113 Items

50
Relevance
Classroom Resources

Witnessing History: The Pardon of Homer Plessy: Recommended Resources

In conjunction with our panel, Witnessing History: The Pardon of Homer Plessy (presented in partnership with the Office of the Governor of Louisiana), the Gilder Lehrman Institute has compiled this list of resources on the Plessy v. Ferguson case, the history of discrimination, and the fight for civil rights in the United States. You can watch a recording of this program (originally held on March 16, 2022) below: For some of these links, you may need to be a subscriber on our site. To log in or start the subscription process, please click here . If you are a K–12 educator who...
Classroom Resources

Abraham Lincoln Highlights

The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, founded in 1994 promotes the knowledge and understanding of American history through educational programs and resources. Drawing on the 80,000 documents in the Gilder Lehrman Collection and an extensive network of eminent historians, the Institute provides teachers, students, and the general public with direct access to unique primary source materials. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and the HISTORY® Channel invite you to watch Abraham Lincoln , then explore Lincoln’s world through primary sources. The items...
Classroom Resources

Guided Readings: Sectional Conflict

Economics, Government and Civics

9, 10, 11, 12

Reading 1 I do not . . . hesitate to avow before this House and the country, and in the presence of the living God, that if by your legislation you seek to drive us from the territories of California and New Mexico, purchased by the common blood and treasure of the whole people, and to abolish slavery in this District, thereby attempting to fix a national degradation upon half the States of this Confederacy, I am for disunion . —Representative Robert Toombs of Georgia, December 13, 1849, Congressional Globe , 31st Cong., 1st Sess. 28 (1849) Reading 2 With the ever watchful eye...
Classroom Resources

Study Aid: Reconstruction Amendments

Government and Civics

9, 10, 11, 12

Thirteenth Amendment Prohibited slavery in the United States Fourteenth Amendment Defined national citizenship Reduced state representation in Congress proportional to number of disfranchised voters Denied former Confederates the right to hold public office Fifteenth Amendment Prohibited denial of vote on grounds of race, color, or previous servitude White Democrats Regain Control of Southern Legislatures 1869 Virginia 1870 North Carolina 1871 Georgia 1873 Texas 1874 Alabama Arkansas 1875 Mississippi 1877 Florida Louisiana South Carolina
Classroom Resources

Historical Context: Mexican Americans and the Great Depression

Economics

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

In February 1930 in San Antonio, Texas, 5000 Mexicans and Mexican Americans gathered at the city’s railroad station to depart the United States for settlement in Mexico. In August, a special train carried another 2000 to central Mexico. Most Americans are familiar with the forced relocation in 1942 of 112,000 Japanese Americans from the West Coast to internment camps. Far fewer are aware that during the Great Depression, the Federal Bureau of Immigration (after 1933, the Immigration and Naturalization Service) and local authorities rounded up Mexican immigrants and naturalized...
Classroom Resources

Guided Readings: Slavery and Abolition

World History

5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

Sid Lapidus Collection: Liberty and the American Revolution Introduction The campaign to end slavery was a prolonged struggle. In England and in America in the eighteenth century, some authors such as Daniel Defoe and Samuel Johnson in England depicted slavery as ugly and immoral. In the 1750s, Quaker groups in the colonies began taking public positions against slavery, yet they remained a minority as few colonists spoke out against slavery on religious grounds. In 1776 most White Americans either accepted slavery or actually enslaved people, while others participated in the...
Classroom Resources

Statistics: Agriculture in America

Economics, Geography, Government and Civics

9, 10, 11, 12

Farm Production Year Number of Farms* Bales of Cotton* Bushels of Corn* Bushels of Wheat* Price Index 1860=100 1860 2 3.8 839 173 100 1870 2.7 4.4 760 254 140 1880 4 6.6 1,706 502 100 1890 4.6 8.7 2,125 449 90 1900 5.7 10.1 2,662 599 90 Source: US Bureau of the Census. Twelfth Decennial Census of the United States, 1900 . Volume V, Agriculture, Part 1 (Washington DC: United States Census Office, 1902), plate 12 * In millions Questions for Discussion What happened to farm production after the Civil War? What happened to farm prices? Growth of Farm Tenancy: Percentage of Farms...
Classroom Resources

Guided Readings: Imperialism and the Spanish-American War

Economics, Government and Civics, Religion and Philosophy

9, 10, 11, 12

Reading 1 Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. . . . The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. . . . The frontier promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people. . . . The legislation which most developed the powers of the national government, and played the largest part in its activity, was conditioned on the frontier. . . . The pioneer needed the goods of the coast, and so the grand series of internal improvement and railroad legislation began,...
Classroom Resources

Guided Readings: Secession and the Civil War

Economics, Government and Civics

9, 10, 11, 12

Reading 1 The leaders and oracles of the most powerful party in the United States have denounced us as tyrants and unprincipled heathens through the whole civilized world. They have preached it from their pulpits. They have declared it in the halls of Congress and in their newspapers. In their school-houses they have taught their children (who are to rule this Government in the next generation) to look upon the slaveholder as the especial disciple of the devil himself. . . . They have established Abolition Societies among them for the purpose of raising funds—if other states...
Classroom Resources

Cultural Encounters: Teaching Exploration and Encounter to Students

Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, World History

5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

Some 40,000 years from now, give or take a few millennia, someone, somewhere in the universe may find and listen to the Golden Record, NASA’s attempt to describe Earth and its peoples to anyone out there who might be interested. There are actually two copies of the Golden Record, each on its own spacecraft, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 , which were launched out into the cosmos in 1977, one year after the Bicentennial of the United States and almost five centuries after the first sustained encounters between the peoples of the Americas and the peoples of Europe. It is interesting...
Classroom Resources

Questions for Discussion: The Roots of the Revolution

Economics, Government and Civics, World History

9, 10, 11, 12

Was colonial America a democratic society? Were the colonists justified in resisting British policies after the French and Indian War (1754–1763)? Were the origins of the American Revolution primarily economic or ideological? Were the colonists’ responses to the Stamp Act (1765) justified? How did the Stamp Act Congress pave the road for American independence? Is violence a sound strategy to bring about significant political and social change? (Case studies to help examine this question could include: the Stamp Act riots [1765], the Boston Massacre [1770], the Boston Tea Party ...
Classroom Resources

Historical Context: American Slavery in Comparative Perspective

Economics, World History

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

Of the 10 to 16 million Africans who survived the voyage to the New World, over one-third landed in Brazil and between 60 and 70 percent ended up in Brazil or the sugar colonies of the Caribbean. Only 6 percent arrived in what is now the United States. Yet by 1860, approximately two thirds of all New World slaves lived in the American South. For a long time it was widely assumed that southern slavery was harsher and crueler than slavery in Latin America, where the Catholic church insisted that slaves had a right to marry, to seek relief from a cruel master, and to purchase...
Classroom Resources

Historical Context: Birth of a Nation

Art, Geography, Government and Civics, Literature

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

In 1915, fifty years after the end of the Civil War, D.W. Griffith released his epic film Birth of a Nation . The greatest blockbuster of the silent era, Birth of a Nation was seen by an estimated 200 million Americans by 1946. Based on a novel by a Baptist preacher named Thomas Dixon, the film painted Reconstruction, the period following the Civil War, as a time when vengeful former enslaved people, opportunistic White scalawags, and corrupt Yankee carpetbaggers plundered and oppressed the former Confederacy until respectable White southerners rose up and restored order. A ...
Classroom Resources

Historical Context: Black Soldiers in the Civil War

Government and Civics

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

By early 1863, voluntary enlistments in the Union army had fallen so sharply that the federal government instituted an unpopular military draft and decided to enroll black, as well as white, troops. Indeed, it seems likely that it was the availability of large numbers of African American soldiers that allowed President Lincoln to resist demands for a negotiated peace that might have including the retention of slavery in the United States. Altogether, 186,000 black soldiers served in the Union Army and another 29,000 served in the Navy, accounting for nearly 10 percent of all...
Classroom Resources

Historical Context: Go West ... and Grow Up with the Country

Geography

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

In 1854 Horace Greeley, a New York newspaper editor, gave Josiah B. Grinnell a famous piece of advice. "Go West, young man, and grow up with the country," said Greeley. Grinnell took Greeley's advice, moved west, and later founded Grinnell, Iowa. Before 1830 Iowa was Indian land, occupied by the Sauk, Fox, Missouri, Pottowatomi, and other Indian tribes. The defeat of the Sauk and Fox Indians in the Black Hawk War in 1832 opened the first strip of Iowa to settlement. By 1840 Iowa's population of settlers had risen to 40,000. Because no government land office was established in...
Classroom Resources

Immigration Policy in World War II

World History

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

The day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt suspended naturalization proceedings for Italian, German, and Japanese immigrants, required them to register, restricted their mobility, and prohibited them from owning items that might be used for sabotage, such as cameras and shortwave radios. The curfews on Italian immigrants were lifted in October 1942, on Columbus Day. Approximately 600,000 Italian aliens lived in the United States in 1940. About 1,600 Italian citizens were interned, and about 10,000 Italian-Americans were forced to move from their houses in...
Classroom Resources

Historical Context: Life on the Trail

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

Each spring, pioneers gathered at Independence and St. Joseph, Missouri, and Council Bluffs, Iowa, to begin a 2,000 mile journey westward. For many families, the great spur for emigration was economic: the financial depression of the late 1830s, accompanied by floods and epidemics in the Mississippi Valley. Said one woman: "We had nothing to lose, and we might gain a fortune." Between 1841 and 1867, more than 350,000 trekked along the overland trails. Most pioneers traveled in family units. At first, pioneers tried to maintain the rigid sexual division of labor that...
Classroom Resources

Historical Context: Movies and Migration

Art

6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12

Many of our most memorable images of the past come from movies. Films set in the past provide a vivid record of history: of the "look," the clothing, the atmosphere, and the mood of past eras. Nevertheless, movies remain a controversial source of historical evidence. Because moviemakers are not held to the same standards as historians, historical films often contain inaccuracies and anachronisms. Further, films frequently blur the line between fact and fiction and avoid complex ideas that cannot be presented visually. Of course, no one goes to a movie expecting a history lesson...
Classroom Resources

Historical Context: Post-World War I Labor Tensions

Economics

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

The years following the end of World War I were a period of deep social tensions, aggrevated by high wartime inflation. Food prices more than doubled between 1915 and 1920; clothing costs more than tripled. A steel strike that began in Chicago in 1919 became much more than a simple dispute between labor and management. The Steel Strike of 1919 became the focal point for profound social anxieties, especially fears of Bolshevism. Organized labor had grown in strength during the course of the war. Many unions won recognition and the 12-hour workday was abolished. An 8-hour days...
Classroom Resources

Historical Context: Slavery in a Capitalist World

Economics, World History

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

Why were the South's political leaders so worried about whether slavery would be permitted in the West when geography and climate made it unlikely that slavery would ever prosper in the area? The answer lies in the South's growing awareness of its minority status in the Union, of the elimination of slavery in many other areas of the Western Hemisphere, and of the decline of slavery in the upper South. During the first half of the nineteenth century, slave labor was becoming an exception in the world. During the early years of the 19th century, Spain's newly independent New...
Classroom Resources

Historical Context: The Breakdown of the Party System

Government and Civics

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

As late as 1850, the two-party system seemed healthy. Democrats and Whigs drew strength in all parts of the country. Then, in the early 1850s, the two-party system began to disintegrate in response to massive foreign immigration. By 1856 the Whig party had collapsed and been replaced by a new sectional party, the Republicans. Between 1846 and 1855, more than three million foreigners arrived in America. In cities such as Chicago, Milwaukee, New York, and St. Louis immigrants actually outnumbered native-born citizens. Opponents of immigration capitalized on working-class fear of...
Classroom Resources

Historical Context: The Confederacy Begins to Collapse

Economics, Government and Civics

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

By early 1863, the Civil War had begun to cause severe hardship on the southern home front. Not only was most of the fighting taking place in the South, but also as the Union blockade grew more effective and the South's railroad system deteriorated, shortages grew increasingly common. In Richmond, food riots erupted in April 1863. A war department clerk wrote: "I have lost twenty pounds, and my wife and children are emaciated. "The Confederacy also suffered rampant inflation. Fearful of undermining support for the war effort, Confederate leaders refused to raise taxes to...
Classroom Resources

Historical Context: The Constitution and Slavery

Government and Civics

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

On the 200th anniversary of the ratification of the US Constitution, Thurgood Marshall, the first African American to sit on the Supreme Court, said that the Constitution was "defective from the start." He pointed out that the framers had left out a majority of Americans when they wrote the phrase, "We the People." While some members of the Constitutional Convention voiced "eloquent objections" to slavery, Marshall said they "consented to a document which laid a foundation for the tragic events which were to follow." The word "slave" does not appear in the Constitution. The...
Classroom Resources

Historical Context: The Economics of Slavery

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

Like other slave societies, the South did not produce urban centers on a scale equal with those in the North. Virginia's largest city, Richmond, had a population of just 15,274 in 1850. That same year, Wilmington, North Carolina's largest city, had just 7,264 inhabitants. Southern cities were small because they failed to develop diversified economies. Unlike the cities of the North, southern cities rarely became centers of commerce, finance, or processing and manufacturing and Southern ports rarely engaged in international trade. By northern standards, the South's...
Classroom Resources

Historical Context: The First National Census

Economics, Geography, Government and Civics

6, 7, 8

Early in August 1790, David Howe, an assistant federal marshal, began the difficult task of counting all the people who lived in Hancock County, Maine. One of 650 federal census takers, charged with making "a...perfect enumeration...of all persons" in the United States, he began by writing down his own name followed by his wife's and child's. He then listed the names of all the other people who lived in his hometown of Penobscot and proceeded to criss-cross the Maine coast, recording the names of 9,549 residents. In March 1791, he submitted his findings: 2,436 free white males,...
Classroom Resources

Historical Context: The Human Meaning of Migration

World History

13+

For more than two centuries novelists and autobiographers have explored the human meaning of migration. In hundreds of stories, novels, and autobiographies, these writers have examined what it means to be uprooted, voluntarily or involuntarily, from one's homeland as well as the problems of adjusting to an entirely new environment. The movement from one society to another is often accompanied by intense feelings of psychological dislocation. Migrants often experience a sense of profound loss at leaving their homeland as well as the pangs of adapting to a new society. Many...
Classroom Resources

Study Aid: The Language of Cultural Mixture and Persistence

World History

9, 10, 11, 12

The study of migration encourages us to think about the process of cultural adjustment and adaptation that takes place after migrants move from one environment to another. In the early twentieth century, Americans commonly thought of migration in terms of a "melting pot," in which immigrants shed their native culture and assimilated into the dominant culture. Today, we are more likely to speak of the persistence and blending of cultural values and practices. Assimilation: Absorption into the cultural tradition of another group by adapting and adjusting cultural practices...
Classroom Resources

Historical Context: The Survival of the US Constitution

Government and Civics

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

The United States has the oldest written national framework of government in the world. At the end of the twentieth century, there were about 159 other national constitutions in the world, and 101 had been adopted since 1970. While the United States has been governed by a single framework of government for over two centuries, France, in contrast, has had 10 separate and distinct constitutional orders (including five republics, two empires, a monarchy, and two dictatorships). The country of El Salvador has had 36 constitutions since 1824. Nearly all of the national constitutions...
Classroom Resources

Historical Context: The Post-World War I Red Scare

Economics, Government and Civics

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

On May 1, 1919—May Day—postal officials discovered twenty bombs in the mail sent to prominent capitalists, including John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan Jr., as well as government officials like Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. A month later, bombs exploded in eight American cities. On September 16, 1920, a bomb left in a parked horse-drawn wagon exploded near Wall Street in Manhattan’s financial district, killing thirty people and injuring hundreds. The suspicion was that the bomb was the work of radicals who had immigrated from Europe. Authorities came up with a...
Classroom Resources

Historical Context: Why Do People Migrate?

Economics, World History

13+

In trying to understand why people migrate, some scholars emphasize individual decision-making, while others stress broader structural forces. Many early scholars of migration emphasized the importance of "push" and "pull" factors. According to this viewpoint, people decide to leave their homeland when conditions there are no longer satisfactory and when conditions in another area are more attractive. In recent years, many scholars have argued that a thorough understanding of the decision to migrate involves looking at various levels of explanation: the individual, the familial...
Classroom Resources

Historical Context: The Global Effect of World War I

World History

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

A recent list of the hundred most important news stories of the twentieth century ranked the onset of World War I eighth. This is a great error. Just about everything that happened in the remainder of the century was in one way or another a result of World War I, including the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, World War II, the Holocaust, and the development of the atomic bomb. The Great Depression, the Cold War, and the collapse of European colonialism can also be traced, at least indirectly, to the First World War. World War I killed more people--more than 9 million soldiers,...
Classroom Resources

Teaching the Revolution

Economics, Geography, Government and Civics, World History

6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

For most Americans, young and old, the history of the American Revolution can be summed up something like this: In 1776, all the colonists rose up in unison to rebel against a tyrannical king and the horrible burden of unfair taxes the British had imposed upon them for over a hundred years. During the long war that followed, citizen soldiers shivered in the cold, shared the hardships together, admired George Washington, and won the war singlehandedly against the most powerful army in the world. Then they created a democracy and everyone lived happily ever after. Except for the...
Classroom Resources

Historical Context: American Slavery and Abolition through Hollywood

5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12

Throughout the twentieth century, many influential Hollywood films, such as Birth of a Nation , Gone with the Wind , Glory , and Amistad , have helped shape the way Americans have thought about slavery and its legacy. Birth of a Nation (1915) Birth of a Nation was the most popular film of the silent era. Its innovative techniques made it the most important silent film ever produced. But the film also provided historical justification for segregation and disfranchisement. The message embedded in the film was that Reconstruction was an unmitigated disaster, that African Americans...
Classroom Resources

Historical Context: Was Slavery the Engine of American Economic Growth?

Economics

9, 10, 11, 12

Few works of history have exerted as powerful an influence as a book published in 1944 called Capitalism and Slavery . Its author, Eric Williams, later the prime minister of Trinidad and Tabago, charged that black slavery was the engine that propelled Europe's rise to global economic dominance . He maintained that Europeans' conquest and settlement of the New World depended on the enslavement of millions of black slaves, who helped amass the capital that financed the industrial revolution. Europe's economic progress, he insisted, came at the expense of black slaves whose labor...
Classroom Resources

Guided Readings: Jacksonian Democracy

Government and Civics

9, 10, 11, 12

Reading 1: The aristocracy of our country . . . continually contrive to change their party name. It was first Tory, then Federalist, then no party . . . then National Republican, now Whig. . . . But by whatever name they reorganize themselves, the true democracy of the country, the producing classes, ought to be able to distinguish the enemy. Ye may know them by their fruit. Ye may know them by their deportment toward the people. Ye may know them by their disposition to club together, and constitute societies and incorporations for the enjoyment of exclusive privileges and for...
Classroom Resources

Guided Readings: Indian Removal

Geography, Government and Civics

7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

Reading 1 Toward the aborigines of this country no one can indulge a more friendly feeling than myself, or would go further in attempting to reclaim them from their wandering habits and make them a happy, prosperous people. Humanity has often wept over the fate of the aborigines of this country, and philanthropy has been long busily employed in devising means to avert it, but its progress has never for a moment been arrested, and one by one have many powerful tribes disappeared from the earth. To follow to the tomb the last of his race and to tread on the graves of extinct...
Classroom Resources

Guided Readings: Political Battles of the Jacksonian Era: The Bank War

Government and Civics

9, 10, 11, 12

Reading 1: It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth cannot be produced by human institutions. In the full enjoyment of the gifts of Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy, and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive...
Classroom Resources

Guided Readings: Political Battles of the Jacksonian Era: Nullification

Economics, Government and Civics

9, 10, 11, 12

Reading 1: And, sir, let it be remembered that a revenue system, grossly and palpably unequal in itself--a system which, under the most favorable modification, would levy the entire amount of the federal taxes from one-fifth part of the productions of the Union, while the other four-fifths are entirely exempted...that this is the substratum upon which has been reared this monstrous and iniquitous superstructure--the protecting system....Let me, then, beseech the advocates of that system...relieve a high-minded and patriotic people from an unconstitutional and oppressive burden,...
Classroom Resources

Guided Readings: Origins of the Cold War: The Containment Policy

Economics, Government and Civics

9, 10, 11, 12

Reading 1 Soviet power...bears within itself the seeds of its own decay, and the sprouting of these seeds is well advanced...[If] anything were ever to disrupt the unity and efficacy of the Party as a political instrument, Soviet Russia might be changed overnight from one of the strongest to one of the weakest and most pitiable of national societies....This would...warrant the United States entering with reasonable confidence upon a policy of firm containment, designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counter-force at every point where they show signs of encroaching...
Classroom Resources

Guided Readings: Origins of the Cold War and Soviet-American Confrontation

Economics, Government and Civics, World History

9, 10, 11, 12

Reading 1 From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow. The safety of the world, ladies and gentlemen,...
Classroom Resources

Guided Readings: The Korean War

Economics, Government and Civics, World History

9, 10, 11, 12

Reading 1 In Korea the Government forces, which were armed to prevent border raids and to preserve internal security, were attacked by invading forces from North Korea. . . . The attack upon Korea makes it plain beyond all doubt that communism has passed beyond the use of subversion to conquer independent nations and will now use armed invasion and war. President Harry Truman Reading 2 [While flying back to Washington after receiving news that North Korea had attacked South Korea, Truman pondered the Communist action in Korea. He later wrote in his memoirs]: This was not the...
Classroom Resources

Guided Readings: Anti-Communism at Home

Economics, Government and Civics, World History

9, 10, 11, 12

Reading 1 Sec. 2: (a) It shall be unlawful for any person— (1) to knowingly or willfully advocate, abet, advise, or teach the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying any government in the United States by force or violence, or by the assassination of any officer of such government; (2) with the intent to cause the overthrow or destruction of any government in the United States, to print, publish, edit, issue, circulate, sell, distribute, or publicly display any written or printed matter advocating, advising, or teaching the duty, necessity,...
Classroom Resources

Guided Readings: Roots of Reform: Religion and Social Reform

Religion and Philosophy

9, 10, 11, 12

From 1801 for years a blessed revival of religion spread through almost the entire inhabited parts of the West. . . . The Presbyterians and Methodists in a great measure united in this work, met together, prayed together, and preached together. . . . They would erect their camps with logs or frame them, and cover them with clapboards or shingles. They would also erect a shed, sufficiently large to protect five thousand people from wind and rain, and cover it with boards or shingles; build a large stand, seat the shed, and here they would collect together from forty to fifty...
Classroom Resources

Guided Readings: Antebellum Social Reform

Government and Civics

9, 10, 11, 12

Reading 1: “The elementary schools throughout the state are irresponsible institutions, established by individuals, from mere motives of private speculation or gain, who are sometimes destitute of character, and frequently, of the requisite attainments and abilities. From the circumstance of the schools being the absolute property of individuals, no supervision or effectual control can be exercised over them; hence, ignorance, inattention, and even immorality prevail to a lamentable extent among their teachers.” “Report of the Joint Committees of the City and County of...
Classroom Resources

Guided Readings: Religion and Social Reform: Abolitionism

9, 10, 11, 12

Reading 1 Assenting to the “self-evident truth” maintained in the American Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights” . . . I shall strenuously contend for the immediate enfranchisement of our slave population. . . . I am aware, that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. . . . Tell a man whose house is on fire, to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of...
Classroom Resources

Guided Readings: Urban Political Machines

Economics, Government and Civics

9, 10, 11, 12

Reading 1 An army led by a council seldom conquers: It must have a commander-in-chief who settles disputes, decides in emergencies, inspires fear or attachment. The head of the Ring is such a commander. He dispenses places, rewards the loyal, punishes the mutinous, concocts schemes, negotiates treaties. He generally avoids publicity, preferring the substance to the pomp of power, and is all the more dangerous because he sits, like a spider, hidden in the midst of his web. He is a Boss. —Lord James Bryce Reading 2 Have you ever thought what would become of the country if the...

Showing results 1 - 50