We need food to live, but don't always think about where food that comes from. We carry foods and foodways with us as we immigrate, emigrate, or migrate. We share food and celebrate with it. Every bite we eat has a long history involving geography, trade, science, technology, global contact, and more.

Take advantage of this rich history by asking questions about the foods students love. These seven links can get you started on taste-testing the past:

• Reenactors make colonial foods at Colonial Williamsburg's History is Served—from pink pancakes to chicken surprise.
• Time to eat out! The Miss Frank E. Buttolph American Menu Collection features restaurant menus from 1851 to 1930.
• The first uniquely American cookbook was Amelia Simmon's American Cookery, published in 1796. Thousands of cookbooks followed. Feeding America: The Historic American Cookbook Project shares 75 published from 1798 through 1922.
• Sometimes food was scarce. University of Wisconsin's Recipe for Victory: Food and Cooking in Wartime shares booklets and cookbooks from World War I.
• How do you get people to buy a new food? Advertise! From postcards to board games, see how food was sold at Michigan State University's Little Cookbooks.
• Cookbooks let communities, clubs, religious groups, and more come together around favorite recipes. The Library of Congress's guide to digitized cookbooks peeks into 19th- and 20th-century kitchens.
• From farm to factory and kitchen to table, what does the government have to say about the foods we eat? The National Archives' What's Cooking, Uncle Sam? takes a look.

Remember that there are many ways of bringing food history into the classroom. American Girl author Valerie Tripp describes how she writes for hands, noses, tongues, and ears, not just eyes, in our blog.

From cooking tools to songs about food, from the smells of spices to the taste of hardtack, explore the history of food with all five senses.

Declared an official national holiday in 1894, the roots of Labor Day stretch back much further. Long before the Industrial Revolution and the rise of organized labor, colonists and Native peoples labored to provide for themselves and their families and to support their societies. U.S. citizens continue to work in many ways and at many jobs.

How has work changed over time? Take a look at our Labor Day spotlight page. We've gathered lesson plans, website reviews, teaching strategies, and more on American labor history. Using these resources, you and your students can ask questions about the nature of work and search for answers.

Need some questions to get started? For each particular time and place, ask:

• Was work divided by gender? What tasks were associated with each gender? How strictly were these divisions followed? How have they changed over time?
• Similarly, was work divided by age? What tasks were associated with different ages? How strictly were these divisions followed? How have they changed over time?
• What did people consider "work"? What did the word mean? Were work and play distinct?
• How were differing ideas of work addressed or resolved? Think about contact between Native peoples and colonists, or between groups of immigrants from different countries.
• Why do people work? How were they compensated (if at all)?
• How was work regulated? Did the people doing the work make the rules?
• What skills, education, or background knowledge were required for various jobs?
• Did people choose to do work? What might the consequences be if they did not work?

There are many more questions to ask! Brainstorm with your students. Ask them what they think of as work. Do they like it? Why do they do it? What kinds of work do the adults in their lives do? They may be surprised at how much the idea of work has changed over time—and even how much it varies from person to person today.

No one would argue that the U.S. Constitution isn't a founding document. But what is a founding document? The Constitution outlined the shape of the U.S. government, and put in writing the basic rights of U.S. citizens. But what else has it done?

The U.S. Constitution has served as the foundation for many discussions about the U.S. and its principles. Whether people speak out for change or to maintain the status quo, they refer to the Constitution. Throughout U.S. history, writers, artists, and orators have used the text and ideas of the Constitution as the backbone of arguments.

Have your students review the U.S. Constitution and its context. What ideas inspired the Constitution? Explore the Library of Congress's exhibit Creating the United States to find primary sources related to the Constitution, many written by the Founding Fathers.

The exhibit also includes documents that followed the Constitution, from 1788 through the 1980s. From cartoons questioning the constitutionality of the New Deal to translated versions of the Constitution published in other countries, students can see many ways in which national (and international) conversations have used the Constitution as a starting point.

Discover more documents that preceded and descended from the Constitution with resources from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Our Documents presents a timeline of 100 milestone documents in U.S. history. Where is the Constitution in this lineup? How does the Constitution show the influence of earlier documents? How do later documents show the influence of the Constitution? What documents on this website do your students think most influenced U.S. history? (Here's what the U.S. public thought in 2004.)

Deepen your class's exploration further with primary sources, lesson plans, quizzes, and more from our Constitution Day spotlight page. Drawing on these materials, your students can uncover connections between the Constitution and the Civil Rights Movement, U.S. Supreme Court decisions, the Watergate scandal, and much more. The Constitution didn't just help found the U.S. government—it founded debates that shape the country.

One of the issues with which I struggled as a new teacher was the recognition of major themes prevalent in American history. In my first year of teaching I was often more concerned with getting through the next unit, next lesson, even the next class rather than thinking about the bigger picture. And my ignorance of the important themes of history did a disservice to my students. The event-focused history as I taught it failed to reveal connections and humanize the actors of history; it felt irrelevant to most of my students. The content, in fact, was presented as simply a series of inevitable events; each one distinct from the last, never to be considered again as we marched through time. As I became more comfortable in my teaching, I realized the importance of weaving salient themes of history, including race, class, and nationalism, throughout my lessons as a way to make the content more meaningful. Thus, I began the conscious effort of highlighting the manifestations of these themes in history for the benefit of my students. I discovered that the connections we made through class activities based on these themes allowed my students to see relationships within the content and gain a deeper understanding of the material.

The theme of class in America was one with which I felt a particularly deep connection, and as such, it became a thread that bound many of my American history lessons and units. Class issues and class conflict imbue nearly every event in American history. Of course, class was a significant concern as the Founding Fathers developed the framework that became our nation. And class issues are important to those studying the workers of the Industrial Revolution and the soldiers of the Civil War. And from there, class has become arguably even more important to our history. During the Gilded Age and the Progressive period, labor issues were rooted firmly in class. This theme continued through the 1930s, during which time most conflict in American society concerned clear class questions. And since the 1970s inflationary pressures and the struggles of the middle class have often been topics of historians, economists, and pundits. Today, we often hear about issues related to the economic crisis, class disparities, and the effects on the middle and lower class. To adapt an expression from professor and philosopher Cornell West—in all circumstances of history, class matters.

As I have suggested in previous posts, using music to engage, inform, and otherwise foster meaningful learning has worked well for my students and me. Within the theme of class in particular, a rich bounty of songs exists and can provide that fundamental thread through which the theme of class can connect with many periods in history. Songs about class give voice to those we rarely listen to or read about in our textbooks, but can be a component of instruction important to historical understanding.

In early American history students and I listened to Yankee Doodle Dandy and assessed the class differences emerging between the colonists and the British. We reviewed class conflict and the emergence of technology during the Industrial Revolution through contemporary sources including Radiohead’s haunting Palo Alto in an effort to tease out some of the feelings of those fearful of what kind of life new technology would bring and the associated loss of jobs for craftspeople in the 19th century. Antebellum period songwriters including Stephen Collins Foster and Daniel Decatur Emmett provided glimpses into the lives of working-class people of the U.S. as we approached the Civil War.

But for me it was music from the labor movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which allowed me to deeply explore the theme of class in American history. Images depicting working conditions and songs written about the plight of the working class as they voiced their frustration and anger toward employers spoke to my students beyond the textbook. Folk musicians from Woody Guthrie, Phil Ochs, and Pete Seeger to Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and the band Bright Eyes have expressed some of these sentiments and I employed them generously. Bluegrass and country artists including Bill Monroe, Hank Williams, and Earl Scruggs also shared stories of the working class and the rural poor in their songs. And beyond the labor movement specifically, music from urban streets has voiced how not only race but class issues have contributed to the struggle toward equality. Artists including Gil Scott-Heron Public Enemy, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, and Common have all confronted class issues. Moreover, the genre of punk rock largely emerged from working-class ethos and often provides the voice for class struggles as viewed by youth culture. Teachers can use the medium of music from various genres as a means to address class and class issues in a culturally significant way.

Teaching history as more than a series of inevitable events is elemental to quality instruction. Providing opportunities for students to understand the enduring themes that are often left out of traditional, event-focused history can be a way to challenge those myopic narratives. And music focused on the theme of class seems especially prevalent and potent as a way with which to transcend history lessons that are disconnected and irrelevant to students. It is music that is accessible, relevant, and has the ability to engage and inform your students in ways they are not likely to forget.