Informational text piece discussing how new NFL rules are making football safer. Student handout and video. High interest.

The NFL kicked off its new season last night with new safety measures that may lessen the chance of injury for players. Video, teacher page, and student handout included.

In the years immediately following World War I, tens of thousands of southern blacks and returning black soldiers flocked to the nation's Northern cities looking for good jobs and a measure of respect and security. Many white Americans, fearful of competition for scarce jobs and housing, responded by attacking black citizens in a spate of urban race riots. In urban African-American enclaves, the 1920s were marked by a flowering of cultural expressions and a proliferation of black self-help organizations that accompanied the era of the "New Negro." Many black leaders, including religious figures, embraced racial pride and militancy. This 1921 article by Rollin Lynde Hartt, a white Congregational minister and journalist, captured well what was "new" in the New Negro: an aggressive willingness to defend black communities against white racist attacks and a desire to celebrate the accomplishments of African-American communities in the North.

The "new woman" of the 1910s and 1920s rejected the pieties (and often the politics) of the older generation, smoked and drank in public, celebrated the sexual revolution, and embraced consumer culture. While earlier generations had debated suffrage, political discussions of feminism were seldom the stuff of popular media in the 1920s. Instead, magazines such as Ladies Home Journal and Pictorial Review presented readers with the debate: "To Bob or Not to Bob?" The short, sculpted hair of the "bob" marked a startling visual departure from the upswept and carefully dressed hair of the early twentieth-century Gibson Girl. Dancer Irene Castle (Treman) inadvertently helped set the fashion when she cut her hair for convenience before entering the hospital for an appendectomy. In these magazine excerpts, Castle, singer Mary Garden, and film star Mary Pickford (known as "America's Sweetheart"), described their decisions to adopt, or not adopt, the new style.

The human cost of World War I was enormous. The prolonged trench warfare ended the lives of 1.8 million Germans, 1.7 million Russians, 1.4 million French, 1.2 million Austro-Hungarians, and over 900,000 British. 112,000 American troops also died, mostly from disease. Many of those who didn't die were left with horrible wounds. Here, plaster casts of the mutilated faces of soldiers wounded in battle are shown next to their reconstructions, carried out with the aid of new prosthetic devices. They represent one legacy of the First World War and the imperfect attempts to contend with its gruesome effects.

Newsela is an innovative way to build reading comprehension with nonfiction. Daily news articles are grouped by topics such as Arts, Sports, War and Peace. Teachers search by topic, grade level, standards, and available quizzes, and they can also create a class and assign articles to read. Each article has five available lexiles to help differentiate for students. Students can practice targeted reading skills through typed written responses.

Infrastructures for energy, water, transport, information and communications services create the conditions for livability and economic development. They are the backbone of our society. Similar to our arteries and neural systems that sustain our human bodies, most people however take infrastructures for granted. That is, until they break down or service levels go down.

In many countries around the globe infrastructures are ageing. They require substantial investments to meet the challenges of increasing population, urbanization, resource scarcity, congestion, pollution, and so on. Infrastructures are vulnerable to extreme weather events, and therewith to climate change.
Technological innovations, such as new technologies to harvest renewable energy, are one part of the solution. The other part comes from infrastructure restructuring. Market design and regulation, for example, have a high impact on the functioning and performance of infrastructures.

During the 1980's and 1990's international free trade agreements encouraged by the United States government increased the power and global reach of multinational corporations. The most controversial of these agreements, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), made it easier for U.S. companies to buy low cost goods from Mexico, which were often produced by U.S. subsidiaries that migrated to take advantage of low-cost labor. Organized labor and most liberal Democrats opposed NAFTA because they feared the loss of American jobs and the increased bargaining power of corporations who could easily transfer production overseas. As Nikos Valence, head of the Fair Trade Campaign, explained, these agreements also stimulated international labor solidarity, as workers in different countries struggled against the free reign of capital and in many cases against the same corporations.

Website Description:
In the debate over the Constitution, the Bill of Rights was a deal breaker. In this lesson, students learn why the federalists thought the Constitution didn’t need a bill of rights and why the anti-federalists refused to accept the Constitution without one. Students will find out why individual rights was such a big issue, where the concept of a bill of rights came from, and how the Bill of Rights finally got added to the U.S. Constitution.

Student Learning Objectives:
Students will be able to:
*Identify arguments for and against the need for a bill of rights in the U.S. Constitution
*Explain why the Bill of Rights was added to the U.S. Constitution
*Describe how the Bill of Rights addresses limited government
*Relate the arguments over the need for a bill of rights to the wording of the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution
*Compare and contrast the fears on both sides of the argument over the need for a bill of rights

Though people had practiced methods of fertility control for hundreds of years, the 20th century saw the advent of more reliable technologies that allowed a sharper separation between sex and reproduction. Before World War I, birth control advocates confronted numerous and often hostile opponents. By the 1920s, though, changing sexual ideologies made such ideas more widely acceptable. The major figure in the American birth control movement, Margaret Sanger, began her crusade as a militant radical whose birth control agitation grew out of her nursing experience in working-class communities. In her short-lived journal, The Woman Rebel, Sanger proclaimed, "A woman's body belongs to herself alone" and openly defended unwed motherhood. In these excerpts from The Woman Rebel, Sanger announced the journal's feminist and radical commitments and reported on "The Post Office Ban," the U.S. Post Office's suppression of the journal under the Comstock laws (which prohibited the use of the U.S. mails to distribute information about contraception).

The first laws passed in the South to impose statewide segregation in public facilities, instituted in the 1880s and 1890s, applied to railroad car seating. During this period, railway lines spread rapidly from cities to rural communities. In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court validated these early "Jim Crow" laws when it ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that a Louisiana statute requiring "separate but equal" accommodations for white and black railroad passengers did not conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment clause guaranteeing all citizens equal protection of the laws. (Jim Crow, the colloquial term for segregation, referred to a blackface character popular on the minstrel stage.) Jim Crow legislation extended throughout the South to schools, hotels, restaurants, streetcars, buses, theaters, hospitals, parks, courthouses, and even cemeteries. Although the Supreme Court ruled in 1946 that a Virginia statute requiring segregated seating interfered with interstate commerce and was thus invalid, Jim Crow travel laws remained in effect in the South. The following letter submitted to a House committee holding hearings in 1954 on legislation to end segregated travel attested to the substandard condition of railroad cars for blacks. The bills under consideration never made it to the House floor for a vote. In 1956, following a boycott by the black community of Montgomery, Alabama, against the city's segregated bus system, the Supreme Court ruled segregation on buses unconstitutional.

In this excerpt from Two Colored Women with the American Expeditionary Forces, Addie W. Hunton and Kathryn M. Johnson told the story of black soldiers and canteen workers. Sponsored by the YMCA and other charitable organizations, canteens were efforts to maintain soldiers' morale and to keep them from vice. Their account commemorated and celebrated African-American participation in the war, even as it noted segregation and discrimination within the effort to "save the world for democracy." The YMCA was one of a very few examples of interracial effort and cooperation during this period; nonetheless, Hunton and Johnson note that some workers of the organization failed to live up to its ideals. German propaganda directed to African-American soldiers used such examples of racism to decry the hypocrisy of the United States and to exhort black soldiers to surrender to the German army.

Early nineteenth-century workers followed traditional workshop practices with a limited pace and intensity to their labor. Breaks for drink and food punctuated the workday in these recollections of a ship's captain of a New York City shipyard from 1835 (published in George McNeill's late nineteenth-century history of the labor movement). However, employers challenged these customs with the goal of obtaining greater efficiency and profit. Mechanics and artisans responded collectively by organized strikes or "turnouts." Despite the obstacles of planning these early collective actions, the ship carpenters 'strike for a ten-hour day proved successful in the mid-1830s. Even as new manufacturing complexes rose in Lowell and other factory towns, work patterns remained irregular in many trades; some craftsmen faced a growing division of labor and accompanying loss of independence. Irregular hours and unemployment always loomed, while cold winters would thrust many of those working outdoors out of work for the harshest season.

In the early 20th century, large-scale commercial agriculture displaced family farms, tenant farmers, and sharecroppers. Hand labor, however, remained more cost effective for harvesting certain fruits and vegetables. Farmworkers under this new system were hired only for seasonal work and had to travel frequently. The migratory experience left these workers--primarily Mexicans, Mexican Americans, African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Filipinos÷permanent outsiders and vulnerable to exploitation, low wages, and wretched working and living conditions. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 established rights of industrial workers to unionize. The Act omitted farmworkers, though, due in part to fears that the powerful farm growers' lobby would prevent passage. Organized efforts by unions and others to rescind the exemption failed in subsequent years. In the 1960s, the United Farm Workers of America (UFW), led by Cesar Chavez, started a strike and boycott of table grapes that gained nationwide support. Although California enacted the first state legislation to protect farm labor union organizing in 1975, other states did not follow, and many union gains in California have since been lost. In the following testimony from a 1969 Senate hearing, Frank Pebeahsy, a Comanche Indian from Oklahoma, presented his experiences as a migrant farmworker. Since 1970, fresh fruit consumption in the U.S. has risen sharply increasing the demand for hand labor. Living and working conditions for migrants remain poor in much of the country.

No Place Like Earth is a fun book about why Earth is such a great place to live!

Students can improve their grammar and writing skills and teachers can instantly differentiate using an adaptive platform. This website allows students and teachers to track progress toward mastery of Common Core and state standards.

 

For early twentieth-century Progressive reformers committed to social justice, widespread child labor--especially in coal mines, textile mills, and department stores--was particularly disturbing. And as with other Progressive crusades, the expos was a favorite tool. Probably the most influential and certainly the most widely read of the Progressive-era exposs of child labor was John Spargo's The Bitter Cry of the Children (1906). Spargo was a British granite cutter who became a union organizer and socialist and gained his formal education through extension courses at Oxford and Cambridge. In 1901, he emigrated to the United States where he became a leader of the conservative wing of the American Socialist Party. In the following excerpt, Spargo described work at the coal breaker, the area outside the mine where coal was sorted and graded, mostly by young children.

In the 1920s, in part because of prohibition and the emergence of speakeasies, homosexuality became more open. At the same time, psychologists, physicians, and social reformers had been at work for several decades attempting to study, classify, categorize, and label human sexual behavior. Practices that had long been common, or at least tolerated, were now being viewed as problematic. In an excerpt from Ten Sex Talks to Girls, published in 1914, Dr. Irving Steinhardt of New York warned that any affection or intimacy--indeed, any sort of physical contact between women at all--carried the potential for disease, pauperism, and death. Steinhardt's book attempted to classify as dangerous forms of intimacy between women that previously had seemed completely "natural."

One of the greatest industrial tragedies in U.S. history occurred on March 26, 1911, when 146 workers, mostly young immigrant women, died in a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist company in New York City. In this brief excerpt from their testimony before the Factory Investigation Commission, New York City Fire Chief Edward F. Croker and Fire Marshall William Beers commented on the safety lapses--the locking of an exit door, the inadequate fire escapes, and the overcrowded factory floor--that led to the deaths of the Triangle workers.