Lewis and Clark: Same Place, Different Perspectives

Teaser

How geography influenced interactions among Lewis, Clark, & Native Americans.

lesson_image
Description

In small groups, students analyze short excerpts from primary sources and secondary information that describe an encounter between the Lewis and Clark expedition and a Native American tribe. They share their analysis with the class and consider how varied locations influenced the ways in which the explorers and the various Native tribes interacted.

Article Body

Encouraging students to work collaboratively in groups, this lesson asks students to think and write about history from multiple viewpoints. The primary source excerpts, primarily from the expedition members’ journals, are a bit challenging, but they are brief and informative. Short expository passages describe different Native American groups and their encounter with the expedition. The absence of primary documents from the Native American perspective provides an opportunity to discuss what sources of information make up the historical record.

Additionally, and maybe more importantly, the lesson engages students in geographic analysis. Using geographic indicators, students must locate each encounter at a specific site on expedition maps. Students consider the varied physical environments that Lewis and Clark encountered and how these connect to cultural variations between the Native American tribes whom they met. This lesson pays special attention to the differences between Native American cultures, countering a common student belief that all Indians lived alike.

We like the closing activity where each group reports back to the whole class before a large group discussion on the similarities and differences between the encounters. The suggested assessment asks students to write about one of the encounters from the perspective of Sacagawea, Lewis and Clark’s Native American guide, or York, a slave on the expedition. Unless this lesson is taught in conjunction with the film or other rich resources providing additional background information, this assessment seems ill-suited as students likely need more background to complete these essays successfully.

Topic
Lewis and Clark Expedition
Time Estimate
1 class period
flexibility_scale
4
Rubric_Content_Accurate_Scholarship

Yes Uses primary sources from the Lewis and Clark expedition.

Rubric_Content_Historical_Background
No We recommend that teachers include additional background information.
Rubric_Content_Read_Write

Yes Students read about environments, resources, and daily life in different places and write about how and why people from different groups perceived events differently.

Rubric_Analytical_Construct_Interpretations

Yes Students' historical and geographic analysis skills are fostered through interpretation of primary and informational texts and maps.

Rubric_Analytical_Close_Reading_Sourcing

Yes Students must read documents and maps closely in order to compare different perspectives.

Rubric_Scaffolding_Appropriate

Yes Some of the document prose is challenging, but grouping students by mixed ability can help address comprehension issues.

Rubric_Scaffolding_Supports_Historical_Thinking

No Teachers may need to create scaffolding questions to guide their students during group work.

Rubric_Structure_Assessment

No Assessment is vague. Teachers may wish to design their own assessments that involve students in viewing the expedition from multiple viewpoints or considering how location influences cultural variation.

Rubric_Structure_Realistic

Yes The directions are clear and all of the materials available on the web are easily reproducible for classroom use

Rubric_Structure_Learning_Goals

Yes Activities require students to examine an event from multiple viewpoints. Students also have the opportunity to see how geography influenced both Native American groups and the expedition members .

National Register of Historic Places Travel Itineraries

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San Francisco during World War II, Mississippi's Indian Mounds, and Cumberland, Maryland, are just three of the more than 50 cities, towns, and rivers across the U.S. to which this website provides virtual access. In Baltimore, Maryland, a clickable map allows users to wander from the USCGC Taney (the last surviving warship present at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941) docked at Baltimore's Inner Harbor, to the house where Edgar Allen Poe lived in the mid-1830s, to the Union Square-Hollins Market Historic District to learn about Baltimore's oldest public market still in operation, and on to 40 more sites around the city. Each landmark is introduced with photographs, brief essays providing historical context, and tourist information.

Some travel itineraries are grouped by theme. For example, Historic Places of the Civil Rights Movement presents information on Arkansas's Little Rock Central High School, Virginia's Robert Moton High School, and the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968. Many of these sites includes links to lesson plans in NPS's Teaching With Historic Places. Updated regularly, this website is useful for teachers, students, and tourists alike.

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.

Voices from the Dust Bowl: 1940-1941

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These materials examine Depression-era migrant work camps in central California. The Farm Security Administration (FSA) managed the camps that were primarily inhabited by migrants from the rural areas of Oklahoma and nearby states. The collection of materials include 371 audio recordings of songs, interviews, and camp announcements and transcriptions of 113 songs. Print and image materials include 23 photographs, newspaper clippings, and 11 camp newsletters.

Additional materials address the role of the ethnographer, including a Works Progress Administration folk song questionnaire; the field notes and correspondence of Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin, the original collectors of the materials; and two published magazine articles by Todd. Topics range from camp court proceedings and personal narratives to square dances and baseball games. The website also includes a bibliography, a background essay, and an essay on the recording expedition. This is a valuable site for the study of Depression-era migrants, their folk traditions, and the documentary impulse of the period.

Rivers, Edens, Empires: Lewis and Clark and the Revealing of America

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Thomas Jefferson outlined three motivating factors in his instructions to Lewis and Clark: a search for navigable rivers to span the continent; a quest for Edenic beauty and riches; and the competitive desire to acquire a continental empire. These 180 documents and artifacts interpret 19th-century westward exploration from this perspective. The range of materials is striking. In addition to maps, plans, and charts, the site offers images (sketches, watercolors, etchings, and engravings), texts (letters, diaries, speeches, newspapers, and books), and tools (surveying and medical instruments, cooking utensils, armaments). The exhibit opens with an examination of the "imperial mentality" common to Virginia's aristocratic class in the late 18th century and then focuses on the Lewis and Clark journey. It ends with the subsequent expeditions of Zebulon Pike, Stephen H. Long, Charles Wilkes, John Charles Fremont, and the mid-19th century transcontinental railroad plan that supplanted the search for a water route.

Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project

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The long history of struggle for equal rights by various ethnic groups in Seattle, including Filipino, Chinese, Japanese, African, and Native Americans; Jews; and Latinos is documented on this website. Primary and secondary sources integrate labor rights movements with struggles for political rights, as is evident in the "special sections," that highlight the Chicano/a movement, the Black Panther Party, Filipino Cannery Unionism, the United Construction Workers Association, Communism, and the United Farm Workers. Each section brings together oral histories, documents, newspapers, and photographs that are accompanied by written and video commentary to provide historical context. The collection of more than 70 oral histories of activists is especially useful for understanding the lived experience of racism and its especially subtle workings in the Pacific Northwest. Together, these resources provide important national context for the civil rights struggle, too often understood as a solely southern phenomenon.

Territorial Kansas Online

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These Territorial Kansas collections convey the growing divisions in Kansas and the nation over the expansion of slavery, federalism, nationalism, industrialization, and changing political coalitions in Congress. Materials include government documents, diaries, letters, photographs, maps, newspapers, rare secondary sources, historical artifacts, and images of historic sites. The website is divided into five sections: Territorial Politics and Government; Border Warfare; Immigration and Early Settlement; Personalities; and National Debate about Kansas. Each is searchable by keyword, author, and county. Topical sections are subdivided into relevant themes and include an introductory essay. Visitors will find essays on territorial politics, the rights of women and African Americans, military organizations, and free state and pro-slavery organizations. "Personalities" lists 32 individuals, including John Calhoun, and the final section presents both anti-slavery and pro-slavery perspectives of the national debate about Kansas. The site also includes a timeline with links and an annotated bibliography.

Lakota Winter Counts

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This anthropological exhibit displays, explains, and interprets the Lakota pictorial histories known as winter counts. Featuring a searchable database of winter count images, a documentary about Lakota history and culture, and video interviews with Lakota people, website visitors can view images from 10 winter counts and examine their symbols in detail by year with curator comments. Visitors are also able to examine the various symbols used by the winter count keepers to represent plants and animals, ceremonies, health, trade goods, places, people, the U.S. government, and the sky. "Who Are the Lakota" offers a historical overview of Lakota history in 10 segments that include the Lakota and the Sioux people, Lakota origins, westward migration, horse-centered culture on the northern Great Plains, important conflicts and treaties, confinement to the Great Sioux Reservation, and subsequent land cessions.

USC Archival Research Center

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These varied collections document the history of Los Angeles and southern California. "Digital Archives" offer more than 126,000 photographs, maps, manuscripts, texts, and sound recordings in addition to exhibits. Nearly 1,200 images of artifacts from early Chinese American settlements in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara are available, as is the entire run of El Clamor Publico, the city's main Spanish-language newspaper from the 1850s. Photographs document Japanese American relocation during World War II and photographs, documents, and oral history audio files record Korean-American history. The archive also includes Works Projects Administration Land Use survey maps and Auto Club materials. A related exhibit, "Los Angeles: Past, Present, and Future", offers collections on additional topics, including discovery and settlement, California missions, electric power, "murders, crimes, and scandals," city neighborhoods, cemeteries, Disneyland, African American gangs, and the Red Car lines.

Selling the Computer Revolution: Marketing Brochures in the Collection

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Presenting more than 250 computer marketing brochures from 1948 to 1988, this collection represents materials from more than 90 companies.

Visitors can explore the entire collection or browse by company. Categories include: calculators, mainframes, minicomputers, personal computers, supercomputers; applications for which the computer was intended; and decade.

Of particular interest are six early marketing brochures from Apple Computer, a brochure for the Commodore 64 computer, and two mid-1950s IBM brochures for "electronic data processing machines." Each group of brochures is accompanied by a brief introduction with historical information about the company, category, type of application, or decade. The full contents of each brochure are available for viewing or download in .pdf format and each brochure is accompanied by descriptive data.