since that first year, I have grown tremendously as a teacher and as a teacher who is guiding students through the National History Day process. There's a lot I could write about National History Day. I truly think it's one of the best programs for asking students to research and then synthesize their research through a project. It allows for choice, higher-order thinking skills, and diversity in the way the project is presented.
It’s that project presentation format I want to focus on. At first, and for quite a number of years, my students participated in the exhibit category because it was my strength as a teacher, but for the last three years or so, the number of students participating in the website and documentary categories has really grown. I have continued to learn and stretch my boundaries as a teacher as well.
For those of you new to National History Day I highly suggest checking their site out online at nhd.org. In a nutshell, however, here is the program: Students choose their own topic that fits within the annual theme (this year’s theme is "Debate and Diplomacy: Successes, Failures, and Consequences"), they choose to work individually or in groups of up to five students (with the exception of the research paper), and they choose one of five categories to present their project in: research paper, documentary, performance, exhibit, or website.
The website and documentary categories are particularly wonderful for integrating social studies content and using technology to display the students’ hard work and knowledge. Here are some highlights and sticking points that I’ve found while having students work with the website and documentary categories.
Pros of Website:
Cons of Website:
Pros of Documentary:
Cons of Documentary:
I think it's important to remember that it's about balance. As a teacher, I have seen students spend an inordinate amount of time on the creation of their website or documentary only to neglect the history. I've also seen students do a dynamic job of researching their topic, only to not present it in the best format because they don't allow enough time or have the background knowledge to create their presentation in the format they chose. It's very important to have a pulse of the students' strengths and time constraints when choosing the format for the project. One of the neat things is that NHD allows students to experiment with the presentation format and is a great way to highlight the integration of social studies and technology!
With planning and communication you and your students will have a great time learning history through National History Day!
Take a few minutes in our Tech for Teachers section—learn about NHD's website-making tool of choice, Weebly, and documentary-creation tools like Digital Storyteller.
Check out a second-place-winning website, our blog entry on NHD 2010, or read an article on NHD's history.
And what exactly are 21st-century skills? Six experts give their views in our Roundtable.