Jack Rakove of Stanford University examines the creation and significance of the Bill of Rights, arguing that it is perhaps not as significant as popularly believed.
To listen to this lecture, select "The Bill of Rights" under "Listen to Dr. Rakove's lectures."
Professor Robin Einhorn looks at the 19th-century understanding of the Constitution and the changes that were made to it following the Civil War.
This school year, each of my classes chose a person to represent them and become their class name. Instead of having blocks 3 and 4 or periods 6 and 7, I've had my Alice Paul and Daisy Bates classes on A Day and Dorie Miller and Rosie the Riveter on B Day.
At the beginning of the year, I gave my students the task of reading a biography in small groups. 
I chose historical figures in U.S. history, some well known and others lesser known to them, and created biographies no longer than a page, by cutting and pasting from credible websites or by using biographies from History Makers (published by Rada Press). After each group read their biography, they summarized what their person did and why they are in the history books. They then presented their findings to the class, as well as what characteristics their person possessed that would make them a great name to adopt for the class. Students cited such qualities as perseverance, tenacity, and strength. After the class heard all of the biographies, they voted on which name they wanted to adopt.
During the course of the year, I made sure each class had an activity outside of the curriculum that connected with their class name. Alice Paul, named after one of the founders of the National Women's Party, had a museum educator from the Sewall-Belmont House come in and speak about Paul. We then walked to the house and saw just how close the National Women's Party headquarters are to our school! 
Dorie Miller, who had taken the name of the first African American to receive the Navy Cross, had a museum educator from the National Portrait Gallery come to our class to share World War II posters, with an emphasis on the Dorie Miller poster. She created a lesson that had students then write their own historic labels, like you would find in a museum, for the poster. Rosie the Riveter visited the Smithsonian National Museum of American History’s "The Price of Freedom: Americans at War" exhibit and had a tour, emphasizing Rosie! The kids even practiced riveting! Daisy Bates, who had taken the name of the civil rights activist, traveled to the National Museum of American History in February and heard from veteran Freedom Riders. While there wasn't a direct connection to Daisy, they heard from civil rights leaders who fought alongside of Daisy Bates.
I've decided that I will definitely continue this for next year’s classes, but that I could never have another Dorie, Daisy, Alice, or Rosie class. So, my last assignment for each class this year was for them to create glogs memorializing their class names. Students worked individually or in pairs to create a glog.
The class then voted on which glog was the best. I will print the final, winning glog for each class in poster form and hang it in my room to teach future classes with and to remind me of the legacy of these classes.
But what's a glog? This is a question that my students had.
At first, they thought I said they were creating a blog—like a blog entry—since they were used to doing that. I clarified and enunciated the word "glog" again. There were confused looks.
A glog, as I explained to my students, is a multimedia poster, created on the computer. On a glog you can add text, photos, videos, music, audio recordings, documents—you name it!
One of the first things we did was find a Plan B. Glogster, a glog creation tool and community, is blocked by my school district. Having explored Glogster at home, I did know that they have a teacher's address. I directed my students to edu.glogster.com and had them create accounts as "Basic" members (it's free!). The students were soon underway!
Students were to create posters about their class name, and incorporate photos, a quote about or from their person, a brief summary of what their person did, and at least one multimedia clip (a video or music).
When the students were done with their posters, they published them and then emailed me their blog with the "email friends" feature. I did this activity over two days. The second day, I was much more clear about my expectations for inclusion of elements on the glog, and they turned out much better, content-wise, for more groups. I think it was helpful for students to have to think about the various elements to incorporate and served as a review of primary sources for them.
I can definitely say that this was a hit among the students. They really enjoyed learning about the new technology and many said they were going to go home and play with it. They became engrossed in looking for sources that others wouldn’t find so that their posters would be unique.
The technology was very intuitive for the students, and I learned a lot from watching them. While I had spent time learning how to glog myself, I watched my students just fly with it! Before I knew it, they were asking each other questions about how to add something or asking their friends to look at what they did on their screens. They clearly were enthusiastic for not only their class name, but for creatively sharing the history of their person through their glogs for future classes.
Evelyn MacPherson, one member of the two-person winning Alice Paul glog team, said the following about making her glog:
I enjoyed making the poster, it was a lot of fun to create something that could be used as a learning tool that required you to use creativity. We knew that you had to balance out the facts with things that would draw people to your poster, such as a theme, or pictures. It required some trial and error, but it was a lot of fun.
I really enjoyed this activity and hope to use glogs more in the future. Glogster was easy to use, and this activity required critical thinking skills from my students and integrated technology and history in an engaging way for them . . . and me!
Our bloggers have many ideas for using visuals in the classroom! Once you've learned how to glog, take a look at Jennifer Orr on using art in a 1st-grade classroom, Diana Laufenberg on tying visuals and visualizations in at the high school level, and Joe Jelen on Google's Art Project.
Tech for Teachers can introduce you to more online tools—including Glogster—and our articles on copyright can help you (and your students) understand the complexities of locating and using images online.
iCivics teaches students civics by way of online casual gaming. Don't write the site off because it consists primarily of games. Most of them are actually both entertaining and educational.
Games are divided into sections—Citizen Participation, the Constitution and Bill of Rights, Budgeting, Separation of Powers, the Executive Branch, Legislative Branch, and the Judicial Branch, with one to four games each. Games can also be sorted by overall time needed to play.
Try Cast Your Vote to learn to prioritize issues of importance to you and evaluate political candidates, Immigration Nation to learn reasons why people are and are not allowed into the country, Do I Have a Right? to review your amendments, Branches of Power to emphasize the relationships among the three branches of government, Executive Command to discover the responsibilities of the President, People's Pie to create a national budget, or Counties Work to manage county services. For an in-depth example, take a look at our Tech for Teachers entry on Do I Have a Right?.
Note that games include teacher's guides in the menu below the play area. Select Teachers' Tools, and look under Teacher's Files. Also under Teachers' Tools, you can search by your state name to find any standards directly related to the game in question.
Players can also earn points, and spend them on various causes such as Teens Against Domestic Abuse. The causes with the highest points each three months are awarded a monetary prize. This gives gaming point acquisition a real-life application.
In addition to games, the website offers curriculum units on budgeting, foundations of government, citizenship and participation, persuasive writing, and each of the three branches of government. These packages include lesson plans, appropriate iCivics games, and webquests. Webquests consist of thematic information linked to resources on external websites. You can also search for appropriate content by specific state standards, and/or register to create a class account.
When was the number of Supreme Court Justices expanded to nine, and what was the reason? Why wasn't there a large public uproar like the one FDR experienced?
On April 10, 1869, Congress passed an act to amend the judicial system in part by increasing the number of Supreme Court justices to nine, to take effect the first Monday in December of that year. That act, which remains in effect to this day, by itself did not provoke a public outcry. A mostly partisan-based controversy did arise, however, when the votes of two new justices nominated by President Ulysses S. Grant in February 1870 and confirmed by the Senate resulted in the overturning of a recent politically divisive court decision.
Grant was accused with packing the court, the same charge leveled against FDR in 1937 when he put forth a plan to reform a Supreme Court that repeatedly had judged key New Deal and state reform legislation to be unconstitutional. Roosevelt proposed giving the President the opportunity to nominate one new justice to the Court whenever a sitting justice who had been on the Court for at least 10 years and had not retired within six months of turning 70 years of age—the average age of the justices at the time was 71—with a maximum total of six such appointments to be allowed. In a fireside chat in March, Roosevelt cited as precedent a bill passed by the House of Representatives in March 1869 that had proposed adding a justice to the Court whenever a sitting justice reached the age of 70 with no upper limit specified for the number of justices the Court could have. Roosevelt's plan was vigorously opposed even by many of the President's supporters.
On six occasions prior to the April 1869 act, Congress had enacted legislation to change the number of Supreme Court justices. The April 1869 legislation—passed without the inclusion of the controversial provision in the March House bill that FDR had cited as a precedent—in effect repealed a July 1866 law stipulating that vacancies for associate justices would not be filled until the total number of justices reached seven. Many scholars of the Court have circulated the view that Radical Republicans in Congress passed the 1866 act—which in turn, in effect, had repealed an 1863 act that had increased the number of justices to 10—to take away President Andrew Johnson's power to appoint conservative justices. Once Grant was elected to the presidency, according to this view, Congress increased the number of justices to nine to give their party more sway over the Court's decisions.
Historian Stanley I. Kutler persuasively has challenged part of this interpretation, arguing that evidence is lacking to support the claim that Republicans "primarily sought to avoid a Johnson appointment." Among other arguments, Kutler points out that Johnson himself approved the 1866 bill and that the 1869 bill was passed by Congress before Johnson left office. Kutler contends that both Congress and Johnson believed that the Court had become unwieldy with too many justices. Still, the main intent of the legislation, which included a reorganization of the judicial circuit system, was to reduce Southern influence on the judiciary, Kutler concludes.
Less than one year after Grant's nominees to the Court assumed office, the Court, by a vote of five to four, overturned the four to three opinion in Hepburn v. Griswold that had ruled three legal tender acts of 1862 and 1863 to be invalid, one of the first times that the Court had judged Congressional legislation to be unconstitutional. The acts, instituted to help pay for the war, had authorized the federal government to issue paper money, colloquially known as "greenbacks" as legal tender that would be irredeemable in specie, i.e. gold or silver coins. Political controversy had arisen after rampant inflation had driven down the value of greenbacks drastically and the question arose as to whether creditors could demand payback for debts in coins or would have to accept paper currency. Those who supported the legal tender acts believed that the Hepburn ruling would result in a contraction of the money supply that would hurt many ordinary Americans in debt. Those in support of Hepburn worried that public debt had risen greatly because in borrowing money, the federal government had been at the mercy of foreign governments that had remained on the gold standard. Defenders of Hepburn also charged that its reversal had been instigated at the behest of big business, as the New York Sun wrote, "so that the great corporations might pay their debts in depreciated paper, instead of coin."
On the day that the Hepburn ruling was announced, February 7, 1870, Grant, who favored upholding the legal tender acts, sent two nominations for new Supreme Court justices to the Senate for confirmation. Previously, one nominee, William Strong, as a judge on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, had ruled to uphold the legal tender acts, and many suspected that the other nominee, Joseph P. Bradley, had vowed he would vote to validate the acts. The ruling to overturn Hepburn and the suspicion that Grant had packed the court caused much adverse comment in the press. The New York Tribune charged, "Powerful corporations, wielding large political and moneyed influence, are deeply involved in the question. . . . The decision, therefore, injures the poor many, and puts immense sums in the pockets of the rich and flourishing few corporations."
Many critics noted Strong's and Bradley's previously ties to railroads. The New York Bulletin bemoaned, "We have now learnt, for the first time, that a President can pack the supreme tribunal of the land, and its Judges can recognize other considerations than those of law and justice. . . . Of all calamities since the foundation of the republic, this is the saddest and the most bitterly wounding to high-minded citizens." The Chicago Tribune similarly lamented, "Nothing has occurred in the history of the country, except, possibly, the Dred Scott decision, so calculated to impair confidence in the stability of the court and the permanency of the republic as this action. . . . The country could survive rebellion, but it cannot outlive the destruction of credit, and the abolishment of the judicial branch of the government."
During the 1872 presidential campaign, Grant's opponents repeated the accusation that he had packed the court with justices who had promised to overturn Hepburn. The controversy was revived periodically until 1935, when Sidney Ratner, later to become a renowned economic historian, presented evidence from the unpublished diary of Grant's Secretary of State, Hamilton Fish, that Grant "required no declaration from Judges Strong and Bradley on the constitutionality of the Legal Tender Act." Fish revealed, however, that Grant did know of Strong's previous ruling and "had reason to believe Judge Bradley's opinion tended in the same direction." While Grant had assured Fish that "he would do nothing to exact anything like a pledge or expression of opinion from the parties he might appoint to the Bench," the president "had desired that the Constitutionality [of the Legal Tender Act] should be sustained by the Supreme Court." Ratner argued that because Grant had not explicitly requested his nominees to decide in favor of Hepburn, "it is not just to say that he 'packed the Court', or that the new judges were 'creatures of the President placed upon the Bench to carry out his instructions.'" A New York Times obituary of Ratner indicated that he had been "influential in President Franklin D. Roosevelt's attempt to expand the size of the Supreme Court by discovering a precedent in President Ulysses S. Grant's appointments to the Court."
"The Legal-Tender Decision," Chicago Tribune, 27 April 1871, 29 April 1871 [which reprints New York Tribune and New York Bulletin editorials].
Edward S. Corwin, "Curbing the Court," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 185 (May 1936).
Kenneth W. Dam, "The Legal Tender Cases," Supreme Court Review 1981 (1981).
Charles Fairman, Reconstruction and Reunion, 186488, History of the Supreme Court of the United States. Vol. 6, pt. 1. New York: Macmillan, 1971.
Stanley I. Kutler, "Reconstruction and the Supreme Court: The Numbers Game Reconsidered," Journal of Southern History 32 (Feb. 1966).
William E. Leuchtenburg, The Supreme Court Reborn: The Constitutional Revolution in the Age of Roosevelt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Lawrence W. Levine and Cornelia R. Levine, The People and the President: America's Conversation with FDR. Boston: Beacon Press, 2002.
Alpheus Thomas Mason, "Politics and the Supreme Court: President Roosevelt's Proposal," University of Pennsylvania Law Review and American Law Register 85 (May 1937).
Scholar Specialized in Economic History," New York Times, 17 January 1996.
Sidney Ratner, "Was the Supreme Court Packed by President Grant?" Political Science Quarterly 50 (September 1935).
From the National Humanities Center website:
Visual imagery played a major role in the anti-slavery movement. From the iconic image of a kneeling slave asking "Am I Not a Man and a Brother?" to images of family separations through sale at auction, images were an important weapon in the arsenal of abolitionist activity. This seminar will look at some of the imagery created in support of anti-slavery activities. How did the imagery evolve? What were the major themes? What were the iconic images of slavery? And how, then, did artists portray freedom? What was the relationship between anti-slavery imagery and slave narratives and abolitionist writing, including Uncle Tom's Cabin?
One of the Famous American Trials sites created by Douglas Linder of the University of Missouri, Kansas City, School of Law, this site explores the 1969-1970 trial of the Chicago Seven, a group of radicals accused of conspiring to incite a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Linder provides a 1500-word account of the trial, which includes links to brief (100-word) explanations of specific terms and biographies of some of the key figures. The site provides a chronology of the lives of those involved in the trial from 1960 to 1998; images of two Yippie posters; a map of the key Chicago riot sites; and roughly 350-word biographies of 15 of the defendants, lawyers, and other figures in the trial. There are ten audio clips of defendants, prosecutors, and witnesses discussing various aspects of the riots and the trial. The site offers full-text versions of the indictment against the Chicago Seven, the trial manuscript, the contempt of court specifications against two of the defendants, and the appellate decision that overturned the contempt convictions and the convictions for intent to incite a riot. Additionally, there are 16 images of the riots and key figures and 14 quotations. A bibliography of 13 websites and 15 scholarly works leads to other sources for studying the Chicago Seven's trial and their lives as radical activists. This is an ideal site for researching 1960s activism and culture.
This site, based on a National Archives exhibition of historically significant photographs, commemorates 20th-century events and everyday life. The gallery features 70 photographs grouped into six chronological headings: A New Century, The Great War and the New Era, The Great Depression and the New Deal, A World in Flames (World War II), Postwar America, and Century's End. Images contained in the gallery depict events such as the first Wright brothers flight at Kitty Hawk, immigrants arriving at Ellis Island, Lyndon Johnson meeting Martin Luther King, Jr., a war protestor placing daisies into the rifle of a U.S. soldier, and Nixon's post-resignation departure from the White House, as well as images of everyday life across the nation and throughout the century. Each chronological section opens with a brief (75-100 word) introduction. A 30-50 word caption contextualizes each image and provides information on the photographer, if known.
A portfolio section contains another 48 images taken from the works of Walter Lubken, Lewis Hine, George Ackerman, Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, Charles Fenno Jacobs, and Danny Lyon. Each image in the portfolio is accompanied by a 5-10 word title, notes on the photographer, and the date and place the photograph was taken. All photographs are printable. This site is ideal for students and teachers of American culture, society, and historical events in the 20th century.
This website provides full-text access to 22 academic history journals, including major titles, such as the American Historical Review and the Journal of American History, and smaller journals, such as the Journal of Social History, the Western Historical Quarterly, and the Journal of World History. Available journals include current issues and coverage from the recent past, going back as far as 1999, in PDF and HTML format. The website offers keyword and Boolean searching as well as advanced searching by type of article. There are four additional resources, including conference proceedings, the Booker T. Washington Papers, and Historical Map Collections. Articles in the American Historical Review are available for free without a subscription; reviews are available only by subscription.
This site is designed to serve as a memorial to the four students killed at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, by National Guardsmen. Visitors will find 93 transcripts of oral history interviews taken at May 4th commemorations in 1990, 1995, and 2000. The oral histories, ranging from two and 35 minutes, are part of a larger collection. The site provides a 780-word chronology of events and a bibliography of 18 books, 90 articles, four complete issues of journals dedicated to May 4th events, and 25 websites about the tragedy. Exhibits include images of 11 memorials to the four slain students, three poems, and annual commemoration programs and photographs from 1971 to 1995. The site also includes finding aids for 71 offline collections and will be interesting for research in the 1960s, protest, and American education.