Lesson Plan Westward Migration: Opportunities and Dangers K, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Click here to download this four-lesson unit.
Lesson Plan War, Immigration Policies, and Dissent: Landmark Moments in Latina/o History 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 Click here to download this three-lesson unit.
Essay "Your Late Lamented Husband": A Letter from Frederick Douglass to Mary Todd Lincoln David W. Blight 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+ On March 4, 1865, Frederick Douglass attended President Abraham Lincoln’s second inauguration. Standing in the crowd, Douglass heard Lincoln declare slavery the "cause" and emancipation the "result" of the Civil War. Over the crisp...
Essay The Roaring Twenties Joshua Zeitz The 1920s heralded a dramatic break between America’s past and future. Before World War I the country remained culturally and psychologically rooted in the nineteenth century, but in the 1920s America seemed to break its wistful...
Essay Populism and Agrarian Discontent Michael Kazin Economics, Government and Civics 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+ Today, the Gilded Age evokes thoughts of “robber baron” industrialists, immigrants toiling long hours in factories for little pay, massive strikes that were often put down by force, and political corruption in both big cities and the...
Essay Exploration Felipe Fernández-Armesto and Benjamin Sacks Geography, Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, World History We often speak of America as "unknown," except to its own inhabitants, in the Middle Ages. But so, in a sense, was Europe, which hardly figured on the maps and in the calculations of the immensely richer, more populous, and...
Essay Postwar Politics and the Cold War Jeremi Suri The late summer of 1945 marked the height of American power. The country that had suffered from dust bowls, economic depression, and a devastating attack on its Pacific naval fleet in the last decade-and-a-half emerged as the dominant...
Essay Immigration and Migration Hasia Diner Economics, Government and Civics 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+ The United States emerged in the last third of the nineteenth century as an industrial powerhouse, producing goods that then circulated around the world. People in distant countries used American-made clothes, shoes, textiles,...
Essay The Progressive Era to the New Era, 1900-1929 Daniel T. Rodgers Government and Civics K, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+ We should not accept social life as it has "trickled down to us," the young journalist Walter Lippmann wrote soon after the twentieth century began. "We have to deal with it deliberately, devise its social organization, . . . educate...
Essay The Sixties Harvard Sitkoff Forty years after it ended, the 1960s remains the most consequential and controversial decade of the twentieth century. It would dawn bright with hope and idealism, see the liberal state attain its mightiest reforms and reach, and end...