17 items
Objective To discover the impact the Cold War had on multiple aspects of life, both in the United States and around the world, by exploring changes over time. Overview of Jigsaw Process Expert Groups will create four timelines...
Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" Speech
Unit Overview This unit is part of the Gilder Lehrman Institute’s Teaching Literacy through History resources, designed to align to the Common Core State Standards. These units were developed to enable students to understand,...
The Cold War: Discussing the Speech of President Kennedy in 1963
Introduction The Cold War is the term for the rivalry between the two blocs of contending states that emerged following the Second World War. It was a series of confrontations played out on the world stage between the non-Communist...
The Big Bang! The Birth of Rock and Roll
Overview In the early 1950s, a new form of music exploded onto the scene, exciting a growing teenage audience while startling many others who preferred the music of Bing Crosby and Patti Page. Popularized by disc jockey Alan Freed in...
Harry S. Truman responds to McCarthy, 1950
In February 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy alleged in a speech in West Virginia that more than 200 staff members at the Department of State were known to be members of the Communist Party. During Harry Truman’s press conference on...
America’s First Ladies on Twentieth-Century Issues
Unit Overview Over the course of three to four lessons the students will analyze five primary source documents. These documents are the abridged transcripts of speeches by five of our country’s first ladies: Eleanor Roosevelt, Betty...
President Dwight Eisenhower’s Farewell Address to the Nation, 1961
Click here to download this four-lesson unit.
Hubert Humphrey’s Speech to the 1948 Democratic National Convention
Unit Introduction As the United States moved into the post-WWII world, it faced struggles over diversity and race relations. Soldiers returning from Europe recognized the disparities between races in the United States and, by the late...
Physicists predict a nuclear arms race, 1945
This declaration of concern, written after the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, offers insight into the Manhattan Project, an atomic development program led by the United States. The "Preliminary Statement of the...
President Truman’s Farewell Address, 1953
It has none of the catch phrases or warnings of other, more famous presidential inaugural or farewell addresses, no cautions against permanent alliances or military-industrial complexes, no appeals to better angels or declarations...
John Kennedy compares US and Soviet military power, 1953
On October 16, 1953, Democratic Senator John F. Kennedy spoke at an executive meeting of the American Legion at the organization’s national headquarters in Indianapolis, Indiana. Addressing members of the United States’ largest...
The Origins of US Cold War Fears, 1946–1961
Click here to download this two-lesson unit. This unit was created in partnership with World101 from the Council on Foreign Relations .
The Cold War as a Culture War: Visualizing Values and the Role of Pop Culture
Click here to download this two-lesson unit. This unit was created in partnership with World101 from the Council on Foreign Relations .
Anti-Communist Trading Cards, 1951
On June 25, 1950, war broke out on the Korean peninsula when the Soviet-backed Communist forces in North Korea invaded the recently founded democratic republic of South Korea. Following a unanimous UN resolution condemning the...
Latino Immigration to the United States in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
About This Lesson Plan Unit The five lessons in this unit explore Latino and Latina immigration to the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, emphasizing how immigrants understood and experienced this...
Showing results 1 - 17