A Portion of the People: Three Hundred Years of Southern Jewish Life

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Oil on canvas, Mary Olivia Lucas Harby. . . , c. 1830, A Portion of the People
Annotation

This exhibit tells "the story of Southern Jewish settlers and their descendants from the late 1600s through the 21st century." It currently consists of two presentations, each with more than 50 pages presenting an image from the exhibit's collection with accompanying explanatory text. Images include portraits, maps, historical documents, photographs of Jewish ritual books and religious and cultural objects, paintings and photographs of synagogues, and photographs of Jewish businesses. "First Families" explores the period from the 1600s to the 1820s through more than 50 images and "This Happy Land" explores the antebellum and Civil War years through more than 90 images. (The presentation "Pledging Allegiance," recounting the story of Jewish migration to the South in the first half of the 20th century, is under construction.) Visitors can listen to six interviews featuring voices from the past (transcripts are available). Additionally, a photographic essay with more than 40 photographs, "Palmetto Jews" by Bill Aron, examines Jewish life in South Carolina over the past 50 years. There is no site search capability.

TAH Projects and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum

Video Overview

Christina Chavarria of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum describes the many resources the museum can offer TAH Grant projects and her own perceptions on the value of the TAH Grant program.

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Transcript Text

During the course of the time that I've been at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, we've had quite a few calls from TAH grant directors who are bringing teachers to Washington who would like a tour of the museum, and sometimes they might ask for a short professional development session.

So this really piqued our curiosity and we began to think of how we could work more intentionally with the TAH program, and it led us to really look at our resources and how our resources support American history, because even though the Holocaust took place in Europe, it is also very much a story about the United States and American responses and how those responses inform a lot of what we're teaching in schools today and issues that we're dealing with here in the United States.

We ask what the theme of the grant is and if there's any particular focus that they are looking at within the grant. For example, we had one TAH project director telling us about the focus on President Roosevelt. So we worked with our historians, our Senior Historians Office; we also work with collections, to see what collections we have that support American history, and we also look at using our permanent exhibition because our permanent exhibition does have a focus on the United States and the role of the United States.

So we try to put in time, of course, for the teachers to see the exhibit, that's very important. and a session on how to teach about the Holocaust and if there is a direct focus within the grant, we can look at our senior historians office to support a lecture about some historical topic that's related to the grant.

We also encourage teachers to hear Holocaust survivors, their testimonies. We do have Holocaust survivors who are at the museum every day. And if we have a phone call and if the project directors make contact with us early on, we can arrange to have Holocaust survivors speak, and that's very important, because we are losing that generation. So while we still have our survivors with us we do encourage teachers and the project directors to incorporate Holocaust testimony in the visit.

The standards in the United States for teaching U.S. history are either very explicit on teaching the Holocaust, where they state responses to what was happening in Nazi Germany and what was happening in occupied Europe during that time—those are very explicitly stated in many states. But when you look at other themes, American response, foreign policy respond, the rise of fascism, American responses to fascism—if you look at American responses to dictatorships, all of these strands within the elements and standards are very much a part of what we focus on at the museum. It's a very natural fit.

Pretty much everything you will see at the United States Holocaust Museum fits in perfectly to support U.S. history teachers when you're looking at 20th-century history. And even the precedents that were set before. You can look at the 19th century, you can look at the role of antisemitism. There are so many elements. And then of course, today, focusing on our responses to genocides since the Holocaust—that is an incredibly important topic to our museum. And, so, we would encourage U.S. history teachers to look at American foreign policy in trouble spots in places like Darfur, in the former Yugoslavia, like Rwanda, and how we've responded to those situations, and how the Holocaust gave us this, I don't want to say opportunity, but it gave us this light on the subject that is still very much with us today.

Because our primary focus is on the victims and our survivors and their testimonies, but, for example, in working with a Teaching American History group a few weeks ago, I focused on some interviews with an African American athlete, John Will—John Woodruff, excuse me, who was a participant in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and he speaks very eloquently about his experiences in Berlin in 1936, representing the United States and being proud to represent his country and his race and what he saw there and the euphoria of the crowds in reaction to his gold medal victory—also Jesse Owens, which is a story that many people know very well. And then when he returns home, he speaks about being excluded from the hall of fame, from the university where he, that he attended.

In looking at that, to show again what we do in a professional development is to show how expansive this history really is. And we use survivor testimony, we use witness testimony, we use liberator testimony. we also focus very much on photos and other primary source documents. And what we really want to do is to complicate the thinking of the teachers that come to us for professional development, to show that this history is so complex and so vast in its context from the years that it took place, but what happened in the years before, the decades and centuries before, and what's happening after.

June and July are very, very busy months for us and usually we're booked about a year before in our schedules, so I recommend to project directors that they contact us, perhaps in the fall, but as soon as they know that they want to come, they need to be in touch with us, and we will do our absolute best to get them in the museum—because that's very important and if there's time and if there's space and we're available to do so we would be very happy to provide professional development to them, as well.

And for groups that they cannot come to Washington, DC, we offer many resources offsite. First of all, our website is filled with archival material—our photo archives, for example. We also have exemplary lessons that have been tested by teachers and education experts, and they have been vetted for historical accuracy. We also have online exhibitions that contain collections that we encourage teachers to use for a more hands-on approach. More importantly, we have traveling exhibitions, and on our website, you can see a schedule of what exhibitions will be in certain venues around the country and when.

And from our standpoint, from the educational standpoint, we have a network of museum regional educators, our Regional Education Corps, and these are 30 educators who are deeply involved with our museum who are spread out around the country, and if you contact us in the Education Division, in the National Outreach for Teacher Initiatives branch, we can be in touch with our museum regional educators and they can work with a TAH project anywhere in the country to provide professional development even before a group comes to the museum, or after, or if they never come at all—we still have that on-ground support. We also have 246 museum Teacher Fellows around the country, one in each of the 50 states, and they are also resources whom we turn to to provide professional development in places where we're not able to go.

The value of Teaching American History is that it works so closely with a group of teachers and it provides sustainability, and sustainability in the career of a teacher is incredibly important. Sometimes you feel like you're alone as a teacher in your classroom, and when you have that network of support and it's ongoing and it's centered on a theme and a particular rational, that makes a teacher feel incredibly rewarded for having that experience, but more importantly that translates into student success.

And students will only benefit from a teacher having that kind of quality interaction with professionals around a sustained program that will keep them going. The network and the broad availability of resources in the form of other teachers and other grants and what is available online is astounding, and I hope that it continues, and I encourage teachers and educators throughout the country to look at this program, because it does sustain teachers, and if you sustain the teacher, the teacher can better sustain the student, so that that translates into success in the classroom for the student.

World War and Literature

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Poster, Books wanted for our men in camp..., c.1918-1923, C.B. Falls, LoC
Question

Can you suggest any literature covering World War I to World War II that my 10th-grade world history class can read? I am looking for short stories or novels from that period that would interest my students. I would like stories that include what life was like during these years for young people.

Answer

Historical literature can really grab your students' interest. Consider the following excerpt:

They had come for him just after midnight. Three men in suits and ties and black fedoras with FBI badges under their coats. 'Grab your toothbrush,' they’d said. This was back in December, right after Pearl Harbor, when they were still living in the white house on the wide street in Berkeley not far from the sea. The Christmas tree was up and the whole house smelled of pine, and from his window the boy had watched as they led his father out across the lawn in his bathrobe and slippers to the black car that was parked at the curb.

He had never seen his father leave the house without his hat on before. That was what had troubled him most. No hat. And those slippers: battered and faded, with the rubber soles curling up at the edges. If only they had let him put on his shoes then it all might have turned out differently. But there had been no time for shoes.

Grab your toothbrush.
Come on. Come on. You’re coming with us.
We just need to ask your husband a few questions.
Into the car, Papa-san

Later, the boy remembered seeing lights on in the house next door, and faces pressed to the window. One of them was Elizabeth's, he was sure of it. Elizabeth Morgana Roosevelt had seen his father taken away in his slippers.

The next morning his sister had wandered around the house looking for the last place their father had sat. Was it the red chair? Or the sofa? The edge of his bed? She had pressed her face to the bedspread and sniffed.

"The edge of my bed," their mother had said.

That evening she had lit a bonfire in the yard and burned all of the letters from Kagoshima. She burned the family photographs and the three silk kimonos she had brought over with her nineteen years ago from Japan. She burned the records of Japanese opera. She ripped up the flag of the red rising sun. She smashed the tea set and the Imari dishes and the framed portrait of the boy's uncle, who had once been a general in the Emperor's army. She smashed the abacus and tossed it into the flames. "From now on," she said, "we are counting on our fingers."

The next day, for the first time ever, she sent the boy and his sister to school with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in their lunch pails. "No more rice balls," she said. "And if anyone asks, you're Chinese."

The boy had nodded. "Chinese," he whispered. "I'm Chinese."

"And I," said the girl, "am the Queen of Spain."

"In your dreams," said the boy.

"In my dreams," said the girl, "I'm the King."

When the Emperor Was Divine, a novel by Julie Otsuka, p. 73–75

Recommendations

This list includes books considered to be for adult readers as well as books considered to be for young adult readers. These labels are only somewhat useful. Occasionally the young adult books are less challenging, though perhaps equally rewarding, for the reader.

A Very Long Engagement by Sebastien Japrisot won the Prix Interallie in 1991. This nonlinear mystery is a moving and incisive portrait of life in France during and after the First World War.

An ambitious, meticulously researched, novel, The Green Glass Sea by Ellen Klages is set in New Mexico in 1943 and told from the viewpoint of two disenfranchised children at Los Alamos where scientists and mathematicians converge (along with their families) to construct and test the first nuclear bomb. Grades 5–up.

No Pretty Pictures, Caldecott illustrator Anita Lobel's haunting memoir of her traumatic years in Nazi-occupied Poland, is told from the perspective of a child—she is just five when the war begins—who does not fully comprehend what she is witnessing. Grade 6–up.

Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo is a slim, stunning, and easily accessible novel written by the author of War Horse. "Exquisitely written vignettes explore bonds of brotherhood that cannot be broken by the physical and psychological wars of the First World War," said Horn Book Magazine. Grade 7–up. Match with the superb photo-essay The War to End All Wars: World War I by Russell Freedman.

Bird in a Box by Andrea Davis Pinkney is a graceful, restrained, and detailed portrait of America's Great Depression, a time when the radio delivered the sound of Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington into living rooms across the country and boxing champion, Joe Lewis, the "Brown Bomber," came to represent so much more than the zenith of a sport. Grade 4–up.

Set on the Laguna Pueblo Reservation in the years immediately following World War II, Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko, focuses on Tayo, a young vet of mixed Indian ancestry. The book is Tayo's story of return and redemption. "The novel is very deliberately a ceremony in itself—demanding but confident and beautifully written," said the Boston Globe.

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak is an unsettling, unsentimental, poetic novel, set in World War II and narrated by Death. This is not an easy read, but it is a book that can change a life. Grade 9–up.

We Are the Ship by Kadir Nelson is a sumptuous history of Negro League Baseball from its beginning in the 1920s to 1947 when Jackie Robinson broke the major leagues’ color barrier. Dazzling, almost iconic paintings illustrate the easygoing, conversational, historically detailed text, and all in all the book illuminates more than baseball in the '20s and '30s—it is a history of all of us. Grade 4–up.

The narrator of Ruta Sepetys's Between Shades of Gray, 15-year-old Lina, begins "They took me in my nightgown." In 1941, Stalin is deporting families from Lithuania and imprisoning them in Siberia where daily life is brutal. It is the slim possibility of survival that provides hope. This book is similar to Esther Hautzig's earlier autobiographical novel, Endless Steppe in that it is similarly themed and equally searing. In Endless Steppe, 10-year-old Esther Rudmin is arrested with her family in Poland as "enemies of the people" and exiled to Siberia. Grade 6–up.

Homestead, by Rosina Lippi, is a series of interconnected vignettes beginning in 1909, about life in Rosenau, a small isolated village in the Austrian Alps. The villagers harvest, tend animals, and make cheese. Against this pastoral backdrop are all of life's vicissitudes. The prose is clean and clear, each chapter is seemingly autonomous but as we see an event (over generations) from different characters' points of view, the life of Rosenau becomes increasingly rich and complex. This novel won the 1998 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for best first fiction and was short-listed for the 2001 Orange Prize.

Complete List of Titles
  • When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka
  • A Very Long Engagement by Sebastien Japrisot
  • The Green Glass Sea by Ellen Klages
  • No Pretty Pictures: A Child of War by Anita Lobel
  • Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo
  • The War to End All Wars: World War I by Russell Freedman
  • Bird in a Box by Andrea Davis Pinkney
  • Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko
  • The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
  • We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball by Kadir Nelson
  • Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys
  • The Endless Steppe: Growing Up in Siberia by Esther Hautzig
  • Homestead by Rosina Lippi
For more information

See here to search the California literature recommendations. Choose “historical fiction” as one of your search parameters.

This Ask a Master Teacher entry has some other helpful resources for finding historical literature.

The Atomic Bomb: Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Question

Is it possible to discover the true story behind the decision to drop the atomic bomb?

Textbook Excerpt

Textbooks often struggle to portray the U.S. decision to drop atomic bombs on Japanese cities in 1945 in a balanced way. Some focus on the cost to American lives of an invasion; others the suffering of Japanese civilians in the wake of the blast. Giving limits of space, textbooks can often only summarize important points of what was a multifaceted debate.

Source Excerpt

As a pivotal event in the history of both World War II and the Cold War, the decision to use atomic weapons generated substantial discussion, deliberation, and debate (some of it highly classified). The documents created by military leaders, politicians, and government agencies during the course of their exchanges tell a rich, complex, and difficult story.

Historian Excerpt

Historians note a great deal of debate surrounding the decision to use the bombs in 1945. Typically, conflict has arisen over the justification for the use of the bombs and about the moral ramifications of the decision. This is a debate that reached the top levels of U.S. policy making and that continued for decades afterwards.

Abstract

Textbooks struggle with the portrayal of the American decision to drop two atomic bombs on Japanese cities in August 1945. Because the subject is both extraordinarily complex and sometimes controversial, textbooks have struck a number of compromises in an attempt to present the story accurately and fairly. Most recently, those compromises involve presenting voices from a variety of perspectives with limited interpretation.

The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II

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Photo, Fat Man plutonium implosion nuclear weapon, The Atomic Bomb. . .
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The site presents more than 90 primary source documents on the first use of nuclear weapons and the end of World War II. The documents are organized under eight topics that include background on the atomic project, target definition, debates on alternatives to first use and unconditional surrender, the Japanese search for Soviet mediation, the Trinity Test, the first nuclear strikes, and the problem of radiation poisoning. Additionally, the site's editor has provided commentary on some of the documents pointing out how they have been interpreted and a short introductory essay that explains the historical context of the documents and the questions they raise. A printable version of the briefing book is also available.

Pearl Harbor Attack Map

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Avenge Pearl Harbor, Our Bullets Will Do It, c.1942-3, NARA, Flickr Commons
Annotation

This interactive website on the attack on Pearl Harbor provides a chronological overview of the day's events. Each major event on the day's timeline is shown on a map of Hawaii, giving the events a visual place within the harbor geography and allowing site visitors to see where ships were in relationship to each other.

On the map, each major occurrence can be selected as the "full story." These individual full story pages provide a short textual overview of the event alongside a looping archival image and video slideshow. Clicking progresses through the slideshow for users interested in quickly revisiting an image after it has passed or who simply want to go through the slideshow at a faster pace. Many of the events also offer eyewitness quotes.

One of the most praiseworthy aspects of the site is that these quotes are not all from U.S. sailors and commanders. The voices selected include two women—a nurse and the daughter of a military man—and several Japanese airmen, submariners, and commanders. By providing voices from both sides of the attack, National Geographic avoids dehumanizing the Japanese through the absence of their own stories.

Why We Remember the Holocaust

Description

This short video produced by the The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum describes the events of the Holocaust in the words of both survivors and modern scholars. The video also discusses the importance of commemorating those consumed by this horrific tragedy and the reason for the National Days of Remembrance. In the words of Holocaust Survivor Estelle Laughlin, "[It's] not enough to curse the darkness of the past. Above all, we have to illuminate the future," for only by doing so can we "leave the world better for our children and for posterity."

Marian Anderson: A Life in Song

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Portrait, Marion Anderson
Annotation

Created by the staff of the Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Pennsylvania, this exhibit traces the life and musical career of African American contralto Marian Anderson. Anderson broke the race barrier when she came to prominence in the 1930s and 1940s. The materials are drawn from Anderson's personal papers, which she donated to the University of Pennsylvania in 1993. The exhibit is presented chronologically in 10 sections that explore Anderson's birth in Philadelphia, her education and musical training, and her career and humanitarian efforts toward improving African Americans' opportunities.

The site contains more than 30 audio and six video excerpts from performances and interviews, over 50 images, with approximately 100-word explanatory captions, illustrating Anderson's life and work. This exhibit is ideal for researching African American history and the history of the performing arts in America.

Home Economics Archive: Research, Tradition, History

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Photo, Dishes, Home Economics Archive: Research, Tradition, History
Annotation

This site offers books and journals related to the science of home economics. Its goal is to document the rise of home economics to a profession, beginning around the middle of the 19th century, and to correct an academic marginalization of the field.

Primarily focused on the years from 1850 through 1925, the site contains digitized texts of 934 books and 218 journal volumes, totaling almost 400,000 pages. Visitors may use the search engine, or look through the Subject index, or browse alphabetically by author, title, or year of publication.

Topics range from Child Care to Housekeeping to Retail. Each entry includes a 500- to 750-word essay, two or three images, a very detailed bibliography (available as a PDF file), and a list of possible subtopics. This is an outstanding site full of primary sources and a great resource for researchers, students, and teachers.

Gifts of Speech: Women's Speeches from Around the World

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Logo, Gifts of Speech
Annotation

Charting changes in women's rhetoric in the public realm from 1848 to the present is possible through this archive of more than 400 speeches by influential, contemporary women. These include prominent female politicians and scientists, as well as popular culture figures. There is an emphasis on the United States (particularly after 1900), including speeches from women as diverse as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, Mary Church Terrell, Marie Curie, Helen Keller, Emma Goldman, Eleanor Roosevelt, Betty Friedan, and Ayn Rand. A nearly complete list of Nobel lectures by women laureates provides access to acceptance speeches.

The search function is particularly useful for pulling speeches from a diverse collection into common subject groups. It also allows for the study of the language of women's public debate by following changes in the use of particular metaphors or idioms, such as the concept "motherhood."