Lesson Plan The Decision to Escalate in Vietnam 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 Click here to download this three-lesson unit.
Spotlight on: Primary Source The end of the Vietnam War: conscience, resistance, and reconciliation, 1973 Vietnam was "America’s longest war." While US operations tended to be very limited between 1945 and 1964, escalation in the early months of 1965 eventually led to the deployment of more than 2.5 million military personnel to South...
Spotlight on: Primary Source The Cold War in the classroom, 1952 Government and Civics, World History As the Cold War pervaded domestic as well as international spheres, Duck and Cover , an educational film produced by the Federal Civil Defense Administration and Archer Productions Inc., showed children how to react in case of a...
Spotlight on: Primary Source Robert F. Kennedy on Vietnam, 1967 Government and Civics, World History On May 15, 1967, CBS broadcast Town Meeting of the World , a program in which Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York and Governor Ronald Reagan of California answered questions posed by the moderator, Charles Collingwood; students from...
Lesson Plan The Soldier's Experience: Letters from Four American Wars 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 Click to download this four-lesson unit.
Spotlight on: Primary Source Address to the Nation Announcing Operation Desert Storm, 1991 Government and Civics, World History On January 16, 1991, President George H. W. Bush announced the beginning of the military campaign to end an Iraqi occupation of neighboring Kuwait. The address was broadcast live on radio and television. It was the culmination of five...
Spotlight on: Primary Source John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address, 1961 Economics, Geography, Government and Civics, Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, World History On January 20, 1961, John F. Kennedy was sworn in as the thirty-fifth President of the United States. His short, fourteen-minute inaugural address is best remembered for a single line: "My fellow Americans: ask not what your country...
Spotlight on: Primary Source Physicists predict a nuclear arms race, 1945 Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, World History 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+ 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...
Spotlight on: Primary Source Discovering a mass grave in Iraq, 2003 Mark Rickert wrote this email while serving as a journalist with the 372nd Mobile Public Affairs Detachment in Iraq. On this day, he and his group were investigating rumors of a mass grave. The letter is written to his grandfather,...
Spotlight on: Primary Source Christmas in Kuwait, 1990 Geography, World History Cpl. Brett G. Coughlin arrived with Delta Company in Saudi Arabia at the port of Al Jubail on September 13, 1990. For the next three months the company trained in the northern desert of Saudi Arabia. By Christmas, its headquarters...
Lesson Plan Singing for Freedom Literature 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Background In the early 1960s, Mississippi was the poorest state in the nation, with most non-white families living well below the poverty line. Although African Americans made up nearly half of the state's population, few were...
Lesson Plan Going to School, Then and Now: Education in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird Literature 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Overview The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee are both written in the voices of children. While each book gives and unabashed commentary of the social mores of the time and place...
Lesson Plan Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" Speech Government and Civics 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 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,...
Lesson Plan President Dwight Eisenhower’s Farewell Address to the Nation, 1961 Government and Civics 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+ Click here to download this four-lesson unit.