This inquiry embeds an Academic and Career Planning concept into historical inquiry, allowing students to make connections between historic accident analysis and the type of accident chain analysis a business might do today. By investigating the compelling question “Can the Accident Chain be disrupted?” students evaluate secondary sources about the Great Molasses Flood and address the issue of whether there are points along the accident chain when alternate decisions can avoid a calamity. The formative performance tasks help students build knowledge and practice skills so they can answer the supporting questions. Students create an evidence-based argument to answer the compelling question.

This packet provides an explanation of Ireland’s Great Hunger and provides ideas for primary source materials to use to describe the event A variety of discussion questions, writing activities, and other activities are provided that allow students to explore the facts and how different Irish artists used art and other media forms to depict the effects of the famine.

Anthony’s speech helps students understand the Constitution as a living document. She uses a variety of techniques of legal reasoning and interpretation to challenge other, exclusionary uses of the document. She bases an argument for change on an interpretation of a founding document.
Reconstruction is a challenging era for students to understand. Anthony’s speech captures the complexities of the Reconstruction Amendments and how they opened new avenues for disenfranchised groups to assert their rights. It also explores the interrelationship of the women’s suffragists with other movements. Anthony highlights the cultural, social, and political aspects of women’s struggle for equal rights. The speech does not simply assert women’s right to vote, but also more broadly addresses the subordinate position of women within the home and in other areas of public policy.

This is an anti-racism institution that uses objects to inform, to teach, and to create dialogues about race relations. They use primary sources to document and learn from the past. The mission of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Imagery is to teach tolerance using objects of deeply rooted intolerance.

Resources promote personal and community awareness, social justice, and racial healing. The museum understands that all individuals have varying comfort levels when speaking about race and confronting racism. The Educational Resources include a virtual tour of the museum, curriculum guide, resource guide, media literacy unit and a unit that addresses racial disparity in Covid-19.

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.

We live in a multi-media world, with images and sounds bombarding us practically from the moment we wake up until we go to bed at night. Young people especially are plugged into this visual and auditory environment. In this unit, students will learn how to take their research on a community-based issue that they care about and create a video. By showing their video to elected officials, policymakers, the general public and their peers, students may add their voices to the dialogue about community issues. Students will come to understand how to use an issue-based video to make their voices heard through the media and increase their participation as active and engaged citizens.

This lesson traces the long history of how African Americans have used music as a vehicle for communicating beliefs, aspirations, observations, joys, despair, resistance, and more across U.S. history. Lesson includes objectives and standards, sample lyrics, lesson plan, assessment and extension activities.

The North Star has been an important symbol in the African American community. A beacon of hope and freedom for some, a symbol of knowledge and information for others and a celestial representation of purpose and reason. On this website, students will explore African American history through digital activities on the Smithsonian Learning Lab platform. The activities, or collections, have gathered objects, stories, videos and thinking questions all in one place. It allows students to work through a "Learning Lab" and analyze primary objects in the museum to learn how to practice Historical Thinking, Reading Silences, Change & Continuity & Historical Context.

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

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

This text set includes a variety of multimodal resources designed to help learners understand treaty rights as they apply to the state of Wisconsin, giving special emphasis to the court cases of LCO v. Voight and State v. Gurnoe.  Indian tribes were independent, sovereign nations, before the arrival of Europeans in North America. Despite ceding their lands in the northern part of Wisconsin to the U.S. government, Chippewa tribes reserved the right to hunt, fish, and gather within the Ceded Territory. In the 1980’s, these court cases affirmed those rights. The year 2024 celebrates 50 years of the court decision. 

Teaching Hard History resources for high-school educators include a framework, as well as student-facing videos and primary source texts. Educators will also find teaching tools and professional development resources. The Key Concepts pinpoint 10 important ideas that all students must understand to truly grasp the historical significance of slavery. Explored through Summary Objectives in grades 6–12 the Key Concepts serve as tools educators can use to structure their teaching.Includes Student Texts, Videos, Quizzes and Inquiry Design Modules.

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.

Important information about how to honor Veterans in school and classroom settings. The activities in this 2021 guide can be applied to any year. The VA publishes a new guide every year.

This website was designed to give students and teachers the ability to electronically access important portions of the We the People student text, such as the Unit and Lesson Purposes and the Terms and Concepts to Understand, and to provide links to primary sources, Supreme Court cases, multimedia, and helpful websites related to the content of the student and teacher's editions.

Who comes to mind when considering the Modern Civil Rights Movement (MCRM) during 1954 - 1965? Is it one of the big three personalities: Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, or Rosa Parks? Or perhaps it is John Lewis, Stokely Carmichael, James Baldwin, Thurgood Marshall, Ralph Abernathy, or Medgar Evers. What about the names of Septima Poinsette Clark, Ella Baker, Diane Nash, Daisy Bates, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ruby Bridges, or Claudette Colvin? What makes the two groups different? Why might the first group be more familiar than the latter? A brief look at one of the most visible events during the MCRM, the March on Washington, can help shed light on this question.Students will be able to conduct an inquiry into the following research questions through this source:Who were some of the women leaders of the Modern Civil Rights Movement in your local town, city, or state? What were the expected gender roles in 1950s - 1960s America?Did these roles vary in different racial and ethnic communities?How would these gender roles affect the MCRM?Who were the "Big Six" of the MCRM?What were their individual views toward women in the movement?How were the ideas of gender similar or different from the MCRM and the later Black Power Movement?How did African American women in the MCRM relate to women in other women movements of the era (ex. Chicano, LGBT, or American Indian Movement)? 

The goal of this module is to provide resources and information about the history of women’s vote in the U.S. Looking at the women’s suffrage movement provides a framework for exploring the changing role of women in politics and society in the 19th and 20th centuries. The history of suffrage offers an opportunity to examine women’s roles at critical points in the nation’s history, and to think about the impact of women’s voting behavior on politics in our time.
Activities and discussion questions are designed to explore the changing role of women in society and in politics. The module includes ideas for developing lessons on women’s suffrage and integrating the issue of suffrage into lessons on US history and politics, and to consider the impact of full suffrage on politics and society today.

Plastic bottles are everywhere! About 70% of the plastic water bottles bought in the U.S. are not recycled, and end up in the oceans. It seems obvious that using fewer plastic water bottles would be a good thing for our environment, but sometimes the alternatives can have negative consequences. Do the costs of banning plastic bottles outweigh the benefits?