"Teach students about civic participation and the role it has played in our judicial history with this two-part lesson comprising historic cases, a classroom mock trial, and a research project. Objective: Your students will analyze the impact of historic cases and the role of civic participation in these cases. Students will also demonstrate their understanding of the basic elements of a trial through a mock trial proceeding.
Time: Two class periods
Materials: Student Worksheets #1 and #2, access to online resources, paper, pencil or pen"

A teaching module designed to have students learn about the Bill of Rights and other amendments and evaluate rights contained in the Bill of Rights and other amendments to the Constitution. Use video resources, readings, student practice scenarios, and quizzes to help students learn about protected rights and violations through the examination of the Bill of Rights & other amendments.

Do your students have what it takes to be the next hit Broadway musical producers? In this free civics learning game, students assume the role of a theater producer adapting true events from United States history to the stage. It’s up to them to analyze primary sources from the Library of Congress to create a new smash Broadway musical hit that is historically accurate and celebrates the power of ordinary citizens in creating change. Students work with different theatrical departments to learn about important aspects of creating a musical, such as costuming, set design, writing, and music. Once all the mini-games are complete, they are rewarded with a scene from their musical on opening night, completely personalized based on the creative choices they made during their game experience.

This site provides a summary, history, and teaching activities related to the EEOC and this historic law, which forbade discrimination on the basis of sex as well as race in hiring, promoting, and firing.

This inquiry leads students through an investigation of the Civil Rights movement and the methods used to challenge social injustices in the United States. Students will analyze the disagreements between Civil Rights leaders on how best to accomplish shared goals. Students will work with primary sources and secondary sources to evaluate the methods by which leaders have attempted to support the movement.

This site examines the Civil War through collections of artifacts. Topics include slavery and abolition, Abraham Lincoln, the first Union officer killed, soldiering, weapons, leaders, cavalries, navies, life and culture, Appomattox, Winslow Homer, and Mathematics and Statistics. A Civil War time-line is included.

This course surveys the social science literature on civil war. Students will study the origins of civil war, discuss variables that affect the duration of civil war, and examine the termination of conflict. This course is highly interdisciplinary and covers a wide variety of cases.

How do we remember the Civil War? Whose stories are told in the art and memorials from and about the time period? In this resource students will examine works of art from and relating to the Civil War era. Students will also learn about the 54th Regiment of Massachusetts, an all-Black regiment, and compose a written response to a cause they are passionate about.

Sensitive: This resource contains material that may be sensitive for some students. Teachers should exercise discretion in evaluating whether this resource is suitable for their class.

This lesson asks students to visualize the Civil War by studying dozens of period photographs, and illustrates how the Civil War threatened the very purpose of the Constitution as stated in the Preamble. This lesson correlates to the National History Standards and the National Standards for Civics and Social Sciences. It also has cross-curricular connections with history, American studies, and language arts.

Margaret Sanger gained notoriety as an advocate for contraception, which she defined as essential for women's freedom. By the late 1920s, however, Sanger's radicalism had become muted. In "The Civilizing Force of Birth Control," she addressed middle-class constituencies with the argument that contraception would strengthen marriage. Like many liberal intellectuals of the time, Sanger was a eugenicist--she believed in managing human reproduction to improve "the race" through better breeding. Many eugenicists were concerned about declining fertility among college-educated and middle-class women, even as they also worried about what they saw as the excessive fertility of poorer women. However, unlike many eugenicists who urged elite women to have more children, Sanger argued that birth control for all women would serve the cause of eugenics. This essay appeared in Sex in Civilization (1929), a voluminous collection of commentary that suggested the emergence of a new species of expert--the sexologist.

The Appeal to Reason was the most popular radical publication in American history. The socialist newspaper, founded in 1895, reached a paid circulation of more than three-quarters of a million people by 1913. During political campaigns and crises, it often sold more than four million individual copies. J. A. Wayland, the paper's founder and publisher until his suicide in 1912, had become a socialist through reading. He built his paper on the conviction that plain talk would convert others to the socialist cause. From its Kansas headquarters, the Appeal published an eclectic mix of news (particularly of strikes and political campaigns), essays, poetry, fiction, humor, and cartoons. It ceased publication in November 1922, a victim of editorial instability, the declining fortunes of the Socialist Party, and U.S. government repression of radicalism. In the August 12, 1916 issue, Scott Nearing offered a disheartening prognosis for the social mobility of wage workers.

In 1890, two competing organizations working to gain the right to vote for women joined forces to form the National American Women Suffrage Association (NAWSA). NAWSA campaigned diligently for the vote in a variety of ways, but did not achieve success until the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920. This prolonged struggle entangled female activists in other important political and moral issues that divided the nation along racial, ethnic, and class lines, and debates over the vote for women often took a divisive tone. Some white women suffrage leaders were willing to use class, ethnic, and racial arguments to bolster the case for granting white women the vote. In 1894 (a year of extraordinary class conflict that included the national Pullman and coal strikes), Carrie Chapman Catt addressed an Iowa suffrage gathering and maintained that women's suffrage was necessary to counter "the ignorant foreign vote" in American cities and protect the life and property of native-born Americans.

The Constitution is the supreme law of the land in the United States. With a positive overtone, the preamble, articles, and amendments in this document protect the rights of all US citizens. Create a similar document for your class to ensure that everyone has a voice and rights that make them feel safe and comfortable expressing themselves.

Labor leader Sidney Hillman emerged as a powerful national figure during the Great Depression, in part because of his role as a leader of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), but even more because of his ties to President Franklin Roosevelt and other New Dealers. In 1944 Republican presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey charged that the CIO and Hillman's Political Action Committee (PAC) dominated Roosevelt. Part of the evidence for this (unfounded) charge was the rumor--given some credibility by its publication in the New York Times --that Roosevelt had told party leaders to "Clear it with Sidney" before selecting a vice-presidential candidate in 1944. Particularly rabid on the subject were the newspapers owned by the anti-New Dealer William Randolph Hearst. Hearst's New York Journal-American even sponsored a "Sidney Limerick Contest." These winning entries gave a flavor of the sharp antagonism and prejudices that the nation's most politically influential labor leader aroused.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965--called "the most successful civil rights law in the nation's history" by Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights--was enacted in order to force Southern states and localities to allow all citizens of voting age to vote in public elections. Although the 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, guaranteed citizens the right to vote regardless of race, discriminatory requirements, such as literacy tests, disenfranchised many African Americans in the South. In 1965, following the murder of a voting rights activist by an Alabama sheriff's deputy and the subsequent attack by state troopers on a massive protest march in Selma, President Lyndon B. Johnson pressed Congress to pass a voting rights bill with "teeth". The Act, signed into law on August 6, applied to states or counties where fewer than half of the citizens of voting age were registered in 1964--Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Virginia, and numerous counties in North Carolina. For these areas, the law banned literacy tests, appointed Federal examiners to oversee election procedures, and, according to the Act's controversial Section 5, required approval by the U.S. Attorney General of future changes to election laws. In 1969, a Senate subcommittee held hearings to discuss extending the Act. In the following statement, Vernon E. Jordan strongly argued against a House bill, advocated by the Nixon Administration, that proposed to extend coverage to the entire country and replace Section 5 with an oversight mechanism more amenable to the white South. Ultimately, on June 22, 1970, President Richard M. Nixon signed into law a bill that extended the Act's provisions, including Section 5, for five additional years, and in addition, lowered the voting age throughout the country to 18.

The San Francisco Building Trades Council (BTC), organized in 1898, actively participated in the anti-Asian agitation that characterized California politics, particularly labor politics, in the late-19th century. The BTC, like the national American Federation of Labor (AFL), argued that the very presence of Chinese (and, after 1900, Japanese and Korean immigrants as well) dragged down the living standards of white workers. The following excerpt is from a 1902 AFL pamphlet entitled Some Reasons for Chinese Exclusion: Meat vs. Rice, which called for a second extension of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Despite the pamphlet's disclaimer that it was not prejudiced, arguments were riddled with racist statements about the employment history and "Social Habits" of "John Chinaman." The selections from the pamphlet reprinted here reflected the abiding beliefs of many white workers, especially skilled workers who belonged to the San Francisco BTC.

Click! In the 1970s that word signaled the moment when a woman awakened to the powerful ideas of contemporary feminism. Today “click” usually refers to a computer keystroke that connects women (and men) to powerful ideas on the Internet. Click! aims to bridge the gap between those two clicks by offering an exhibit that highlights the achievements of women from the 1940s to the present. This exhibit explores the power and complexity of gender consciousness in modern American life.
Students will be able to explore, research, and analyze various topics such as women in politics, the Civil Rights Movement, the Feminist Movement, Body and Health, and Workplace and Family.
Educators will have the ability to retrieve lesson plans on various topics such as free lesson plans to give teachers content materials and activities that will allow them to integrate the history of the modern women’s movement into their curriculum and help students engage with important historical questions about the struggles that have made the United States more equal and democratic. Each lesson plan focuses on a historical topic that engages with the concerns of students: politics and social movements; body and health; and workplace and family. These topics are investigated through the histories of individual women, their organizations, and their struggles for greater rights and social justice. Their stories are situated within larger histories to help students connect the modern women’s movement to other changes in post-World War Two America.

Students will read an article online about the first four presidents. The online article provides scaffolds for vocabulary and reading. Students can use the online quiz to check for understanding. Students will then perform a close reading of the article following six text dependent questions. The lesson describes the activities along with the language to use for each of the questions.

After fighting World War I, ostensibly to defend democracy and the right of self-determination, thousands of African-American soldiers returned home to face intensified discrimination, segregation, and racial violence. Drawing on this frustration, Marcus Garvey attracted thousands of disillusioned black working-class and lower middle-class followers to his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). The UNIA, committed to notions of racial purity and separatism, insisted that salvation for African Americans meant building an autonomous, black-led nation in Africa. The Black Star Line, an all-black shipping company chartered by the UNIA, was the movement's boldest and most important project, and many African Americans bought shares of stock in the company. For all its grandeur and promise, however, the Black Star Line was soon beset by financial and legal problems, largely resulting from Garvey's mismanagement. The company folded only a few years after its founding. The company's collapse was detailed in an essay by black intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois, who cast doubt on Garvey's trustworthiness and suspicion on UNIA's overall program.