Why did Texans revolt against the Mexican government? In this lesson, students read the Texas Declaration of Independence, military commander letters, and an abolitionist pamphlet to explore causes of the Texas Revolution.

This assessment gauges whether students can identify the historical event or development depicted in a photograph from the past and evaluate the historical significance of the development. Successful students will draw on their knowledge of the past to explain that this photograph is from the Tulsa Massacre of 1921 and then explain how this event was historically significant.

This assessment measures students' ability to contextualize and periodize two historical documents by placing them on a timeline. The first document is a 1942 letter from the U.S. secretary of state to the American ambassador in Mexico, and the second is an excerpt from a newspaper published in Brownsville, Texas, in 1931. This HAT draws on students' historical knowledge, but in a way that requires more than the simple recall of information. Students must understand how and why the United States' policies on Mexican migration changed from the Great Depression to World War II and use their understanding to place historical sources in time.

This assessment gauges students’ ability to reason about how evidence supports a historical argument. Students must explain how a floor plan of the building that acted as the United Farm Workers Headquarters and a poster made by the Young Americans for Freedom both support the conclusion that the UFW was influential.

In 1943, Anglo servicemen attacked Mexican American, Filipino American, and African American adolescents in Los Angeles. This violence was known as the "Zoot Suit Riots," named for the allegedly un-patriotic fashion then popular among the city's youth. In this lesson, students examine four historical sources to answer the question: What caused the Zoot Suit Riots?