165 items
At the end of the first millennium, most people in the Eastern Hemisphere had a firm sense of how the world was arranged, who occupied it, and how they had come to be where they were. Various sacred texts as well as long-standing folk...
National Expansion and Reform, 1815–1860
A good way to understand the men and women who created America’s reform tradition and carried it across the Mississippi in the years before the Civil War is to look at the political heritage their parents and grandparents left to them...
The First Age of Reform
"In the history of the world," Ralph Waldo Emerson declared in 1841, "the doctrine of Reform had never such scope as at the present hour." [1] Not much a joiner of causes himself, Emerson had in mind a remarkable flowering of reform...
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":...
History Times: The Colonial Era
Crossing the Atlantic Ocean Imagine saying goodbye to family, friends, and familiar places to take a dangerous voyage across thousands of miles of ocean in a small wooden ship. Your destination: a strange and often hostile land. Yet,...
History Times: The Industrial Revolution
A Changing Nation The second half of the nineteenth century can be described as a time of innovation, invention, and rapid growth—a period known as the "Industrial Revolution." Many inventions from this period never caught on or have...
History Times: A Nation of Immigrants
Coming to the Land of Opportunity Throughout American history, millions of people around the world have left their homelands for a chance to start a new life in this country—and they continue to come here to this day. People who come...
The Social and Intellectual Legacy of the American Revolution
"We can see with other eyes; we hear with other ears; and think with other thoughts, than those we formerly used. We are now really another people, and cannot again go back to ignorance and prejudice. The mind once enlightened cannot...
Prohibition and Its Effects
The Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in January 1919 and enacted in January 1920, outlawed the "manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors." This amendment was the culmination of decades of effort...
September 11, 2001
"9/11" has emerged as shorthand for the four coordinated terrorist attacks on the United States that took place on September 11, 2001. That morning, nineteen terrorists from the Islamist extremist group al Qaeda hijacked four...
Imperial Rivalries
When Christopher Columbus made his plans to sail westward across the Atlantic, he first set off across Europe to find sponsors. His brother Bartholomew went to the court of the English King Henry VII (who turned him down, much to the...
The Gettysburg Address: Identifying Text, Context, and Subtext
Objective This lesson is part of Gilder Lehrman’s series of Common Core State Standards–based teaching resources. These resources were developed to enable students to understand, summarize, and analyze original texts of historical...
Letter from Christopher Columbus on Returning from His First Voyage to the Americas, 1493
Click here to download this five-lesson unit.
“A City upon a Hill” from John Winthrop’s “A Modell of Christian Charity,” 1630
Click here to download this four-lesson unit.
Colonists Divided: A Revolution and a Civil War
Background The Stamp Act, the Quartering Act, the Declaratory Act, the Sugar Act, and the Tea Act were just a few of the many policies Great Britain enacted in the British North American colonies in the eighteenth century. To many...
Securing the Right to Vote: The Selma-to-Montgomery Story
Essential Question What conditions created the need for a protest march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965, and what did that march achieve? Background Throughout American history, African Americans have struggled to gain...
Facing the New Millennium
In 1941, on the eve of Pearl Harbor, Time magazine publisher Henry Luce predicted that the twentieth century would become known as the "American Century." By many measures he was correct. During the next sixty years, the United States...
Late 19th- and Early 20th-Century Immigration and Migration: Pairing Text and Visual Materials
Click to download this five-lesson unit.
George Washington’s Rules of Civility
Introduction When George Washington was a teenager, he wanted to make a good impression on his elders. Good manners were important to him. He made sure that he knew how by copying Rules of Civility from a French rulebook in his own...
Surveying Land
Introduction During the time of the American Revolution, much of the land in the colonies was not mapped. In his early years, George Washington was a surveyor and measured land to figure out the location of property. Materials Rope or...
Making a Lens
Introduction Benjamin Franklin was a scientist and an inventor. As he got older, he noticed he needed glasses for reading and seeing things far away. Franklin solved this problem by inventing bifocals, which were glasses made with two...
Back in 1734
Introduction Present the following scenario to your students. You can either read it to them or enlist students to act it out. The scenario is about two children who lived in 1734 and were the age of your students. "Anna Elizabeth and...
Our New Country Needs New Money: Colonial Money Simulation
There certainly can’t be a greater Grievance to a Traveler, from one Colony to another than the different values their Paper Money bears. —an English visitor, ca.1742 Introduction Students use different kinds of paper money to...
Revolutionary in America
The image is so clear in our minds, seen first in elementary school and reinforced countless times since: a few dozen gentlemen with powdered wigs and period suits (coats, waistcoats, and knee-length breeches) gathered in a large...
Declarations of Independence: Women's Rights and the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions
Background Under the leadership of Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a convention for the rights of women was held in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848. It was attended by between 200 and 300 people, both women and men. Its...
Who Was John Brown?
"Did John Brown fail? John Brown began the war that ended American slavery and made this a free Republic." —Frederick Douglass Background The late 1840s and the 1850s were a turbulent and complex time in American history as the...
Children’s Attitudes about Slavery and Women’s Abolitionism as Seen through Anti-slavery Fairs
Overview Over two days, students will examine the attitudes that children from northern states had about slavery during the 1830s to 1860s and how abolitionists tried to change their way of thinking. They will also explore how woman...
Every Four Years: Qualifications for the Office of President and Electing the President
Overview Students will examine aspects of Article II of the Constitution for specific information related to the requirements for and method of electing the president. Materials (attached) KWL Chart (PDF) The United States...
Every Four Years: Introducing Presidential Elections
Lesson Overview The students will examine, explain, and evaluate Article II, Section 1 of the US Constitution for specific information concerning the eligibility requirements and election process for the office of President of the...
A Look at Slavery through Posters and Broadsides
Overview Students will examine posters and broadsides from the 1800s to examine attitudes about slavery in the United States at that time. Materials Overhead or copies for all students of the poster packet (PDF) Poster Inquiry Sheet...
Jewish Immigration, Popular Culture, and the Birth of the Comic Book
Background The study of immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries goes beyond the study of the ethnic make-up of the immigrants of this era, the challenges and hardships they encountered in the United States,...
Immigration in the Gilded Age: Using Photographs as Primary Sources
Aim / Essential Question How successful were photographs in demonstrating the conditions of immigrants during the Gilded Age? Background The latter portion of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century witnessed the start...
Norwegian Immigration in the Nineteenth Century
Background For most Norwegians in the nineteenth century, America remained a remote and exotic place until the first immigrants began to write home. These "American letters," which traveled from the immigrants back to former neighbors...
Framing Soo Hoo Lem Kong
Overview Students will examine immigration documents and interviews in order to describe the experience of Chinese immigrants entering California in the 1900s. Students will use depth and complexity icons as tools to develop higher...
The First Thanksgiving Celebration
Learning Objectives Students will use literature to gain insight into the lives of the Wampanoag people and their participation in the first Thanksgiving celebration. Students will present information on different aspects of the...
Abraham Lincoln on Slavery and Race
Background Slavery played a prominent role in America’s political, social, and economic history in the antebellum era. The "peculiar institution" was at the forefront of discussions ranging from the future of the nation’s economy to...
What Events Led to Lincoln’s Assassination?
Overview Fourth-grade students often associate Abraham Lincoln with three things: He wore a tall hat, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, and he was assassinated. The murder of Lincoln, whom most historians consider one of the...
Examining Women’s Roles through Primary Sources and Literature
Essential Question: How were the ever-changing roles of women in American society chronicled? Background Joseph Heller writes in his book The Feminization of Quest-Romance that "American Literature equates the very essence of what it...
Nonviolent Direct Action at Southern Lunch Counters
Background On February 1, 1960, four black students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro, North Carolina, walked into a Woolworth’s store and quietly sat down at the lunch counter. This seemingly...
Singing for Freedom
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...
June 25, 1876: An Interpretation of an Historical Event
Essential Question How should events from the Indian Wars be commemorated by the federal government? Background The Battle of Little Bighorn was one in a series of conflicts that occurred during the American attempt to remove native...
Native American Policy
Background: Two conflicting policies have governed this country’s treatment of Native Americans—assimilation and removal. As the United States expanded, it became necessary to issue formal policy statements and make treaties with...
The Pony Express: The Fastest Delivery of a Message across America
Background The inauguration of a new service, the Pony Express, on April 3, 1860, promised the fastest communication ever from the Missouri River to California. How long did a Pony Express message take to go from its starting point in...
Dashes and Dots: A Product of the Nineteenth Century
Overview Students will examine primary sources including letters, a patent, photos, and diagrams to identify and describe the technological invention and development of the telegraph that evolved during the nineteenth century....
The Great Chicago Fire of 1871: A Story of Human Tragedy and Triumph
Background Ask anyone what the greatest disaster in Chicago was and probably no one will say, "The Great Iroquois Theatre Fire of December 30, 1903." Six hundred three souls perished in that fire. They probably won’t say, "The sinking...
Philadelphia and the Constitutional Convention "Heat Up"
Background Little did William Penn know that his plans for a "Great Towne," set up in rectangular form between the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers, would become the site of some of the most important meetings in our nation’s founding,...
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