Causal Reasoning

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*Please note that this video is no longer hosted by the Teachers TV website. It may be hosted on a different site and found through doing an internet search on the video's title.

This video shows a 9th-grade history teacher teaching a lesson on causal reasoning to a mixed-ability class (though it is labeled Gifted and Talented). The instructor presents students with the fictional story of Alphonse the Camel, whose back is ultimately broken by his owner's addition of a single straw. Through group work based on this accessible, engaging example, students learn how multiple causes of an event interact. The video is punctuated by student and teacher interviews, which provide the viewer with additional insight into student learning. The video provides examples of two promising practices:

  • Exploring why things happen through an accessible, fictional example and then applying the same approach to an historical problem
  • Using concrete instructional strategies to push students to consider different kinds of historical causes and the relationships among them

Alphonse the Camel The teacher introduces students to the story of Alphonse during their study of the causes of World War I. The students discover that there are a number of factors that ultimately lead to the camel's demise, which is finally brought about by a straw thrown on his back. The fictional story challenges students to think beyond single factors and simple lists when exploring causality. Students identify and analyze the causes implicit in the story. Using note cards with change-related words on them, students pair each word with a cause in order to identify the kind of change the particular cause brought about. For example, they are asked to distinguish between causes that initiate change and causes that exacerbate change.

Applying Knowledge in New Contexts

After students discuss their work identifying various causes and the relationships among them, the teacher asks them to apply what they have learned to a new problem, the causes of World War I. This topic is explored at greater length in a follow-up lesson.

What's New?

History teachers frequently ask students to consider causes. This lesson, however, challenges students to grapple with multiple causality, including the way that different kinds of causes relate to each other. Further, the design of the lesson allows all students to participate and be challenged, not only because it begins with an accessible case, but also because it includes causal relationships of varied complexity. The video moves back and forth between the lesson in action and interviews with the students and instructor in order to highlight what makes the lesson successful.

Prosperity and Thrift: Coolidge Era and the Consumer Economy

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This exhibit assembles a wide assortment of materials from the 1920s, items loosely related to the prosperity of the Coolidge years and the rise of a mass consumer economy. The collection includes more than 400 documents, images, and audio and video clips on subjects ranging from automobiles, consumer goods, department stores, families, Motion Picture News, and the National Negro Business League, to politics.

An introductory essay provides valuable background information on the Coolidge administration with additional insight on the social and cultural context of the era. An alphabetized guide to people, organizations, and topics includes definitions and brief descriptions. This sort of material has not been widely available, and this collection is extremely valuable as a resource on the development of mass consumption.

American Environmental Photographs, 1891-1936

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These approximately 4,500 photographs document natural environments, ecologies, and plant communities in the United States at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Produced by American botanists between 1891 and 1936, the photos describe various ecosystems and landforms across the United States. Users can search for specific plants and some animals as well as for landforms, natural events, and weather patterns.

The collection is a bit odd in that it mixes genres and types. Clicking on the region "Pennsylvania" produces eight images, ranging from pictures of dogwoods to a photo of tree rings to three pictures of the Pittsburgh flood. A timeline and an essay on "Ecology and the American Environment" provide valuable background information as well as a bibliography. These materials are useful as record of early environmental thinking as well as a document of vanished landscapes.

Profiles in Science

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These documents, exhibits, photographs, and essays tell the history of 26 prominent 20th-century scientists, physicians, and experts in biomedical research and public health. The site is divided thematically into "Biomedical Research," "Health and Medicine," and "Fostering Science and Health." The collections include published and unpublished items, such as books, journals, pamphlets, diaries, letters, manuscripts, photographs, audiotapes, video clips, and other materials. Each exhibit includes introductory narratives and biographies of each scientist and a selection of noteworthy documents. The collections are particularly strong in cellular biology, genetics, and biochemistry, with attention to health and medical research policy, application of computers in medicine, science education, and the history of modern science.

The Jack London Online Collection

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The full-text versions of more than 40 works by Jack London (1876–1916), a prominent early 20th-century writer who was also involved in the socialist movement, are available here. Materials include famous fiction, such as The Call of the Wild (1903), and lesser-known works, such as War of the Classes (1905), a collection of speeches London delivered on behalf of socialism. The website includes 20 novels, 19 short story collections, two collections of essays, three plays, and six additional published nonfiction works. The website is keyword searchable. In addition to providing the writings of Jack London, there is plenty of biographical and historical information about London and his times. Outside resources are suggested, divided into those suitable for students and those for teachers. Combining London's original works with other contextual materials provided by the site could be valuable for studying early 20th-century American literature and journalism and its relation to radical political and social currents of the time.

Time Archive, 1923 to Present

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Time magazine published its first edition on March 23, 1923. This website features all 4,428 Time magazine covers published since that time. Covers can be searched by keyword or browsed by year.

Exploring Time covers from the early years shows that individuals (generally men in political leadership positions) were featured up until the late 1960s. Indeed, House of Representatives Speaker Joseph G. Cannon occupies Time's first cover, China's General Chiang Kai-shek appears several times between the late 1920s and 1940s, African leaders surface at decolonization in the late 1950s, and Ralph Nader can be found trumpeting the "consumer revolt" on a cover from December 1969.

Those interested in U.S. foreign policy (search China, Russia, Vietnam, or Latin America), popular culture and entertainment, the environment, religion, and legal history also will find valuable resources. Within each keyword search, suggestions for related topics are helpful.

Race and Place

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This archive addresses Jim Crow, or racial segregation, laws from the late 1880s until the mid-20th century, focusing on the town of Charlottesville, VA. The theme is the connection of race with place by understanding the lives of African Americans in the segregated South. Political materials includes seven political broadsides and a timeline of African American political activity in Charlottesville and Virginia. Census data includes searchable databases containing information about individual African Americans taken from the 1870 and 1910 Charlottesville census records. City records includes information on individual African Americans and African American businesses. Oral histories includes audio files from over 37 interviews. Personal papers contains indexes to the Benjamin F. Yancey family papers and the letters of Catherine Flanagan Coles. Newspapers, still in progress, includes more than 1,000 transcribed articles from or about Charlottesville or Albemarle from two major African American newspapers—the Charlottesville Recorder and the Richmond Planet. Images has links to two extensive image collections, the Holsinger Studio Collection and the Jackson Davis Collection of African American Educational Photographs, and three smaller collections.

Native American Documents Project

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These four collections of data and documents address Federal Indian policy in the late 19th century. The first set includes eight annual reports of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs from the 1870s, along with appendices and a map. The second set, Allotment Data, traces the Federal "reform" policy of dividing Indian lands into small tracts for individuals—a significant amount of which went to whites—from the 1870s to the 1910s. This set includes transcriptions of five acts of Congress, tables, and an essay analyzing the data.

The third set includes 111 documents on the little-known Rogue River War of 1855 in Oregon, the reservations set up for Indian survivors, and the allotment of one of these reservations, the Siletz, in 1894. The fourth set provides the California section of an ethnographic compilation from 1952.

Remembering Jim Crow

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Created as a companion to a National Public Radio (NPR) documentary on segregation in the South, this website presents thirty audio excerpts from oral history interviews, ranging from one minute to ten minutes in length, and 130 photographs. Materials are arranged in six thematically-organized sections that address legal, social, and cultural aspects of segregation, black community, and black resistance to the Jim Crow way of life. As anthropologist Kate Ellis, one of the site’s creators, notes, the interviews display a "marked contrast between African American and white reflections on Jim Crow." Many of the photographs come from personal collections of the people interviewed. The website presents sixteen photographs taken by Farm Security Administration photographer Russell Lee in New Iberia, Louisiana. Also available are audio files and transcripts of the original radio documentary, more than ninety additional stories, a sampling of state segregation laws arranged by topic, links to nine related sites, and a bibliography.

Willa Cather Archive

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Willa Cather (1873–1947) wrote 12 novels and numerous works of short fiction. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 and is known for her intensive examination of life in the midwestern U.S. This extensive archive is dedicated to her life and work. At its core is a collection of all of her novels, short fiction, journalistic writing, interviews, speeches, and public letters published before 1922. All materials are fully searchable. Notably, both O Pioneers! and My Antonia are accompanied by extensive scholarly notes, historical context, and introductory material. Accompanying her published materials is a collection of 2,054 of Cather's letters (again annotated and fully searchable), more than 600 photographs of Cather and important people and places in her life, audio of Cather's Pulitzer Prize acceptance speech, and a short video clip of Cather. Several scholarly articles and a text analysis tool are also available.