239 items
Unit Objective This unit is part of Gilder Lehrman’s series of Common Core State Standards–based units. These units were developed to enable students to understand, summarize, and analyze original texts of historical significance....
The Transcontinental Railroad in Images and Poetry
Unit Objectives Students will analyze a variety of primary sources related to the completion of the transcontinental railroad. investigate celebratory images and a poem to discover some of the key outcomes that arose from the ability...
Railroads: The "Engine" to Promote National Unity and Economic Growth
Objectives Students will examine, explain, and evaluate a variety of literary and visual primary sources that describe and depict the development and impact of railroads on sectional relationships, national unity, and economic growth...
All Aboard: Making Connections with the Transcontinental Railroad
LESSON 1 Objectives Students will Read and understand primary source writings from two key documents that encouraged settlers to go west and that established congressional support of what would eventually become the transcontinental...
The Transcontinental Railroad: Interpreting Images
Objectives Students will be able to apply the distinction between inferring (inference) and implying (implication). analyze primary source illustrations, including paintings, political cartoons, and promotional posters. Essential...
The Civil Rights Movement: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X
Click to download this three-lesson unit.
Understanding President Washington through His First Inaugural and Farewell Addresses
Lesson Overview In this lesson, students will read and analyze excerpts from two of George Washington’s most important addresses. The first is the speech he gave to Congress on the day of his first inauguration in 1789; the second is...
Opposing Viewpoints on the Ratification of the US Constitution
Lesson Overview Students will develop a rich understanding of the arguments in favor of and in opposition to the ratification of the US Constitution. They will examine and analyze key excerpts from "Federalist No. 51," George Mason’s...
How Hamilton Solved the Economic Problems Facing the United States
Lesson Overview In this lesson students will develop an understanding of the economic challenges facing the newly independent United States. Those challenges included the lack of a national currency, the national government’s...
Hamilton v. Burr: The Story behind the Duel
Lesson Overview Students will develop an understanding of the tensions in the relationship between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr prior to their famous duel in 1804. They will read and analyze key excerpts from primary source...
Pioneering New Methods to Expand Voting, 1865–1920
Paragraphs
> Access this essay as a PDF , including key vocabulary terms and discussion questions, or read the text of the essay below. A new chapter in voting rights began when the Civil War ended in 1865....
The Battle to Expand Access to the Ballot from 1920 to 2000
Paragraphs
> Access this essay as a PDF , including key vocabulary terms and discussion questions, or read the text of the essay below. State and local governments have primary responsibility for setting the...
"You Drop A Petal in the Water, and It Has a Ripple Effect": The Disability Rights Movement, 1950-1990
Click here to download this four-lesson unit.
War, Immigration Policies, and Dissent: Landmark Moments in Latina/o History
Click here to download this three-lesson unit.
Immigration and Migration
The United States emerged in the last third of the nineteenth century as an industrial powerhouse, producing goods that then circulated around the world. People in distant countries used American-made clothes, shoes, textiles,...
The Declaration of Independence in Global Perspective
No American document has had a greater global impact than the Declaration of Independence. It has been fundamental to American history longer than any other text because it was the first to use the name "the United States of America":...
Douglass and Lincoln: A Convergence
In 1880, Osborn Oldroyd invited Frederick Douglass to write something for a collection of tributes to Abraham Lincoln, published two years later as The Lincoln Memorial: Album-Immortelles . Douglass was uncharacteristically brief, but...
"To give all a chance": Lincoln, Abolition, and Economic Freedom
To read carefully the Lincoln economic parable of the ant (reprinted here) suggests a lost truth about our sixteenth president: during most of Abraham Lincoln’s political career he focused not on anti-slavery but on economic policy....
"In the end you are sure to succeed": Lincoln on Perseverance
If there was one quality Abraham Lincoln believed essential both to individual success and to social advancement, it was industriousness. A child of the impoverished frontier who went on to take proud advantage of what historian Gabor...
Showing results 51 - 75