Lesson Plan Pilgrims, the Mayflower Compact, and Thanksgiving Government and Civics, Religion and Philosophy, World History 3, 4, 5 Click here to download this four-lesson unit.
Lesson Plan “A City upon a Hill” from John Winthrop’s “A Modell of Christian Charity,” 1630 Government and Civics 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 Click here to download this four-lesson unit.
Spotlight on: Primary Source A report from Spanish California, 1776 Foreign Languages, Government and Civics Fernando de Rivera y Moncada, military commander of Alta California, wrote this letter from Mission San Gabriel. Rivera y Moncada was instrumental in the development of missions in California and was in a sometimes-contentious...
Spotlight on: Primary Source The New York Conspiracy of 1741 Economics, Government and Civics In New York City in 1741 an economic decline exacerbated conflict between enslaved men and women engaged in commercial activity and working-class White colonists who felt their jobs were threatened. This tension boiled over in the...
Spotlight on: Primary Source John Winthrop describes life in Boston, 1634 Between 1629 and 1640, 20,000 Puritans left England for America to escape religious persecution. They hoped to establish a church free from worldly corruption founded on voluntary agreement among congregants. This covenant theory...
Spotlight on: Primary Source George Washington on attending church, 1762 Economics, Religion and Philosophy, Science, Technology, Engineering and Math 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+ In 1762, Virginia planter and future president George Washington, just thirty years old, had reason for optimism. He had inherited Mount Vernon a decade earlier, and it had prospered under his management; plus he had married Martha...
Spotlight on: Primary Source A revival of religious fervor, 1744 Religion and Philosophy The Christian History was a revivalist periodical founded by the Boston clergyman Thomas Prince in 1743 to report on the religious revivals sweeping across Europe and the United States. It was the first Christian periodical published...
Spotlight on: Primary Source William Penn on the "Well-Governing of My Family," 1751 Religion and Philosophy K, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+ Quaker school teacher Josiah Forster first published this broadside in 1751, thirty years after the death of its author, William Penn, the Quaker founder of Pennsylvania. The treatise, Christian Discipline: Or Certain Good and...
Spotlight on: Primary Source Cotton Mather’s account of the Salem witch trials, 1693 Government and Civics, Literature, Religion and Philosophy Most Americans’ knowledge of the seventeenth century comes from heavily mythologized events: the first Thanksgiving at Plymouth, Pocahontas purportedly saving Captain John Smith from execution in early Virginia, and the Salem witch...
Lesson Plan Religion and Literacy in Colonial New England Religion and Philosophy 5, 6, 7, 8 Historical Background Puritans believed that reading the Bible was important to achieving salvation and, therefore, teaching children to read was a priority in their colonial centers. The New England Primer , first published in Boston...