My History at School

Teaser

To make something real, make it personal. Abstract concepts can best be understood when applied to individual experience.

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Description

Access 7 activities which introduce the evidentiary and narrative aspects of history to young students. Students familiarize themselves with these topics by exploring their own past school experiences.

Article Body

This collection of activities found on the Bringing History Home website introduces first graders to important historical concepts. Through exploring the history of their time at school, students learn about topics such as chronology and historical context as well as how to identify and question different types of primary sources. While these concepts may seem fairly sophisticated for first or second graders, the activities introduce them in accessible and engaging ways. There are seven activities that make up this instructional unit. Each activity can stand alone as a single class lesson or can be combined with others for a multi-day lesson or unit. The first activity asks the question, "What is history," and distinguishes between fictional stories and stories about things that actually happened. Understanding history as a story is a central theme throughout the plan, and the subsequent activities focus on the centrality of evidence in creating historical stories.

Understanding history as a story is a central theme throughout the plan. . .

Activities three, four, and five introduce students to various types of evidence historians use to make sense of the past, through examining school artifacts such as a newsletter and cafeteria menu. In the final activity, students work as a class to construct a mind map about the history of their year at school. Students are then asked to draw a picture that illustrates one of the concepts from the mind map. Finally, students can be assessed by asking them to identify types of evidence that can provide particular types of information about the school. With a focus on making connections to students' experiences and teaching them that history is a story based on evidence, these clear and kid-friendly activities are an elegant way to introduce key aspects of history to young elementary students. Designed for first graders, these activities can be useful for both younger and older students.

Topic
Chronology, Historical context
Time Estimate
1-7 days
flexibility_scale
2
Rubric_Content_Accurate_Scholarship

Yes
Introduces students to core characteristics of the historical discipline.

Rubric_Content_Historical_Background

Yes

Rubric_Content_Read_Write

Yes
However, teachers must find text-based artifacts about their school (e.g. a newsletter) to use in the lesson.

Rubric_Analytical_Construct_Interpretations

Yes
Students are asked to analyze multiple pieces of evidence in order to construct a history of their time at school.

Rubric_Analytical_Close_Reading_Sourcing

Yes
Students are introduced to sourcing and are asked to consider source information in several activities. See this example. Questions are used to demonstrate the close reading of multiple kinds of sources.

Rubric_Scaffolding_Appropriate

Yes
A very accessible introduction to the idea that history is more than just a set of facts.

Rubric_Scaffolding_Supports_Historical_Thinking

Yes

Rubric_Structure_Assessment

Yes
Includes an assessment activity and rubric.

Rubric_Structure_Realistic

Yes, but no estimated times are provided for instruction.
A few activities rely on specific texts but substitute texts can be used.

Rubric_Structure_Learning_Goals

Yes

University of Washington Libraries: Moving Image Collection

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This website presents 65 moving images from 1915 through the 21st century. These include home movies, industrial films, news coverage, and documentaries, and cover a wide variety of topics, with a special focus on life in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska.

Several home videos capture the experience of attending the 1962 Seattle World's Fair—riding the monorail or looking at the Space Needle.

Visitors can also watch as U.S. Presidents made history in this region, including John F. Kennedy's groundbreaking of the N-reactor at Hanford Nuclear Reservation, and President Truman awarding the Congressional Medal of Honor to Bud Hawk.

A four-minute video captures a traditional Eskimo dance in Point Barrow, AK, in the early 1940s.

All movies can be browsed by year or by subject (e.g. trash, wildlife, workers, football, hiking, poverty, fisheries, laboratories, Rainier), and are keyword searchable.

Wisconsin State Historical Society Online Collections

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Founded in 1846 and chartered in 1853, the Wisconsin State Historical Society is the oldest American historical society to receive continuous public funding. This website provides a host of online collections containing thousands of documents and images addressing Wisconsin's social, political, and cultural history, drawn from the Historical Society's collections.

Highlights include full-text access to 80 histories of Wisconsin counties, and 1,000 more articles, memoirs, interviews, and essays on Wisconsin history and archaeology first published between 1850 and 1920; thousands of articles from the Wisconsin Magazine of History; and hundreds of objects form the Society's Museum, including moccasins, dolls, quilts, ceramics, paintings, and children's clothing.

Other objects can be viewed at the website's Online Exhibits section, which includes objects from exhibits on Presidential elections, Wisconsin's Olympic speed skaters, the Milwaukee Braves, Jewish women, and family labor in Milwaukee after World War II.

The website also provides a vast collection of images available through Wisconsin Historical Images, including photographs, drawings, and prints relating to both regional history, as well as more national histories of 19th-century exploration, mass communications, and social action movements.

Washington State Digital Archives

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This massive archive contains more than 84.5 million documents, more than 26 million of which are fully keyword searchable, from Washington State and local agencies. These documents include contracts, birth, marriage, military, naturalization, death, cemetery, and census records, land records and surveys, oaths of office, maps, photographs, power of attorney records, and date from the late 19th century to the present.

A detailed list of collections is available through the Collections section. Here, users will find detailed information on all record collections, including dates and counties available, and options to search by county or within sub-collections.

The casual user may want to begin with several browsable featured collections, which contain photographs from the Spokane city planning department, audio recordings of the Washington House of Representatives Committee Meetings, and 200 photographs of daily life in the Big Bend region of the Columbia Basin.

Useful for teachers and historical researchers interested in many aspects of life in the West, and those interested in genealogy with connections to Washington State.

Watergate and the Constitution

Teaser

To indict or not to indict? Watergate raised complicated questions concerning Constitutional interpretation.

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Description

Students analyze a primary source document which sets forth points both for and against the indictment of Richard Nixon, before considering Constitutional interpretations of Watergate.

Article Body

The strength of this lesson is that it is centered around a document which presents compelling arguments both for and against the indictment of former President Nixon for his role in the Watergate scandal. The featured document, a memo to the Watergate Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski, was written by Jaworski's staff as he was considering whether or not to indict Nixon.

The memorandum’s language should be accessible to most high school students. Both a copy of the original document and a transcribed version are available.

The question at the center of the lesson is, "Should the Watergate Special Prosecutor seek an indictment of the former President?" If teachers want to make this lesson more of an historical inquiry, we recommend modifying that question to read: "What were the main arguments for and against the indictment of former President Richard Nixon?"

An additional strength of this lesson is two activities that use the Constitution as a lens to understand the Watergate affair. One of the suggested activities asks students to identify the specific role each branch of government played in the Watergate affair. Another activity asks students to apply specific sections of the Constitution and determine the role particular constitutional powers and rights played in the Watergate affair.

This lesson would likely work best after an introductory lesson on Watergate. While there is no formal assessment included in this lesson, the questions presented by the document easily lend themselves to an essay or a discussion.

Topic
Watergate, the Constitution
Time Estimate
1 day
flexibility_scale
3
Rubric_Content_Accurate_Scholarship

Yes
Historical background is detailed and accurate. The document is from The National Archives.

Rubric_Content_Historical_Background

Yes
Th lesson includes background information for teachers and students, as well as a chronology of the Watergate affair.

Rubric_Content_Read_Write

Yes
The lesson is centered around a primary document from the Watergate scandal, and requires students to read the Constitution.

Rubric_Analytical_Construct_Interpretations

Yes
Students are asked to weigh the reasons for and against indicting Nixon.

Rubric_Analytical_Close_Reading_Sourcing

Yes

Rubric_Scaffolding_Appropriate

Yes
The main document is appropriate and accessible for most high school students, as are the teaching activities.

Rubric_Scaffolding_Supports_Historical_Thinking

Yes
The lesson includes the Archives' worksheet for analyzing primary source documents, asking students to consider source and contextual information when interpreting the document.

Rubric_Structure_Assessment

No

Rubric_Structure_Realistic

Yes
The lesson is clearly presented and is easily adapted to emphasize either History or Civic standards.

Rubric_Structure_Learning_Goals

Yes
Appropriate for one class period.

Enduring Outrage: Editorial Cartoons by Herblock

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Political cartoonist Herbert Block's career spanned more than 70 years, over the course of which he produced more than 14,000 cartoons and won three Pulitzer Prizes in 1942, 1954, and 1979. He spent the majority of his career at the Washington Post, where he critiqued Democrats and Republicans alike, and covered topics from McCarthyism (a term he coined in a cartoon published in 1950) and the Nixon Administration to Chernobyl, the Vietnam War, and the Yugoslav Wars in the mid-1990s. This website presents 32 of his cartoons, relating to seven prominent themes in his work: the environment, ethics, extremism, voting, the Middle East, privacy and security, and war. Each cartoon is enlargeable and downloadable, and accompanied by a brief description of the context surrounding its creation and publication, as well as several sketches drawn by Herblock made in preparation for drawing the cartoon. Useful for those interested in U.S. political history and foreign relations, as well as the history of editorial cartoons.

Land of (Unequal) Opportunity

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While many are familiar with the 1957 Little Rock High School integration crisis, far fewer students of U.S. civil rights history may be aware of the longer history of that struggle in Arkansas. This website includes more than 460 documents and images, including cartoons, court decisions, photographs, newspaper articles, letters, and essays related to that history. For example, an essay on the meaning of relocation written by a high school student at Arkansas's Jerome Relocation Center in 1943 brings a more personal perspective to the story of internment, as the student describes the ways in which members of her community have struggled between the "fighting spirit" and the "giving up spirit." Users new to civil rights history in Arkansas may want to begin with the extensive timeline that describes events from the arrival of slaves in Arkansas in the 1720s to a 2006 State Supreme Court ruling that struck down a ban on gays serving as foster parents. The website also includes 10 lesson plans geared for middle school students that make use of the website's resources—such as a speech given by Governor Oral Fabus in 1958. An extensive bibliography of secondary sources related to many aspects of civil rights, including African American, gay and lesbian, and women's issues, Japanese relocation, religious intolerance, political rights, and anti-civil liberties groups and issues, is also available.

U.S. Congressional Serial Set, 1817-1994

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[SUBSCRIPTION REQUIRED] This vast archive includes many documents and reports produced by the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives and published between 1817 and 1980, for a total of more than 355,000 items. These items include 48,000 maps, 9,000 illustrations, thousands of reports, and numerous records of committee hearings and floor proceedings. All items are full-text searchable and can be browsed by subject, such as education, economics, food and agriculture, health, Indian affairs, armed forces and conflicts, environment and natural resources, and social issues. Within each of these broad categories, there are hundreds of subject headings, such as "animal welfare" (83 items), "alien labor" (306 items), and "ordnance testing" (353 items). The "Indian Affairs" category, for example, presents thousands of items on agencies and organizations relating to Indian affairs, Indian reservations, treaties, names of Indian tribes, as well as documents relating to hundreds of laws and supreme court cases. There is also a bill number search, an alphabetical list of names of all acts of Congress, and a listing of all documents by U.S. Congress session. All documents can be downloaded in PDF format. In addition, a separate browse feature entitled "Serial Set Maps" facilitates access to thousands of maps from counties and cities across the country. Many of these date to the Civil War-era or later and include images of forts and depictions of field operations. Readex plans to expand coverage through 1994.

Platte River Basin in Nebraska

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The Platte River begins in the Rocky Mountains and flows the length of central Nebraska before emptying into the Missouri River to the east. This website provides 40 diverse documents about the history, geology, and hydrology of the Platte River, ranging in date from an 1843 report by the U.S. Secretary of War entitled "An Exploration of the Country Lying Between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains," to a 302-page report published in 1993 by the Nebraska Geological Survey entitled, "Flat Water: A History of Nebraska and Its Water." The majority of documents date to the 1970s, many of which were published by government agencies such as the Missouri River Basin Commission or the U.S. Department of the Interior Geological Survey, detailing investigations into ground water usage and water resources management. There are also several documents on legal issues surrounding water rights and outdoor recreation. These materials are accompanied by 13 links to websites offering information about water resources, including the University of Nebraska's Water Center and Water Sciences Laboratory, as well as the Missouri River Basin Project, created to plan for the conservation and use of Missouri River water resources. Especially useful for those interested in the history of development projects surrounding water resources.

The Leonard Bernstein Collection, ca.1920-1989

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Selected material from the papers of the great American composer, conductor, and music educator Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990), including 85 photographs, 177 scripts from Bernstein's Young People's Concerts television programs, 74 scripts from Thursday Evening Previews, and more than 1,100 pieces of correspondence, with an emphasis on letters between Bernstein and his mentors Aaron Copland and Serge Koussevitzky, his family, and his teacher, assistant, and longtime friend Helen Coates. Users interested in Bernstein's renowned musicals can locate 27 letters on West Side Story, 12 on Candide, and nine pertaining to Trouble in Tahiti. Provides a finding aid for the complete collection, housed in the Library of Congress's Music Division; the 6,000-word essay, "Professor Lenny" by Joseph Horowitz, originally published in the New York Review of Books; a chronology of Bernstein's life; and a 27-title bibliography. With formerly obscure material concerning Bernstein's social activism, this collection will be of primary interest to those studying his musical works, ideas, and influences, and more generally 20th-century American music and musical theater.