From the Facing History and Ourselves website:

"Please join us as we explore the Facing History and Ourselves resource book, Choices in Little Rock—a collection of teaching suggestions, activities, and primary sources that focus on the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957. These efforts led to a crisis that historian Taylor Branch once described as 'the most severe test of the Constitution since the Civil War.'

These resources explore a range of civic choices—the decisions people make as citizens in a democracy. Those decisions, both then and now, reveal that democracy is not a product but a work in progress, a work that is shaped in every generation by the choices that we make about ourselves and others. In this workshop, we will consider ways to engage students in the issues raised by this history and its civic implications for their lives today.

Choices in Little Rock can be used not only to teach history but also to deepen and enrich a study of civics, government, and literature."

From the National Humanities Center website:

"The United States marked its 100th anniversary in 1876 with the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, a birthday party that celebrated mechanical progress. But in late nineteenth-century America, progress did not simply mean generating more horsepower. It meant cleaning up cities, reforming government, improving the efficiency of workers, and professionalizing endeavors like playing baseball and studying history. The idea of progress reached into every corner of American life. How did Americans define progress at that time? How did progress manifest itself? And how did it shape America?"

From the National Humanities Center website:

"In one lesson plan after another Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois forever stand opposed. In the late nineteenth century both sought uplift for African Americans, but one believed it came through accommodation and manual training, while the other urged resistance and the liberal arts. Is that the entire story? Was Washington a narrow, uncreative booster of commercialism or a savvy politician who correctly read what late nineteenth-century America would afford its black citizens? Was Du Bois a heroic intellectual activist or a narrow elitist whose path to uplift was open only to the 'Talented Tenth'?"