This 14-minute video shows students how the federal government’s botched raid on the compound of the Branch Davidian religious sect in 1993 gave rise to a nationwide militia movement of people advocating an expansive and individualistic interpretation of the Second Amendment. Students will learn how this movement included terrorists like Timothy McVeigh as well as lawful activists, many of whom continue to influence the national conversation on gun rights. Including interviews with militia activists as well as their opponents, the video provides students with context and insight on a defining cultural and political moment in the tug-of-war between individual rights and government powers. Useful for any lesson introducing Second Amendment controversies, the video illustrates why the right of individuals to own firearms remains one of the most contentious issues in American government.

Content Advisory:
This video includes footage of gun violence during a law enforcement raid that left 80 people dead.

Through the short film A Conversation with My Black Son (originally published by The New York Times as one of its Op-Docs) by directors Geeta Gandbhir and Blair Foster, students will hear from parents who have personally struggled with the burden of “The Conversation” and compare/contrast their stories and strategies for keeping their children safe. Students will then research and analyze the history of policing in America from the colonial era to the present as it relates to the African-American community and identify how that history produced the need for black parents to have “The Conversation” today.

This 10-minute video delves into how the nature of Supreme Court nominations have changed since the defeat of Robert Bork. As President Biden makes his first Supreme Court nomination, he is hoping for bipartisan support for nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. Recent history of Supreme Court nominations have yielded bitter battles and guarded answers from nominees on their views of important legal issues.

Collection of Lesson plans related to George Washington’s life, his service to his country, and his legacy. Lesson plans can be searched by grade level and topic.

Oral history and article of Herb Hanneman, a Wisconsin survivor, of the Batman Death March

Women's music is a genre for women, by women, and about women. Women's music formed and evolved from the second wave of the feminist movement, the Civil Rights Movement, and the peace movements of the 1960s and 1970s.The movement was started by lesbian performers such as Cris Williamson, Meg Christian, and Margie Adam, African-American musicians including Linda Tillery, Mary Watkins, and Gwen Avery, and activists such as Bernice Johnson Reagon and her group Sweet Honey in the Rock, and Peace activist Holly Near.
Women's music also refers to the wider industry of women's music that goes beyond the performing artists to include studio musicians, producers, sound engineers, technicians, cover artists, distributors, promoters, and festival organizers who are also women.
Students will be able to investigate various songs, interpret their lyrics, and examine the perspectives behind the creation of the song.

Enhance your classroom experience on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr Day with these teacher-tested lessons from the nationally recognized We the People: The Citizen & the Constitution curriculum. These materials will help inform your students about the national struggle for civil rights and equal protection under the law.

During the 1960s, Milwaukee’s African-American community waged protests, organized boycotts, and fought legislative battles against segregation and discriminatory practices in schools, housing, and social clubs. This exhibits provides highlights from the March on Milwaukee Civil Rights History Project (https://uwm.edu/marchonmilwaukee/), a digital collection that features primary sources including photographs, unedited news film footage, text documents, and oral history interviews from the Milwaukee Area Research Center at the UW-Milwaukee Libraries as well as a detailed timeline and bibliography.

This teaching guide from the OER Project outlines their courses, PD, and other resources.

The OER Project is a coalition of educators and historians committed to boosting student engagement and achievement through transformational social studies programs. By empowering classroom teachers with better curricula, content, and a vibrant community, we deliver more compelling, impactful, and usable histories. “OER” stands for open educational resources. When you grab a free worksheet off Pinterest for your tenth graders, that’s an OER resource. We recognize the value of OER resources, but want to go beyond the typical content repository approach—we aim to improve OER by providing coherency, support, and community.

Currently, the OER Project offers two courses—Big History Project (BHP) and World History Project (WHP)—both of which are completely free, online, and adaptable to different standards and classroom needs. Unlike textbooks, lesson websites, and other commercial products, everything has been purposely built to truly empower teachers and leave traditional history courses in—sorry for the pun—the past. We also offer short, standalone courses for those who want to try the OER Project approach, but aren’t yet ready to take on a full history course. Our current standalone options include Project X, a course that uses data to explore historical trends to help make predictions about the future; Project Score, a course that uses writing tools and the use of Score, a free, online essay-scoring service to help support student writing; and Climate Project, an evidence-based overview of the global carbon problem that culminates in students developing a plan of action they can implement locally

Follow individual trajectories of America’s diverse community of veterans as they join the military, experience deployments, and then return and adjust to civilian life. Analyze oral histories that describe the camaraderie of the veteran community, the struggles of engaging in combat, and the experiences—positive and negative—of returning to civilian life. Use their personal stories to engage in a discussion of how American veterans are treated by civilians during their service and on returning home from various conflicts.

Use the following NewsHour Classroom resources to examine King’s impact on civil rights and his ongoing legacy. Lessons include a deep dive anayisis of the “I have a dream” speech and the impact of Dr, King’s work on current evens

In 1967, riots triggered by episodes of police brutality and harassment of African Americans erupted in over 150 U.S. cities. President Johnson asked Congress to investigate, and the result was the Kerner Commission report, which stated: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal.” The report highlighted shortages of jobs, inadequate education, discrimination, and harsh police tactics. In this lesson students will look at the report’s findings, and how ignoring them had an impact that continues today.

Content Advisory:
This video includes footage of police violence.

Retro Report is a non-profit journalism organization. In your classroom, we can help foster engagement and critical thinking skills with over 250 short videos that connect history to today. Our videos are perfect for many classroom subjects, particularly U.S. History, Civics and Government, Media Literacy, World History, Psychology, and Environmental Studies. All of our videos, lessons, and student activities are completely FREE. Video topics include The Birth of the Environmental Movement: DDT and Rachel Carson; From Women's Suffrage to the ERA; Suffrage for Black Women, Second Wave, Feminism, the Equal Rights Amendment, and Phyllis Schlafly.

By reading primary sources outlining the rights of prisoners of war, along with the primary accounts of American prisoners of war held by the Japanese, students should critically assess the nature of violations committed by the Japanese forces during World War II. Through this assessment, the students should be able to determine the specific ways Japanese forces violated the rights of American POWs. Students should also consider how the Geneva Conventions, and Japan’s lack of ratification, apply to the debates that surrounded Japanese war crimes at the postwar Tokyo Trials.

As an enslaved person, Sally Hemings struggled to improve her family’s prospects as she labored under the institution of slavery. By dividing her life into four major stages, students will encounter the difficult choices forced upon enslaved women by an evil institution.
Students will be able to evaluate the choices available to enslaved women like Sally Hemings.
Students will use the four essential themes to analyze and discuss Sally Hemings’s impact on her family and plantation community at Monticello.
Either individually or as a group, students will present and support their theme and its relevance to Sally Hemings’s life in a cohesive and factual statement using information and knowledge gained from class materials and discussion.

This blog post exploring the true facts of Columbus’s journey, the history of Columbus Day, and different sources for information.

Transgender people have long faced discrimination in employment, marriage, medical care, and other areas, and are far more likely to experience homelessness, unemployment, and mental illness than people whose gender identity matches the gender they were assigned at birth. Today, ​lawmakers across the country have introduced anti-trans legislation, seeking to bar transgender students from participating in sports and limiting access by minors to gender-affirming medical care. The movement that began nearly half a century ago still faces many obstacles.

Content Advisory:
This lesson covers historical and contemporary demands for equality by transgender people. The film and associated resources address sexuality, violence against transgender people, and other topics that may upset or offend some people.

This series of eight lessons is organized as a mini-unit for teaching the Armenian Genocide. They were designed to complement Facing History and Ourselves' resource books, Holocaust and Human Behavior and Crimes Against Humanity and Civilization: The Genocide of the Armenians. Most of these lessons are designed to be used with the film The Armenian Genocide (Two Cats Productions), which aired on PBS on April 17, 2006 and is available to borrow from our library or stream if you are in our educator network. These texts depict, in words or images, evidence of horrible atrocities such as murder and starvation. We recommend previewing materials in order to gauge if they are appropriate given the maturity level of your students.

While we estimate that teaching all eight lessons would require approximately 10 hours of class time, we know that the actual pacing of these lessons depends on your students and your context. These lessons can also by used individually with the understanding that the later lessons rely on students' previous knowledge of the Armenian Genocide. It is our hope that you use these lessons as a jumping off point in creating learning experiences that will engage students in the history of the Armenian Genocide and the important questions this history raises about human behavior.

Language note: While this unit is titled "The Genocide of the Armenians," the word genocide did not exist in 1915 when the Armenians were being massacred and forced on death marches. To avoid historical anachronism, the first seven lessons of this unit circumvent the use of the word "genocide" with students. The final lesson introduces students to the modern term "genocide," and to the different ways people claim or deny this term. You might choose to introduce students to the term "genocide" earlier in the unit, while informing them that the events they are learning about inspired the genesis of this term.

Something to think about: The purpose of these lessons is to help students understand a particular moment in history, the Armenian Genocide, as a way to explore core questions about human behavior. While students are asked to travel across time and space in order to connect this history to their own ideas and experiences, it would be irresponsible for students to make generalizations about a particular religious or national group that cuts across time and place. In other words, students should be strongly discouraged from seeing this history as a lesson about all Turks, all Muslims, all Armenians, or all Americans, in the same way that scholars who teach about the Holocaust are careful not to condemn all Germans or all Christians for acts committed by the Nazis and their followers.

Background
In our increasingly interconnected world it has become clear that what happens in one country affects all of us in many ways, some more visible than others. Responding to genocide, ethnic violence, and abuses of human rights stand as the primary challenges of our day. There was great hope that the end of the Cold War would usher in a new era with a blossoming of democracy and human rights; instead violence around the world makes it clear that finding the tools to prevent genocide is as urgent as ever. Historians note that in the last hundred years more human beings died through genocidal violence and state-sanctioned murder than on that era's countless battlefields.

It was no accident that the failure to prevent escalating abuses of the human rights of Ottoman minorities climaxed with the systematic deportation and mass murder of the Armenian population of the empire in World War I. While other minority groups had broken free from the Ottoman Empire, the Armenians hoped that reforms--supported by the Western powers-would bring change. Instead a new nationalism spread through the Ottoman leadership that left no place for the Christian minorities within the empire. Under the cover of World War I the genocide of the Armenians began.

In 1915 journalists, politicians, and ordinary people considered how best to respond to the accounts of "horrors" and "outrages" in Turkey's Anatolian desert. Unable to remain silent, local and national leaders challenged tradition by boldly proclaiming that responsibility for human life does not stop at national borders. Their solutions set important precedents for international law. In fact, the phrase "crimes against humanity," made famous as one of the counts at the post-Holocaust Nuremberg Trials, was first used to describe the massacres of Armenian civilians in the spring of 1915.

As the pillaging of Armenian villages continued, diplomats debated questions of national sovereignty. In the absence of military intervention, coalitions of individuals, religious groups, and voluntary associations were able to raise millions of dollars to house and feed refugees from the slaughter. While those efforts saved many, humanitarian relief alone could not stop the mass murder of women, children, and men. In the wake of the genocide, official promises to hold the perpetrators accountable faded, as did support for the new Armenian state.

To many who had followed the bloody history of Turkey's campaign against its own people, the impunity enjoyed by those who had ordered and carried out the killings was unbearable. One of them was Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew and a law student. Lemkin confronted one of his law school professors. He asked, "Why is the killing of a million people a lesser crime than the killing of a single individual?" His professor used a metaphor to explain that courts did not have any jurisdiction: "Consider the case of a farmer who owns a flock of chickens. He kills them and this is his business. If you interfere, you are trespassing." But, replied an incensed Lemkin, "the Armenians are not chickens." Lemkin dedicated the rest of his life to finding a way to make sure that the law would recognize the difference. In 1944 Lemkin coined the word "genocide" and later he drafted the United Nations Convention on Genocide. The convention was ratified on December 9, 1948, one day before the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Although this convention requires that its signatories take whatever steps are necessary to prevent genocide, too often the international community does little but stand by while mass killings continue in places like Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In his role as a columnist for the New York Times, Nicholas Kristoff warns readers about the consequences of silence. "There is something special about genocide," he writes, "When human beings deliberately wipe out others because of their tribe or skin color, when babies succumb not to diarrhea but to bayonets and bonfires, that is not just one more tragedy. It is a monstrosity that demands a response from other humans. We demean our own humanity, and that of the victims, when we avert our eyes."

We hope that this series of lessons will help a new generation to understand that genocide is a threat to all of us: it is indeed a "crime against humanity."

Introduction
Raphael Lemkin devoted much of his life to a single goal: making the world understand and recognize a crime so horrific that there was not even a word for it. By coining the word "genocide" and drafting the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Lemkin's actions have influenced the way we are able to respond to acts of genocide. In this way, a study of Raphael Lemkin's work not only helps students understand traditional world history themes such as sovereignty, diplomacy, and law, but also provides a powerful historical example of how moral outrage can be translated into action-an example that can spur students to reflect on their ideas about crimes against humanity and their own role in preventing future genocides and promoting human dignity.

Facing History and Ourselves has developed the following three lesson plans to accompany the case study Totally Unofficial: Raphael Lemkin and the Genocide Convention, which can be adapted to fit the needs of your students. They were developed as a mini-unit but can also be used independently if students have the prerequisite knowledge to use the material. Each lesson is designed to run between 60 and 90 minutes long. Lessons contain options regarding how to use the accompanying case study text, primary source materials, and videos.

Using resources from the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency and the American Battle Monuments Commission, students will learn about the recovery and identification pro- cess of missing service members’ remains. The students will demonstrate their understanding of the recovery process by researching the location of a missing service member and developing a pre-mission report for that area.