As the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney move into full swing, both men have to stake out positions on many issues. From health care to economic revival to the environment, Obama and Romney make promises and set priorities.

So far, one of the defining issues of 2012 has been immigration: How should the U.S. handle illegal immigration and possible immigration reform?

Put the issue into perspective for your students by providing them with resources on immigration in U.S. history. The U.S. today rests on the heritages of many different peoples — from a land populated by native peoples to a country founded by colonists to a world power that both welcomed and restricted immigration at different times.

Where to start? Historian Alan Gevinson outlines the ups and downs of immigration from the 1870s to the 1920s in Ask a Historian, but remember that the arrival of newcomers to North America began much earlier! Who were the ancestors of prehistoric peoples like the Mississippi Moundbuilders? Check out the website Peopling North America for some theories.

The original English colonists may not have seen themselves as immigrants, but they were certainly newcomers to an already-peopled land. A lesson plan on Jamestown explores early contact between English and the Powhatans.

Other early Americans came to the English colonies against their will. Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record can introduce students to the brutal separation of Africans from their homelands and their sale to the Americas. What regulations managed the slave trade? When was it stopped in the U.S.?

As the U.S. developed and its boundaries expanded, national views on immigration have shifted multiple times. In Lesson Plan Reviews, we look at lesson plans on Asian immigration through Angel Island, Jewish immigration, and living conditions in tenements after the Civil War. (For more on Jewish immigration, visit our Beyond the Textbook feature.)

Browse more than 100 Website Reviews for primary sources on the lives of immigrants throughout U.S. history. Or find suggestions for teaching about immigration in Ask a Master Teacher.

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.

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.