International Spy Museum

Description

The International Spy Museum is "the only public museum in the United States solely dedicated to espionage," according to its website, featuring "the largest collection of international espionage artifacts ever placed on public display." The museum works to offer an apolitical view into the world of spies and espionage and to explore the importance of espionage work worldwide, both in the past and the present day.

The museum offers downloadable educator guides, pre- and post-visit materials, workshops for grades 5–12, bus tours, and long-distance web-conferencing-based programs.

Diana Laufenberg's What If?

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Photo of illustration, Alternate Realities, May 24, 2010, jurvetson, Flickr
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NOTE: Deemed not acceptable for publication

  • What if Ben Franklin died in his electricity experiment?
  • What if Albert Einstein died before the theory of relativity was released?
  • What if Alice Paul and Lucy Burns were assassinated?
  • What if the Selective Service Act from World War I was not ratified?
  • What if Prohibition was not repealed?
  • What if Joseph Kennedy, Jr. lived?
  • What if JFK did not come to a diplomatic resolution to the Cuban Missile Crisis?
  • What if Ronald Reagan did not survive his assassination attempt?
  • What if Britain and the U.S. did not have the Revolutionary War?
  • What if Nat Turner did not get caught?
  • What if Puerto Rico did not become a U.S. territory?
  • What if Amelia Earhart survived her 1937 flight?
  • What if segregation in schools was never overturned?
  • What if Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring did not "catch on" and DDT was never banned?
  • What if Osama bin Laden died in 1980?
  • What if Bill Gates's middle school never bought a computer terminal and made it available to students?
  • What if al-Qaeda was successful in the car bombing of the Twin Towers in 1993?

This is a sampling of questions asked by my juniors in their final project for American History. Counterfactual or alternate history is a fringe topic amongst academic historians. However, as a class activity it challenges students to understand history as more than a series of inevitable events. The What If? project focuses on the specific engagement of the individual student with a deep investigation of the historical record. The steps that take the student through the exercise are challenging, couched in research, and steeped in creativity.

Student Steps for Executing the "What If?" Unit:
  1. Brainstorm for ideas—think back to the most interesting units of study from the past year as a place to start; what are you most curious about in American history? The goal is to establish the Point of Divergence (POD).
  2. Investigate 2–3 PODs for the project.
  3. Choose one POD and fill out the contract for completing the project.
  4. Receive the graphic organizer that serves as a one-stop shop for writing down the pieces of the project. You will fill this out as you work through the project.
  5. Identify at least three primary source documents that PRECEDE your POD. (This establishes students' understanding of the historical record leading up to their PODs.)
  6. Use the National Archives Primary Source Document Analysis Worksheets to analyze your primary sources.
  7. Brainstorm three NEW events to add to the altered timeline that results after the POD.
  8. Create two primary source documents for each new event, to establish the events as 'real.'

    9. Finally, after they complete these eight steps, students use all the pieces amassed on their graphic organizers to pull together multimedia projects that utilize each piece of their evidence, real and created, in order to represent 2011 as it exists after their PODs. Students then post their work on their blogs and each writes a lengthy reflection. They answer questions including

    • What did you like about this project?
    • What was most challenging?
    • Describe the most interesting fact or event that you investigated.
    • How do the actions of individuals impact the historical record?
    • How do systemic changes impact the historical record?
    • How influential can one decision be in the historical landscape?
    • How could this project be improved?
    • If you had it to do over, what would you change about your process for the project?
    Student Responses to the Project

    Many times over I hear the students say things like, "You have no IDEA how much I know about this topic." They push back when I try to poke holes in their logic with events from the historical record; they cite primary sources when I need more proof. Their reflections often are the most telling records of the learning that occurs during this process. They write:

    The thing that I found most fun about this project, was coincidentally the same thing I thought was the most difficult, and that was the fact that there were so many different possibilities. It was very fun to see how different events related to one another, and how changing one could set off this long domino effect about all of history. —Dennis

    My favorite part of the actual creating of the project was definitely fabricating primary source documents. I felt so cool, like some kind of all-powerful, primary-source-creating being. —Luna

    I liked that I had free control to change something in history. It gave me the opportunity to choose something I was passionate about and change it to my liking. On the flip side, it was hard to pick something to change that would give me the outcome I wanted. —Ayanna

    I really liked the hypothetical part of this benchmark, it left a lot of room for creativity. I enjoyed making my primary source documents and making up a different future for our country. However, topic choice was definitely the most difficult thing for me. —Emma

    What I like about the project was that it made me do a lot of thinking and I learned a lot of history by going out on my own and researching the information that I needed. —Sam

    Learning through Challenge

    This unit causes my brain to hurt. This project causes my students' brains to hurt. It puzzles, stumps, and perplexes us. Students choose topics poorly but do not realize it until well into the project. I approve a topic that is 'too big' and we are challenged to find a way out as the project comes to a close. There are contracts, organizers, analysis, predictions, and sweat involved in this project. In the end, each student learns. They learn content in an intense and curious manner. They learn skills with an urgency of 'I need to know this right now.' They learn their limitations and challenges in the most instructive of ways. This unit also pushes me in all these ways and more. It pushes me as a teacher and as a constant student of history to be the type of resource they need throughout this project. This is learning in its most messy and beautiful form.

For more information

In Ask a Historian, John Buescher looks at how complicated (and ultimately unanswerable) questions of 'what if? can be (here, for World War II history).

Ask students to 'stop action and assess alternatives,' suggests teacher educator Lori Shaller. This teaching strategy can help students realize that history, as it was happening, presented its participants with constant 'what ifs?'

Organize Your Thinking to Critically Analyze Text

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Video screencap, Organize Your Thinking to Critically Analyze Text, 27 Feb 2012
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This 15-minute video features 5th-grade teacher Jennifer Brouhard using several strategies for prompting deep understanding of historical texts. Brouhard explains how she noticed that her students were reading quickly and considered themselves finished with a text before going deeply into it or “doing anything” with it. Here, she explains several strategies that prompted her students to delve deeper into text and draw more meaning from it than a quick read allows.

This video provides examples of three promising practices:

  1. Creating opportunities to hear students making sense of the content and text and using what she learns about student understanding to design instruction tailored to that particular class’s needs;
  2. Using a historical question to frame instruction and student reading; and
  3. Using a variety of teaching strategies in response to student needs and abilities.
Strategies

In “Keep it or Junk it?” students nominate, vote, and discuss which words are needed to address the following focus question: What happened as a result of English settlement of Jamestown Virginia? Handouts for this strategy can be downloaded from the site.

“Jump in and read” lets Brouhard listen to her students read the text which helps her understand areas they need more help with. For example, if students stumble on the phrase “indentured servant,” it indicates that they need more review of this term and its meaning.

Writing subtitles for paragraphs is a third strategy Brouhard selectively employs.

Included with this video are handouts and samples of student work that make it easy to give one of these strategies a try in your own classroom.

"Uncoverage" in History Survey Courses

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A middle school student completing a writing assignment. NHEC
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The emphasis in survey courses is on "coverage"—trying to get through vast quantities of material. This can create routines which, according to Lendol Calder, rarely lead students to develop skills as historical readers, writers, and thinkers. As one of the study participants put it, in history survey courses you listen to a lecture, then you read a textbook, then you take a test. And then you do it all over again. Many teachers, however, acknowledge that covering everything is an impossible goal. But if "coverage" is not the aim of survey courses, then what is?

In this article from the Journal of American History, Calder argues for a new way of teaching these courses. Too often, history survey courses focus only on "what happened," without stopping to consider the work that historians do or to inquire into the writing and reading of history. Calder argues that "uncoverage" (a term used by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe to describe a way to delve into content instead of just covering it) is naturally suited to history, which is about inquiry, argument, and point of view, and often uses incomplete evidence to construct reasonable stories about the past. Calder claims that plowing through piles of historical facts actually prevents students from connecting with the disciplinary work of history. By emulating the work of historians, students actually retain content better, because they are more engaged in the process of learning and absorbing information.

. . . plowing through piles of historical facts actually prevents students from connecting with the disciplinary work of history.

Although the article focuses on college-level courses, the uncoverage concept could apply just as well to middle- and high-school classes, which are almost always taught as survey courses.

Framing the Course

Calder begins by asking students to consider reasons for studying history, the problems that arise in the pursuit of historical knowledge, and the stories and patterns from the past. After explaining the nature of "doing history," Calder explains that the class will be focusing on particular "problem areas" from the American past such as "Origins of the Cold War" and "1980s Culture Wars." For each problem area, Calder identifies six historical skills students can develop: questioning, connecting, sourcing, making inferences, considering alternate perspectives, and recognizing limits to one’s knowledge. At the heart of his approach are three modes of inquiry that students should learn to employ: the visual, the critical, and the moral.

. . . three modes of inquiry that students should learn to employ: the visual, the critical, and the moral.
Visual Inquiry

Calder tackles each problem area with a visual inquiry into the period. Through films that focus on historical topics and create an environment rich in information, students can become engaged and begin to ask historical questions. This approach "uncovers" the way historians choose topics to focus on, based on what they find interesting or have questions about.

Critical Inquiry

Next, Calder has his students engage in critically examining the problem area. In a structured history workshop, students examine primary documents and construct interpretations about the period. During this phase, Calder emphasizes questioning what doesn’t make sense, drawing connections to prior knowledge, making inferences, and considering alternate perspectives.

Moral Inquiry

Finally, Calder leads his students into what he calls "a moral inquiry" of the problem area. By this time students are primed to begin reading opinionated secondary sources that seem to "pick a side" in the history they tell. Particularly useful are provocative texts that prompt students to consider how they would think or write about interpretations of the past.

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Marginalia, CHNM
In the Classroom
  • If you teach a survey class, it's time to take a step back. Don’t worry about what you need to "cover." Instead, think about what you want to teach.
  • Consider which overarching history lessons students need to know. Ask your students questions like "What is the story of American history?" and "How and why have freedoms expanded (or contracted) over time?"
  • Next, consider the skills you want your students to acquire. Calder hoped his students would gain an understanding of how historians do their work. Perhaps you want students to conduct a conversation about how history is written. Or maybe your students could develop concrete skills such as using evidence to support their claims.
  • Once you’ve decided on your ultimate aims, consider what units of instruction would promote them. You’ll still be covering content, of course, but in the service of setting bigger goals for your students.
  • Leaving out material is hard. But remember, no one can teach everything. Using the "uncoverage" approach, you can explain to students why you’re teaching what you’re teaching.
Sample Application

Instead of asking them to memorize textbook pages or lecture notes, Calder presents his students with big questions about American history, such as:

  • What is the story of American history?
  • Who are Americans?
  • What have we accomplished?
  • How do we judge what we have done?
  • Are things getting better or worse, or are generalized statements like these possible to believe in the first place?

From there Calder asks questions about the process of "doing" history:

  • How do historians know what they claim to know?
  • Why would we want to think the way historians think?

Calder is asking his students to think about why and how they are studying history. These questions about purpose and process are at the heart of "uncovering" history.

For more information

Lendol Calder, with the assistance of Melissa Beaver, created a website to accompany his JAH article. Visit to explore his ideas in greater depth.

Bibliography

Lendol Calder, "Uncoverage: Toward a Signature Pedagogy for the History Survey," The Journal of American History, volume 92, no. 4 (March 2006), pp. 1358-1369. http://jah.oxfordjournals.org/content/92/4/1358.full.

Multiperspectivity: What Is It, and Why Use It?

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Photo, San Francisco, Calif., April 1942. . . , Library of Congress
Question

What is multiperspectivity in history?

Answer

Exploring multiple perspectives (which is known as "multiperspectivity" in parts of Europe) requires incorporating source materials that reflect different views of a historical event. In recent decades scholars and educators have begun to question the validity of singular (one-sided) historical narratives. Instead of just focusing on dominant groups and communities, they recommend employing multiple perspectives. One reason for this stems from increasing diversity and cultural pluralism, since many groups—women, the poor, ethnic minorities, etc.—have been ignored in traditional historical narratives.

. . . many groups—women, the poor, ethnic minorities, etc.—have been ignored in traditional historical narratives.

Another reason is disciplinary. After all, good historians don’t just settle for one perspective on a historical issue—they piece together many (sometimes competing) versions of a story to construct an accurate interpretation. As Ann Low-Beer explains, "In history, multiple perspectives are usual and have to be tested against evidence, and accounted for in judgments and conclusions."

Here's an instance of using multiple perspectives: When studying the voyages of discovery, students would not only learn about explorers like Columbus, but about the peoples who had been "discovered." Historian Jon Wiener, writing in American History 101 in Slate magazine, offers the following example:

In the case of Reconstruction. . . I focus [on] the three most significant [perspectives]: the Northern Radicals, who shaped federal policy and who wanted to bring the former slaves into the economy of the free market, as wage earners, and into the political system, as voters; the Southern planter elite, who wanted to preserve as much of the old plantation labor system as possible; and the former slaves themselves. Their understanding of freedom was, as Eric Foner has written, "shaped by their experiences as slaves." Freedom for them meant freedom to work for themselves—economic autonomy and access to land. This argument shows the freedmen defining their own interests, in conflict with the federal government, which claimed to represent them. Thus, instead of giving students a list of facts and dates to memorize, I would ask them to conceive of what's happening as a three-sided conflict over the meaning of freedom.

. . . instead of giving students a list of facts and dates to memorize, I would ask them to conceive of what's happening as a three-sided conflict over the meaning of freedom.

Consequently, for Wiener, "students end up learning not just about what happened during Reconstruction, but about how history itself gets reconstructed."

If not yet universal, this approach is widely accepted. In its most recent Position Statement, the National Council for the Social Studies in the United States recommended students learn to "think critically, and make personal and civic decisions based on information from multiple perspectives."

So what can a classroom teacher do? Try incorporating primary sources that represent a range of views on a historical issue. Then, ask students to spend some time thinking about why different groups may see the same event in different ways. Oftentimes a different story emerges when those multiple perspectives are put together. The result is enriched historical understanding.

Women Taking History: Women's History Month 2011

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Photo, Woman with camera, White House, Washington, D.C., Apr. 8, 1922, LoC
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African American History Month ends, and Women's History Month begins! Take a glance around the internet, and you'll find plenty of resources for teaching women's history—whether it be the Seneca Falls Convention, heroes of the American Revolution and the Civil War, social activists, First Ladies, workers during the World Wars, jazz and blues stars, or presidential candidates. You'll find photographs of many of these women, too—working in factories, on the campaign trail, helping the wounded, conducting scientific experiments.

But who takes these photographs? Who makes these images that become the records of history? Aren't the people behind the camera as significant as the ones in front of it?

Of course they are, though they can easily be forgotten. When we look at photographs of Amelia Earhart, we rarely ask who took the photo. When we're struck by a picture of New York during 9/11, do we ever ask if it was snapped by a man or a woman?

Explore women's history behind the camera this Women's History Month. What have women chosen to capture on film, as they record and live through history?

Taking Photos and Making History
  • The Kansas Historical Society tells the story of Alice Gardiner Sennrich, a professional photographer early in photography's commercial history. Born in 1878, Sennrich purchased a Kansas photography studio in 1902, and ran it throughout her life, including after her marriage. Recognized by the National Association of Photographers, she was also active in the Photographers Association of Kansas (PAK), an organization that had active female members since its founding. You can hear more about Sennrich in this podcast by the Society.
  • During the Great Depression, the Federal Government gave photographers, both men and women, work documenting the lives of ordinary U.S. citizens and the social conditions of the day. The Library of Congress's American Memory collection From the Great Depression to World War II: Photos from the FSA-OWI preserves more than 150,000 of these photographs. Try browsing the collections' black-and-white and color photos by creator. Look for women's names and work—and remember to check names with only a first initial and a surname! These may be women, too. Giving only a first initial was (and remains) one way to avoid being judged (at least in print) by gender.
  • Photographs aren't always taken as documentation. Sometimes, they're carefully composed as art. The online archive Women Artists of the American West showcases the artwork of 19th- and 20th-century Western women. Photography exhibits include photographs by white women of Pueblo arts and crafts workers (many of them women), taken from 1900 to 1935; modern art photography by Native women; landscape photography by Laura Gilpin (1891–1979); and 1972–1997 lesbian photography (some pages contain nudity). The Women in International Photography Archive, collects essays on more than 25 women photographers.
  • For an example of a modern photographer using her work as part of a political journalistic career, check out Jo Freeman.com. A writer, lawyer, and activist, Freeman's site features her photographs of Democratic and Republican conventions, marches and protests, New York after 9/11, the Chicago riot following Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination, and Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm's 1972 campaign for the presidency.

If photographs aren't enough, branch out into art, journalism, fiction and nonfiction writing, and other ways of recording and responding to the world, all meant for the public eye. What have women created and documented? What were their (myriad, uncountable) reasons for crafting "snapshots" and composing reactions? Women make history when they're behind its lens, as well as in front!

Further Resources

Looking for more resources? Take a quiz on women in history, with our weekly quiz archive! See how well you do on quizzes with subjects like women in the West. Search our Website Reviews, as well—we've reviewed and annotated more than 200 websites with women's history content.

If you'd still like more, these organizations feature content and pages created just for Women's History Month:

For more information

Speaking of photographs, the Smithsonian is looking for help identifying women in photographs with missing or incomplete background information. Take a look and see if you can help out!

Finding Local History Resources

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Photo, The old neighborhood. . . , Christopher Frith, 1998, NYPL
Question

I have been unable to find teaching materials and/or curriculum for the teaching of local history. Our small town has a very rich history, including being the place where Lewis and Clark joined together to form their expedition, and the town that is the oldest American town in what was the entire Northwest Territory. It is also the site of the only home that George Rogers Clark ever owned. We also have extensive archaeology of Archaic, Woodland, and Mississippian periods.

We would like to incorporate teaching our town's history into the curriculum of grades K-5, but find no curriculum help or materials to do so.

Answer

Learning history through a local lens can be an engaging and powerful way to study the past. It sounds like your town (in Indiana, I presume?) has a rich history to mine with elementary students. For curricular resources, first try local museums, libraries, and historic sites. Their local collections often have interesting and evocative primary sources and orienting secondary material that can be curricular building blocks.

Some of these local institutions even provide lessons, resources, and field trips designed especially for the K-5 classroom. See this site's Museum and Historic Sites search for locating institutions near your community.

But even without specific curriculum, repositories of historic photographs, documents, maps, and other sources can get you well on your way to creating classroom plans.

Here are some tips for creating local history curricula for the elementary classroom:

Remember your state's standards—these can help you identify important topics, themes, and concepts at each of the grade levels. (Click here to search state standards.)

Timelines and maps are invaluable tools for helping students of all ages study history. From using a timeline to understand photographs that show a changing town landscape to using maps to understand settlement patterns, these tools help young students locate primary sources in concrete ways and read and analyze these sources. Connections between local and regional or national events can also be more transparent for students when timelines and maps are compared. For instance, compare a timeline of national events with a timeline of local events to help students see these connections.

Guiding questions are important. Use them to help students read and look carefully at sources and consider the significance of what they see.

Remember that walking tours can help students engage with the past. Seek out local history experts to help you identify promising sources, stories, and sites.

Use existing curricula and lesson ideas on this site to help you plan questions, activities, and lesson structures. For example, see this teaching guide about reading historic photographs closely and using them as doors into larger historic questions, or this video for a teacher who uses walking tours to help students learn their local colonial history. And don't forget to explore our Primary Source Guides. The entry about the National Parks Service may be especially helpful.

Other national organizations also provide resources for teaching local history. See the Regional Education Resources of the National Archives, National History Day's state pages, and a list of resources from the Library of Congress's American Memory site. Finally, the New England Flow of History project has some teaching ideas and resources that can be helpful.

Please come back and tell us about your successes and challenges—this is a topic that is important to many educators!

National History Day Wins 2011 National Humanities Medal

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Photo, Final preparations, Mar. 6, 2009, Jose Kevo, Flickr
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On February 13th, National History Day (NHD), a year-long, nationwide contest that challenges students to hone their historical thinking, research, and interpretation skills, received the 2011 National Humanities Medal. Presented by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the medal "honors individuals or groups whose work has deepened the nation's understanding of the humanities, broadened our citizens' engagement with the humanities, or helped preserve and expand Americans' access to important resources in the humanities." This marks the first time a K–12 education program has received the medal, according to a press release.

Interested in learning more about the program? Your first stop should be the National History Day website. Then come back to Teachinghistory.org to read what our teacher-writers have to say about their NHD experiences! Eighth-grade teacher Amy Trenkle loves the website and documentary categories, which ask students to practice 21st-century skills in their NHD presentations (read her thoughts). Mike Yell, 7th-grade teacher and former National Council for the Social Studies president, recommends using the program as a differentiation option for self-directed students (read more here).

Are you and your students already involved in NHD? Do they have questions about historical thinking and research? Do you? Remember that anyone can submit questions to Ask a Master Teacher, Ask a Historian, and Ask a Digital Historian here at Teachinghistory.org. In the past, we've answered questions about aligning NHD to state social studies standards and given tips on places to begin research and steps in developing a research topic.

Congratulations, National History Day!

Brookgreen Gardens

Description

In 1931 Archer and Anna Hyatt Huntington founded Brookgreen Gardens, a non-profit 501(c) (3) garden museum, to preserve the native flora and fauna and display objects of art within that natural setting.

Today, Brookgreen Gardens is a National Historic Landmark with the most significant collection of figurative sculpture, in an outdoor setting, by American artists in the world, and has the only zoo accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums on the coast of the Carolinas.

In 2010, the Brookgreen Gardens Education Department provided field trip experiences for 4,093 students with South Carolina curriculum-based programs about History, Art, and Nature. Additionally, our annual curriculum-based special event for Horry and Georgetown County students, “Gullah Gullah Days,” a third-grade social studies program, provided educational enrichment for 1,708 students.

Programs generally are 50-minutes in length. History programs are: “Creek Excursion”, “Stretching and Growing: Children on Lowcountry Rice Plantations: and “Rice Plantation Exploration.” Cultural presentations offered are: “Gullah Lessons on History, Family & Respect”, “Gullah/Geechee Rhythms”, and “Priscilla’s Posse, A (Simulated) Press Conference about Gullah Heritage.” Teachers receive pre-visit Program Information Sheets that detail: content area, grade, maximum number of students, South Carolina State Standards, and program description. Program descriptions also are available at www.brookgreen/org, after viewers click on Education.

The Children’s Discovery Room attracts numerous enthusiastic public guests. Its seven interactive stations target 4- to 12-year-olds and reflect the history, nature, and art of Brookgreen Gardens. Educators also may gain historical enrichment through visiting one of the following Public programs: Gullah/Geechee Program Series, the Lowcountry Trail Audio Tour, Oaks History and Nature Trail, the Creek Excursion, and the “Lowcountry Change & Continuity” exhibit.

African American History Month 2011

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Photo, Navy baseball team--Espiritu Santo, New Hebrides, Sept. 1944, NARA
Photo, Navy baseball team--Espiritu Santo, New Hebrides, Sept. 1944, NARA
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It's February! Resources throughout the web stand ready to provide you with lessons and primary source materials for Black History Month (also known as African American History Month), but African American history stretches far beyond the confines of one month and the narrative litany of a handful of cultural heroes. Maybe you want to go beyond Martin Luther King, Jr., Frederick Douglass, and Jackie Robinson. What stories can you uncover beyond the headlining stories textbooks provide? Remind your students of the complexity of African American history with these resources.

Documenting African American History
  • The New York Times' lesson plan "Stories to Tell: Curating an African-American History Exhibit" introduces students to the difficulties in curating a large museum—or even just one exhibit. How can curators for the developing Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture create a museum that honors all of African American history?
  • Search the Carnegie Museum of Art's Teenie Harris Archive Project for photographs taken by photographer Charles "Teenie" Harris for the Pittsburgh Courier. Published from 1907 to 1965, the Courier was a major African American newspaper, and these photographs show Harris's journalistic perspective on Pittsburgh events of all scales. Use the keywords "Teenie Harris," along with others related to your topic of interest, to find images of life at school, home, community events, church, work, and out on the town.
  • The Smithsonian National Museum of American History's Portraits of a City provides a similar photographic record of a place. The Scurlocks ran studios in DC for much of the 20th century, documenting African American life in the nation's capital.
  • The Library of Congress's American Memory collection The African American Experience in Ohio, 1850-1920 focuses on the themes of slavery, politics, and religion. Its wide range of primary-source documents, including thousands of newspaper articles, can help students construct a view of just what the collection's title implies.
  • High-quality photographs in the National Archives and Records Administration's "Pictures of African Americans During World War II" could give students a look into another kind of community—one that formed both overseas and on the home front during war.
Looking for More Suggestions?

If none of these resources fit into your curriculum or spark your interests, there's plenty where they came from. Search our Website Reviews using the topic "African Americans," and you'll turn up close to 300 websites, on topics ranging from Marcus Garvey to the construction of race to Seattle's Black Panthers to sheet music by and about African Americans. Or test your African American history knowledge in our weekly quiz feature! You and your students can take online quizzes on African American baseball players and other athletes, the historical accuracy of the film Glory, Jim Crow laws, and foodways.

You can also explore the African American History Month pages of history and educational organizations, including:

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