Lesson Plan "Contagious Liberty": Women in the Revolutionary Age Government and Civics Background The American Revolution, a byproduct of events both on the North American continent and abroad, unleashed a movement that focused on egalitarianism in ways that had never been seen before. Even John Adams commented on these...
Spotlight on: Primary Source The New York Conspiracy of 1741 Economics, Government and Civics In New York City in 1741 an economic decline exacerbated conflict between enslaved men and women engaged in commercial activity and working-class White colonists who felt their jobs were threatened. This tension boiled over in the...
Spotlight on: Primary Source A revival of religious fervor, 1744 Religion and Philosophy The Christian History was a revivalist periodical founded by the Boston clergyman Thomas Prince in 1743 to report on the religious revivals sweeping across Europe and the United States. It was the first Christian periodical published...
Spotlight on: Primary Source Franklin D. Roosevelt’s First Inauguration, 1933 Economics, Government and Civics, Literature When Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave his first inaugural address on March 4, 1933, the nation was reeling from the Great Depression and was dissatisfied with the previous administration’s reluctance to fight it. Roosevelt declared that...
Spotlight on: Primary Source The Supreme Court upholds national prohibition, 1920 Economics, Government and Civics After more than a century of activism, the temperance movement achieved its signal victory with the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment to the US Constitution in 1919. The amendment abolished "the manufacture, sale, or...
Spotlight on: Primary Source Lowell Mill Girls and the factory system, 1840 Economics Lowell, Massachusetts, named in honor of Francis Cabot Lowell, was founded in the early 1820s as a planned town for the manufacture of textiles. It introduced a new system of integrated manufacturing to the United States and...
Lesson Plan Frederick Douglass: What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? 7, 8, 9, 10 Click to download this five-lesson unit :
Spotlight on: Primary Source "Bleeding Kansas" and the Pottawatomie Massacre, 1856 In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act overturned the Missouri Compromise, which stated that slavery would not be allowed north of latitude 36°30′. Instead, settlers would use the principle of popular sovereignty and vote to determine...
Spotlight on: Primary Source Thanksgiving Proclamation, 1863 Government and Civics In 1621, settlers in Massachusetts celebrated what has come to be regarded as the first thanksgiving in the New World. On October 3, 1789, George Washington issued a proclamation creating the first Thanksgiving Day designated by the...