This is designed to have the students think critically about the immigration debate in the United States.  This lesson allows the teacher to guide student driven discussion without coloring the debate with their personal opinion.  This very difficult topic becomes easy to talk about with these students using this method.

Learn about some of the people who contributed to the Harlem Renaissance in this video from A Walk Through Harlem.

Paul Revere's ride is the most famous event of its kind in American history. But other Americans made similar rides during the American Revolution. Who were these men and women? Why were their rides important? Do they deserve to be better known?

Help your students develop a broader understanding of the Revolutionary War as they learn about some less well known but no less colorful rides that occurred in other locations. Give your students the opportunity to immortalize these "other riders" in verse as Longfellow did for Paul Revere. Heighten your students' skills in reading texts critically and making defendable judgments based on them.

Featured here are three photographs, three posters, and three textual documents from the National Archives that relate to several of the 100 Our Documents. They are teachable documents that inspire creative methods for introducing students to the milestones and reinforcing their significance.

Their worldly possessions piled on two rundown vehicles, a migrant family paused en route to California in February, 1936. They joined 400,000 people who left western and southwestern agricultural areas for California during the Great Depression, fleeing drought, dust storms, and a dramatic drop in agricultural prices. From 1929 to 1932, wheat prices dropped 50 percent and cotton fell more than two-thirds. The income of many farm families was too low to meet mortgage payments, repay loans, or pay taxes. Hundreds of thousands of families lost their farms. Drought made a bad situation worse, as dust storms tore across the Great Plains, carrying walls of dirt 8,000 feet high and destroying crops, livestock, and a whole way of life.

This lesson encourages students to analyze dozens of photographs taken in the early 1900s depicting working conditions for child laborers. This lesson correlates to the National History Standards and the National Standards for Civics and Social Sciences. It has cross-curricular connections with history, government, language arts, and business law.

This site features an all-black regiment that rose to fame at a time when the Army, federal workers, and other parts of society were segregated. The 369th Infantry, also known as the Harlem Hellfighters, was among the first regiments to arrive in France in 1917 after the U.S. declared war on Germany. Under the command of mostly white officers, the regiment spent 191 days in combat, longer than any other American unit, and emerged as one of the most highly decorated regiments during the Great War.

This site presents nearly 200 photos and drawings of Native Americans -- agriculture, burial customs, councils, dances, fishing, food preparation, homes, hunting, portraits, pottery, villages, and more.

This site offers teaching activities, four political cartoons, and a narrative about reforms proposed by three major presidential candidates in 1912: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson.

This manual provides you with a variety of creative and engaging strategies to help students think about how wars have been defining moments in both the history of the nation and the lives of individual Americans.

Examine a collection of primary source documents about airplanes in the United States.

Examine a collection of primary source documents about highways in the United States.

Examine a collection of primary source documents about railroads in the United States.

Examine a collection of primary source documents about trolleys and streetcars in American history.

This lesson looks at how proponents of slavery in antebellum America defended it as a positive good. America in Class Lessons are tailored to meet the Common Core State Standards. The Lessons present challenging primary resources in a classroom-ready format, with background information and analytical strategies that enable teachers and students to subject texts and images to the close reading called for in the Standards.

Stanford History Education Group's lesson on Puritans provides students with a background lecture on the Puritans (one of the group's who settled the 13 British colonies).  It then asks students, through reading two primary sources from the Puritans, to assess their motivations for settling in the Americas based on the historical question: Were the Puritans selfish or selfless (in their motivation)? This lesson asks students to engage in historical empathy and understand the purpose behind historical actions as historians would.