Contemporary US, 1968-Present | TeachingHistory.org

ABMC War Dead Database

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Annotation

This American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC) Burials and Memorializations database features over 224,000 records of individuals buried or memorialized in ABMC cemeteries and memorials worldwide. Covering 24 cemeteries in 10 foreign countries and 3 additional memorials in the U.S., this database provides online access to burial information of those killed in action primarily during World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War.

Additional individuals include veterans, active duty military, and civilians. The database also provides information on individuals in the Corozal American Cemetery (Panama) and the Mexico City National Cemetery (Mexico), including civilians and veterans of the Spanish-American War and the Civil War.

The database interface allows students to search by name, war or conflict, service or serial number, branch of service, unit, service entry location, cemetery/memorial, date of death, and keyword. Users can also search for service members who are missing in action and Medal of Honor recipients who are buried or memorialized by ABMC.

This organization of the material allows the user to explore a wealth of information. Students can research the geographic distribution of burials or explore representation among military branches in individual cemeteries. The ABMC database allows users to focus on who is buried and memorialized and to explore the experiences of individual soldiers as well as patterns and commonalities.

Students, for example, could begin to explore the number of women who served as nurses during World War I and the Influenza epidemic of 1918, or the experiences of the 100th Infantry Battalion of the U.S. Army during World War II. Or they could chose to search for an individual from their home state or community and use the database’s information as a starting point to research the life of this individual. They can download search results and print, email, or share individual records.

This valuable research and teaching resource is accompanied by a robust “Education Resources” section featuring interactive timelines and campaign narratives, cemetery or memorial-specific mobile apps, publications, videos, lesson plans, and curriculum ideas. The “Flying Yanks: American Airmen in WWI” interactive, for example, provides historical background for students exploring the air war in WWI, a timeline and map with primary sources, as well as individual stories of airmen.

Students can use the database in conjunction with the learning materials to enrich their understanding of U.S. military history, memorialization, public history, and numerous other historical topics.

Remembrance Pearl Harbor

Learn Pearl Harbor

Emergence of Modern US, 1890-1930

Great Depression & WWII, 1929-1945

Postwar US, 1945-Early 1970s

Contemporary US, 1968-Present

Read more about ABMC War Dead Database

Win the White House

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What is it?

Win the White House is an online game that allows students to simulate a presidential campaign of their own. This includes debating, completing primaries, choosing a vice president, fundraising, making appearances, and more.

Getting Started

Visitors can register to play Win the White House or play without registering (both options are free). However, if the player is not registered, they cannot continue a campaign later. Win the White House works on both Macs and PCs.

To start, the player chooses a candidate, slogan, political party, and issues that they focus on, such as environment, health care, and voting laws. For older students, topics such as gun control and gay marriage are included. (Throughout the game, they will have to periodically answer questions regarding their platform or the platform that their opposition supports.) They then begin their political campaign. For support, as well as examples of use and teaching plans for the game, check out Win the White House: A Game Guide for Teachers.

Examples

During the political campaign, students will painlessly review the details of running a campaign, including how the electoral college works and how those votes are weighed, as well as how important political marketing is.

Playing the game can point out to students how many factors contribute to the progress and success of a presidential campaign. As students play, make sure they notice and use the four blue buttons at the top of the play screen map to view the states through different filters as their campaigns progress. With these buttons, they can remind themselves how many electoral votes each state has, see how the popular vote is going, keep track of states' momentum (are states leaning red or blue?), and check how much money each state still has available to fund campaigns.

Although Win the White House is a learning tool, it is also a game, adding motivation to learn and presenting students with many choices. Note that the game provides an assessment of how well the students achieved their objectives at the end, which can help teachers measure student comprehension. Win the White House can help teachers see how well students understand both the political process and the media’s potential to influence the outcome of an election.

For more information

Looking for more high-quality games for use in the history or civics classroom? iCivics, creator of Win the White House, features more than 20 online games on topics ranging from municipal planning to immigration to the Bill of Rights. Check out our Tech for Teachers on Do I Have a Right? for our take on one of iCivics' more addictive games.

Not certain how best to use games for teaching? High school teacher Jeremiah McCall shares his tips for getting the most out of games in his six-part blog series.

Read more about Win the White House

The March on Milwaukee Civil Rights History Project

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Annotation

A project of the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee, The March on Milwaukee Civil Rights History Project preserves the history of the Civil Rights Movement in Milwaukee, WI. In the late 1960s, the open housing movement worked to break down housing restrictions that segregated the city's population. Milwaukee residents of all ages and walks of life supported or opposed this movement.

The site features more than 150 digitized primary sources from the period, including oral histories, letters to organizations, support and hate letters, meeting minutes, Henry Maier's 1967 mayor's log, speeches, press releases, photographs, official reports and research studies, video clips, curriculum and programming from Freedom Schools (alternative schools children could attend during school boycotts), and more. Sources can be searched by keyword and browsed by media type (audio, documents, photos, or video) or collection (materials are divided into 10 collections by relationship to prominent individuals and groups in the movement). Visitors can add sources to "My Favorites" and review them as they browse.

In addition, a downloadable map shows the division of Milwaukee neighborhoods in 1967 and the path of the Aug. 28 open housing march, and a timeline tracks local and national events from 1954 to 1976. A glossary of key terms gives the context for more than 60 acronyms, names, places, and other terms, and a bibliography lists more than 40 primary sources and more than 50 secondary sources.

Teachers may need to do a little extra legwork to contextualize the primary sources, but the collection can bring Civil Rights Movement history home to Wisconsin students, particularly those in Milwaukee and the surrounding area. Teachers nationwide can use the materials to explore the work of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), NAACP Youth Council, and local institutions like Freedom Schools and integration committees.

Film and Video

Literary Sources

Newspapers and Periodicals

Civil Rights Movement

African American History Month

Splash Pullout AAH Month

Learn AAH Month

Postwar US, 1945-Early 1970s

Contemporary US, 1968-Present

Read more about The March on Milwaukee Civil Rights History Project

Transportation: Past, Present and Future

Teaser

What pushes and pulls people into new ways of life? In this lesson, students use artifacts, documents, and photographs to help them answer this question.

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Website

The Henry Ford Museum

Description

What pushes and pulls people into new ways of life? In this lesson, students use artifacts, documents, and photographs to help them answer this question.

Article Body

The Henry Ford Museum’s "Early 20th Century Migration—Transportation: Past, Present and Future" is a thematically rich teaching unit. Through artifacts, documents and photographs, students explore the overarching question, What pushes and pulls people into new ways of life? How did the lure of jobs in U.S. factories “pull” Europeans and people of the American South to northern cities and new ways of living? The lessons are both rigorous and relevant, and continuously engage students in considering the impact of the past on the present.

Dubbed an Educator DigiKit, the unit includes extensive materials for teachers. The Teacher’s Guide includes timelines on various historic themes relevant to the lesson topics, a glossary, bibliographies, connections to Michigan and national standards, and field trip suggestions. The lesson plans introduce the assembly line concept, technological and economic forces that cause large-scale migration, fair labor issues, challenges faced by immigrants, and the ongoing changing nature of work up to the present. All of the lessons include links to primary sources in the Henry Ford Museum Online Collection and they utilize a range of activities, including simulations, math-based problem solving, and source analysis.

Teachers will want to consider supplementing this unit by incorporating a rigorous, systematic approach to analyzing primary sources. Borrowing one from another site (see possibilities here) could strengthen the individual lessons and unit. A rich resource, 20th Century Migration honors middle elementary children by challenging them to ponder and interpret significant topics in history that continue to affect their world today.

Topic

Continuity and Change

Time Estimate

Varies

flexibility_scale

Rubric_Content_Accurate_Scholarship

Yes
Not only are the details accurate, but the breadth of the perspectives in the lessons helps students develop an accurately complex sense of the unit topics.

Rubric_Content_Historical_Background

Yes
Brief secondary sources provide context for the investigations. For examples, see an essay on the nature of assembly line work on page 44, or a PowerPoint on urbanization that is linked from pages 36 or 37.

Rubric_Content_Read_Write

Yes

Includes a few explicit writing exercises, primarily short-answer assessments. Class discussion questions might be used as writing prompts in older grade levels.

For an example, see writing prompts for primary source analysis on page 55.

Rubric_Analytical_Construct_Interpretations

Yes
Would have liked to see primary source analysis embedded earlier in the unit; it is not introduced until near the end of the unit. The unit would also be more powerful if it introduced a systematic model for source analysis.

Rubric_Analytical_Close_Reading_Sourcing

No
The source analysis guides do not ask students to consider the author or creator of a source. The informal mini-biographies used as primary sources in Lesson 6 are intriguing; the lesson would help students better understand the nature of historical analysis if they engaged them in asking who created the biographies and why.

Rubric_Scaffolding_Appropriate

Yes
The lessons lend themselves to ready adaptation not only in grades 3-5, but for middle school as well.

Rubric_Scaffolding_Supports_Historical_Thinking

Yes

Rubric_Structure_Assessment

Yes
Topical knowledge is emphasized in the unit. Nonetheless, the unit does include activities to engage children in interpreting historical documents for basic understanding. No criteria for assessment are included.

Rubric_Structure_Realistic

Yes
The learning goals are topical.

Rubric_Structure_Learning_Goals

Yes
The learning goals are topical.

Read more about Transportation: Past, Present and Future

My Piece of History

Teaser

Even the recent past was very different from the present. Students analyze photos from the 1960s and 1970s to identify differences between then and now.

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Website

EDSITEment

Description

Students analyze two pictures from the mid to late 20th century—a recreation room, and a set of wedding gifts—and use objects in the picture to identify differences between the past and the present.

Article Body

This lesson uses everyday objects from the past to facilitate the development of two foundational historical thinking skills for young students:

understanding that people of the past lived differently than we do today and;
that history consists of stories constructed from artifacts left from the past.

The lesson begins with the teacher introducing an object from his or her own past that is unfamiliar to students, and a discussion of what that object’s purpose might have been. Then, students observe photographs of everyday items from the 1960s and 1970s to identify both familiar and unfamiliar objects.

Activities 2 and 3 focus on students acting as “historical detectives,” as they generate hypotheses for the purposes of unfamiliar objects in the pictures, and then brainstorm methods for verifying these hypotheses—including interviewing older family members for additional information. Finally, students construct their own historical narratives about an object by creating a museum label for that object. In activity 4, students repeat the process using an object found in their own home.

This lesson walks students through the steps of historical inquiry and introduces them to key historical concepts (historical context and evidence) in an engaging and age-appropriate way.

Topic

Daily life; popular culture and leisure

Time Estimate

2-3 Class Sessions

flexibility_scale

Rubric_Content_Accurate_Scholarship

Yes

Rubric_Content_Historical_Background

Yes
Several other museum exhibits from the mid to late 20th century are available here, and may be useful for augmenting the lesson as well as providing background for teachers.

Rubric_Content_Read_Write

Yes
While no reading of text is required, students write during the interview process, as well as in the final activity, creating museum labels.

Rubric_Analytical_Construct_Interpretations

Yes
This is the central feature of the lesson.

Rubric_Analytical_Close_Reading_Sourcing

No
While no reading is required, close analysis of the photographs and attention to time period is necessary.

Rubric_Scaffolding_Appropriate

Yes

Rubric_Scaffolding_Supports_Historical_Thinking

Yes
Discussion questions are provided to help students analyze unfamiliar objects, as well as a chart for students to organize information gained from interviewing older family members about “mystery objects.”

Rubric_Structure_Assessment

No
While no specific assessment or criteria is provided, the final activity allows students to engage in the inquiry process independently, and may be used to assess student understanding.

Rubric_Structure_Realistic

Yes

Rubric_Structure_Learning_Goals

Yes

Read more about My Piece of History

World War II Memorial

Video Overview

What do the elements of the World War II Memorial in Washington, DC, symbolize? Is the design effective? Who was the memorial built for? Christopher Hamner and Michael O'Malley try to answer these questions by contrasting the memorial with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Video Clip Name

warmemorial2.mov

Video Clip Title

World War II Memorial

Transcript Text

Christopher Hamner: You can’t really understand the World War II Monument, where it is and why it looks the way it looks, without understanding the Vietnam Memorial and the story of getting it built. The design competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was open to everybody. It eventually got more than 1,400 submissions. They were handled anonymously so that the judging panels saw only the design and a numbered code and they went on 1,400 down to 300 down to 30 down to the winner who was very surprising when it was revealed. It was a 21-year-old architecture student at Yale named Maya Lin.

Michael O’Malley: Problematic is so many ways.

Christopher Hamner:: Youth, ethnicity, gender. And it was the design that’s very close to what we now see on the Mall. One of the reasons that I suspect the World War II Monument looks the way that it looks, which is much more traditional, heroic, sort of celebratory. It seems to privilege sort of consensus and unity above everything else. [It] has to do with the desire to avoid that kind of controversy. One of the things that we pointed out was the fact that the ring of stones that sort of marks the outer boundary that are adorned with wreaths are dedicated to the states.

Michael O’Malley: Which makes no sense. The state-iness was not part of the World War II experience.

Christopher Hamner: Of all the ways you could possibly cut up World War II—

Michael O’Malley: It’s not like all the guys from Delaware were in one unit. They got drafted, they went down to some camp in the South and then they went back. I mean their was no state-iness attached to it.

Christopher Hamner: It’s a national effort to the extent that people identify with some smaller segment, it’s usually by branch or then by division. There are other ways that you could group it, but the one that makes the least sense is the states. It’s incredibly traditional, it’s white, there are wreaths, there’s a gold star at one end for every 500 combat deaths.

Michael O’Malley: So they want to have some element of what the Vietnam War Memorial does so well, which is individualizing. Really made graphic the extent of the loss. They want to have some element of that—

Christopher Hamner: But they don’t particularize it quite as effectively and that some of the teachers that we toured with said that that element of it had sort of fallen flat, that it did not—

Michael O’Malley: You actually came away thinking less people died in World War II than in Vietnam.

Christopher Hamner: I found as I walked around I spent probably half my time trying to figure out what the organizational strategy was. They were not in alphabetical order, they were not in the order the states joined the Union, they’re not grouped together. I mean I couldn’t tell. It didn’t look to me like it was sort of by population or the sort of number of soldiers from that state who perished over the course of the war and I started to suspect that it was just random.

Michael O’Malley: I mean the Vietnam Memorial takes a few elements and loads them with meaning. This thing takes a lot of elements and bleeds the meaning out of them.

Christopher Hamner: We also talked about the Korean War Memorial, which is a sort of interesting combination, right? That it’s particularized and personalized and that it’s slightly larger-than-life-size figures of soldiers that are in ponchos. They’re spread out and kind of making their way across a field but they’re not heroic in the way that soldiers a century ago would have been portrayed. You can feel the weight of the gear that they carry.

Michael O’Malley: And that wants to put you in the midst of it, I mean you walk through them. You’re right in the middle of that, so, where as in the World War II Memorial you’re in the middle of kind of nothing, you’re in the middle of some kind of empty abstraction.

Christopher Hamner: It has become more participatory at least during the daytime than it had been before because there are so many World War II veterans who are designated, who are kind of milling around the areas and who will engage with visitors and pose for photographs and talk about their experience so there is a sort of participatory dimension to it. But as Mike pointed out, these guys won’t be around forever, that cannot last.

Michael O’Malley: That’s an element of this thing that we got to in the discussion. There were some great questions, like who was this thing for? And there was really a sense that this was for veterans. Like this is here to make veterans feel good. It’s not about the nation remembering something. It’s a gift to veterans. I have nothing against giving gifts to veterans, but is that the purpose of a memorial? That’s a worthwhile question. And when the veterans are gone, what do you have? You have a gift for a person who is no longer around. It’s an odd construction of memorialization.

Read more about World War II Memorial

IWitness

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What is it?

IWitness is a free resource developed by the USC Shoah Foundation Institute to help students develop a deeper understanding of 20th-century history alongside digital and media literacies. It houses approximately 1,000 Holocaust survivor and witness testimonies and allows students to construct multimedia projects using the testimonies. Users need only an Internet connection; all of the tools—including an online video editor—are self-contained on the server and are compatible with both Macs and PCs.

Getting Started

In order to start using IWitness, click here and select “register.” Once registered, you will be able to create classes and generate access codes students can use to register.

Teachers are using IWitness as a way to integrate 21st-century literacies into a range of subjects.

Even prior to registering, the IWitness home page features a rotating group of curated clips. These short clips run less than five minutes and draw learners into compelling stories. Linked from the home page, the Browse All Topics page provides more clips from a breadth of topics to anyone visiting the site. Registered users are able to search among more than 1,000 full-length testimonies, then save clips from the testimonies for use in projects. Testimonies have been indexed to the minute with keywords. If, for example, students search for “music,” they will get a list of clips where the interviewee discusses music, and they can go right to the exact minute in which music is discussed in a testimony. Users also can narrow search results in various ways.

Once signed in, you should go to your “Dashboard” to get started exploring IWitness. From here you will notice videos located on the left side under “Connections.” The Connections videos will help you address important topics with your students: ethical editing of video clips, effective searching, and defining terms like “archive” and “testimony.” There is an Educators page designed to orient teachers to the site and highlight available resources. There is also a resource tab on the top of the screen with links to reliable information. For students and teachers alike, IWitness offers a Tool Kit, which can fly out from the right side of the screen. The Tool Kit provides users with quick access to their assigned activities, as well as to an encyclopedia, glossary, and note-taking tool.

IWitness has numerous activities you can assign to your students. More than 200 activities are available in several languages and cover an array of subjects from the Holocaust and genocide to cinema and media & digital literacy. Different types of activities present information in diverse formats and can be filtered for different age or subject levels. “Information Quest”, for example, focuses on a single survivor or witness of the Holocaust. Students listen carefully for information in testimony clips and then reflect on their learning by using, among other things, a world cloud tool. As an educator, you are also able to build your own activities for your students in IWitness with the “Activity Builder”. The additional resources offered on the “Resources” page provide bibliographies, glossaries, and timelines that may be useful when assigning activities for students to build or complete.

Examples

IWitness allows students to learn about . . . the 20th century while creating meaningful projects and making connections with their own lives.

Teachers are using IWitness as a way to integrate 21st-century literacies into a range of subjects, including social studies, language arts, media studies, psychology, and more. One history teacher built an IWitness activity so his students could compare and contrast the Hollywood portrayal of the Sobibor Uprising in film with how survivors of the event remember and describe it. Through his IWitness activity “Escape From Sobibor: Hollywood and Memory,” his students were able to use critical thinking as they watched testimony and compared it to the film, then select clips of that testimony to construct a more historical depiction of daily life in the concentration camp.

You can also use IWitness to help teach online etiquette and respectful dialogue skills. Within IWitness, students finish their activities by viewing and commenting on their classmates’ projects. This is a great way to spark conversation that can continue in IWitness through social-media-style commenting tools. Teachers are able to mediate conversations and communicate with students within the application. IWitness also provides reminders to students about good digital citizenship when communicating with their peers within the site. IWitness allows students to learn about important events in the 20th century while creating meaningful projects and making connections with their own lives.

For more information

Want to learn more about IWitness? See Teachinghistory.org's Website Review for more information.

Looking for more resources on the Holocaust? Teachinghistory.org has gathered website reviews, lesson plans, teaching strategies, and more on the Days of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust spotlight page.