"The Fife Lake museum is full of numerous historical artifacts and displays relating to the history of this quaint village. The museum is open for tours from 1-4pm on Wed, Sat, and Sun throughout the summer."
Unable to confirm the continued existence of this society. The above quote was pre-existing.
The institute is divided into three levels, as follows:
101: This 40-hour training begins with an in-depth study of the Declaration of Independence. Participants will then be taken through the ancient and European origins of the U.S. Constitution, followed by the American origins. The training will continue with a famous Federalist debating a famous Anti-Federalist over whether a New York State convention should vote to ratify the Constitution in 1788.
Then attending teachers will be taken on a walk through the seven articles of the Constitution. The remainder of the time will be spent studying the First Amendment and famous Supreme Court cases on the First Amendment, including the current term cases.
The agenda is divided into blocks of time spent with scholars, followed by break-out sessions where activities are demonstrated on the curriculum covered in the scholar sessions.
201: Available to those teachers who have completed the 101 session, the advanced session begins with a look at the "Ladder of the Bill of Rights." The remainder of the three-day, 18-hour institute is spent studying Amendments Two through 10, along with Supreme Court cases decided under each of these amendments. Break-out sessions follow each scholar session with activities on the Bill of Rights.
301: The one-day, seven-hour Update Session is available to those teachers who have previously attended both 101 and 201. Participants will spend most of the time discussing Supreme Court cases that have been decided during the past few years with the scholars. They will also receive a new activity guide, which includes lessons on Federalism and writing.
Launched in 2010 as a resource for history and culture in the state by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, this website is still a work in progress. Nonetheless, it is an attractive website that provides information on six main topics: Louisiana art, architecture, history, literature, music, and folklife.
The main historical content can be easily accessed through the "Categories" and "Time Periods" sections in the navigation menu under the site header. Aside from the aforementioned six topics, content on the site is also categorized by 12 time periods. By clicking on a specific category, such as "Louisiana History," users will find three subsections: entries, images, and media. U.S. and Louisiana history teachers will find more than 250 entries in each of the six categories, arranged alphabetically per section. Viewers can also access these entries, over 1,100 images, and more than 200 media items by historical time period or region of the state.
Future plans include lesson plans and personal accounts that would allow students to collect images, record notes, and create original slideshows and stories. A tutorial at the top of the "About" page describes both current and anticipated ways to access information and use the site.
Teachers will find KnowLA a useful site for incorporating Louisiana history and culture into their history curriculum. Users will discover that Louisiana's influential role in U.S., Caribbean, and Atlantic history is worth further exploration.
Visitors to this site will find more than 1,000 images and dozens of videos about the history and culture of Puerto Rico. The work of dozens of scholars and contributors, the Puerto Rico Encyclopedia reflects the diverse nature of the island: a U.S. territory, a key location for trade in the Caribbean, a Spanish-speaking entity with its own distinct culture, and a part of a larger Atlantic world. Funded by an endowment from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Fundación Angel Ramos, the site is a key product from the Fundación Puertorriqueña de las Humanidades. It provides users with all content in both English and Spanish. Educators will find the site easy to navigate and conveniently categorized by themes; within each topic, appropriate subtopics provide an in-depth examination of Puerto Rican culture and history. Of particular interest to U.S. History teachers are the images and information found under History and Archeology. Here, teachers and students can explore a chronological narrative of the island's history and role at specific moments in U.S. and Atlantic history. Other sections worth exploring are Archeology (for its focus on Native American culture), Puerto Rican Diaspora (for its look at Puerto Ricans in the U.S.), and Government (for a detailed history on Puerto Rico's unique status as a free and associated US territory). Educators in other social science courses will also find valuable information related to music, population, health, education, and local government. In all, 15 sections and 71 subsections provide a thorough examination of Puerto Rico. The Puerto Rico Encyclopedia's bilingual presentation also makes it a good site for integrating Hispanic culture into the U.S. History curriculum, as well as helping to bridge curriculum for English Language Learners (ELLs) in the classroom.
The Center for History and New Media and the Smithsonian National Museum of American History created this website to model both historical thinking about artifacts as primary sources and possible best practices for sharing museum collections online. With the site, students can curate their own virtual history exhibits, using documents and expert interviews related to six core artifacts from different time periods. The "Guide" section introduces users to how and why artifacts are important to historians. Seven 300- to 600-word essays argue that artifacts tell stories, create connections between people, hold many different meanings, capture moments, and reflect changes. After learning how historians relate to artifacts, users can tour model exhibits in "Objects," focusing on six Smithsonian-held artifacts: Thomas Jefferson's lapdesk, the gold nugget that started the California Gold Rush, a dress that belonged to Mary Todd Lincoln, an 1898 voting machine, the Woolworth counter where a sit-in took place in 1960, and a short-handled hoe used by farmworkers in the 1960s and 1970s.
An "Introduction" for each artifact includes a short introductory video placing it in its historical context and a virtual version of the artifact. Users can zoom in and out on the virtual artifact, rotate it, or click to discover interactive hot spots. Clicking "Explore" in each exhibit provides further information on the object, its place in history, and its history as a museum artifact. Interviews with Smithsonian experts and related primary sources enrich "Explore" sections. "Tour" demonstrates how the interviews and sources in "Explore" can be pulled together into exhibits: either a short 4- to 5-piece "Brief Tour" or a 5- to 13-piece "Extended Tour." "Resources" rounds up annotated links to websites with more information on topics related to each artifact. "Activity" is the heart of the site. Using the more than 220 expert interviews and primary sources from the "Object" model exhibits, students can create their own six-item exhibit. After selecting the objects that reveal the perspective or tell the story they wish to convey and labeling the objects with interpretative text, students can email their finished exhibits to their teacher (or to themselves). For even more information on the six core artifacts, users can listen to experts' recorded answers to questions about the artifacts in "Forums." The 16 recordings run from 13 minutes to an hour. The site may take time to learn to navigate and use, and sorting through the many interviews and primary sources to curate an exhibit can be frustrating (interviews and sources can be displayed by collection, but not searched). However, the site can still provide an introduction to what makes artifacts unique as primary sources, and the skills historians use to interpret artifacts and create museum exhibits.
A project of the Library of Virginia, this website makes many of the library's resources available to the public in digital form. Most resources in its digital collections relate to Virginia history, making this a treasure house for educators teaching Virginia state history.
"Digital Collections" contains the bulk of the site's content. More than 70 collections document aspects of Virginian life and politics from the colonial era to the present day, and include photographs, maps, broadsides, newspaper articles, letters, artwork, posters, official documents and records, archived political websites, and many other types of primary sources.
Topics include, but are far from limited to, modern Virgina politics and elections; the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting; World War II photographs; Works Project Administration oral histories; the 1939 World's Fair; World War I veterans and posters; the sinking of the Titanic; stereographs; the Richmond Planet, a 19th-century African American paper; Civil War maps; official documents related to Civil War veterans; religious petitions from 1774 to 1802; letters to the Virginia governor from 1776 to 1784; Dunmore's War; and official documents from the Revolutionary War. Collections can be browsed by topic and title, and are internally searchable using keywords and other filtering tools.
Other features on the site include the "Reading Room," "Exhibitions," and "Online Classroom." "Reading Room" lets visitors explore a primary source for each day in Virginia history or browse a timeline of Virginia history. There are eight essays on unusual sources in the library's collection as well as on new finds in the library's blog, "Out of the Box."
"Exhibitions" preserves 25 exhibits on Virginia history topics that accompany physical exhibitions at the library. "Online Classroom" orients teachers to the site with a short "Guide for Educators," suggesting possible uses for the website's resources, and offers four source analysis sheets and 30 Virginia-history-related lesson plans, all downloadable as .pdfs. The section also highlights two online exhibits designed to be particularly useful to teachers: "Shaping the Constitution," chronicling Virginians' contributions to the founding of the country, and "Union or Secession?", which uses primary sources to explore the months leading up to Virginia's secession in the Civil War.
An invaluable resource for educators covering Virginia state history, this website should also be of use to teachers covering the colonial period, the American Revolution, and the Civil War generally, among other topics.
Created by the nonprofit organizations Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change, the Zinn Education Project works to bring resources exploring the “role of working people, women, people of color, and organized social movements in shaping history” into the classroom. Inspired by the work of historian Howard Zinn, author of the popular A People's History of the United States, the website provides teachers with materials for expanding on these historical narratives.
“Teaching Materials” contains the bulk of the site's content, including more than 100 teaching activities. These can be downloaded in PDF form following free registration, and include essays, articles, interviews, and full lesson plans on topics related to marginalized groups and labor history. Titles range from “Exploring Women's Rights: The 1908 Textile Strike in a 1st-grade Class” to “What the Tour Guide Didn’t Tell Me: Tourism, Colonialism, and Resistance in Hawai'i”.
“Teaching Materials” also contains more than 300 annotations on audio resources, fiction and nonfiction books, films, posters, commercial teaching guides, websites, and Spanish/bilingual resources. Annotations consist of 2–3 sentences describing the resource and its relevance to Zinn's focus and classroom use.
“Teaching Materials” can be browsed by date (either selected on a timeline, or chosen from 16 time periods, ranging from “Colonialism” to “20th Century” ) or searched by one of 29 themes, five reading levels, or by type of material (teaching activity .pdfs, audio, books: fiction, books: nonfiction, films, posters, teaching guides, websites, or Spanish/bilingual).
Useful to teachers wanting to expand on the traditional textbook narratives on marginalized groups and labor history.
Why were Indians in South America able to create great civilization, and those in present USA and Canada weren't?
I’m not sure how this question defines “great civilization,” but it seems that, like most other people educated in the United States, the questioner is unaware of the highly stratified, centralized, and elaborate societies that did exist north of the Rio Grande prior to the arrival of Europeans. We are taught that Indian societies in North America had no governments, class structures, religions, intellectual traditions, or other elements of what Western European philosophy calls “civilization.” But to contrast that view, I'll offer a few examples. I think we can fairly say that all societies, regardless of how elaborate their social and political structures may be, are “civilized.” The largest city in North America prior to 1492 was called Cahokia, located on what is today the Missouri River across from St. Louis. As a city-state, the population of 15,000 people was comparable to London or Paris at that time. Cahokia was the center of an elaborate trade network that stretched across the entire continent from 950 to 1250 AD. City residents, along with laborers from far away, traveled to Cahokia over the course of several hundred years to build enormous earthen mounds. The largest one is 15 acres around and is the largest earthen structure in the Western Hemisphere. These mounds—not unlike European cathedrals in spiritual or architectural significance—served as symbols of power for elite religious and political leaders. These leaders often lived atop the mounds to be closer to the sun, their spiritual source of power. The influence these leaders possessed was enormous. Not only could they command the construction of mounds, but they held the reins of the city's economic and military fortunes as well. Because of the extent of Cahokia's trade networks, the consequences of their decisions were felt all over the continent.
Another immense center of trade and spiritual power was located in Chaco Canyon in what is now New Mexico. Inhabitants and visitors to the canyon built 12 structures between 900 and 1150 AD, which had 200 or more contiguous, multistoried rooms and numerous “kivas,” or round, windowless areas that today the Hopi and Pubelo Indians (descendants of the people who built Chaco) use for worship. Like Cahokia, the labor required to build such structures must have been enormous and well-coordinated, evincing a sophisticated political, economic, scientific, and social organization. Surrounding these 12 structures were between 200 and 350 villages in the canyon. An estimated 15,000 people inhabited the area. Among archaeologists, two theories are popular about why Chaco was built. The first centers on trade and exchange. Archaeologists have found items from Mexico and Central America in towns and villages up to 60 miles away from the central part of the canyon, along with a system of roads. This evidence leads them to speculate that the Chaco structures were the center of trade, where people bought and sold goods. The second theory involves the scientific and spiritual dimensions of the buildings. The structures are built in line with astronomical movements of the sun, moon, planets, and stars, leading some to believe that it was in fact a kind of three-dimensional calendar, a much more elaborate version of Stonehenge in England. Settlers in the canyon would have gone there to worship at certain times of the year to be reminded of the order of the universe and their place in it. Ultimately, both these scenarios could exist. Certainly by anyone’s standards, a society that so fully integrated spiritual, scientific, and material aspects of life would qualify as a “great civilization.” If, however, by comparing North and South America you mean to ask why did North America not develop the exact same kind of societies that Central and South America did, then one answer to that may be population density. Central Mexico alone had 25.2 million people in 1491, making it the most densely populated place on earth. The whole continent of North America, by contrast, had 12–20 million people. As we see throughout human history and all over the world, higher numbers of people tend to lead to more highly stratified societies.
Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site. Last modified 2008. "Chaco Culture." National Parks Service, U.S. Department of the Interior. Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities and the Department of Anthropology, University of Virginia. Chaco Research Archive. Last modified 2010. Seppa, Nathan. "Metropolitan Life on the Mississippi." Washington Post, 12 March 1997, Page H01. "Traditions of the Sun." NASA. Last modified 2008. "World Heritage Site." National Parks Service, U.S. Department of the Interior. Last modified 8 December 2009.