This resource features articles, books and discussions that support primary educators in building their understanding of race, racism and positive racial identities. After exploring these resources, educators will be more equipped to support students’ development of an accurate, integrative, and comprehensive knowledge of our nation’s history with a focus on the critical role African Americans played and continue to play in our country’s development. 

For four years after the U.S. dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II, America held a monopoly on the production of atomic weapons. During this period, debate centering on the use of nuclear bombs in future wars proliferated among government officials, scientists, religious leaders, and in the popular press. In the following article from Collier's, former Navy lieutenant commander William H. Hessler, using data from the Strategic Bombing Survey, argued that saturation bombing of urban areas during World War II, while devastating for civilians, did not achieve war aims. A future atomic war, therefore, might well destroy cities but fail to stop enemy aggression. Furthermore, with a much higher urban concentration than the Soviet Union, the U.S. had more to lose from atomic warfare. The article, while providing detailed explanations of the bomb's destructive capability, demonstrated the lack of information available regarding the long-term medical and ecological effects of radioactivity. Hessler's prose also evoked both the fascination that gadgetry of atomic warfare held for Americans of the time and the fear many felt about the risks involved in putting this technology to use. On September 24, 1949, one week after publication of this article, news that the Russians had conducted atom bomb tests shocked the nation. The following April, a National Security Council report to President Harry S. Truman advised development of a hydrogen bomb--some 1,000 times more destructive than an atom bomb--and a massive buildup of non-nuclear defenses. The subsequent outbreak of war in Korea in June 1950 justified to many a substantial increase in defense spending.

This collection uses primary sources to explore AIDS activism during the 1980s. Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and draw diverse material from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. Each set includes an overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee.

Faced with stiff business opposition, a conservative political climate, hostile courts, and declining membership, leaders of the American Federeration of Labor (AFL) grew increasingly cautious during the 1920s. Labor radicals viewed AFL leaders as overpaid, self-interested functionaries uninterested in organizing unorganized workers into unions. A cartoon by William Gropper published in the Communist Yiddish newspaper Freiheit (and reprinted in English in the New Masses ) caricatures delegates to a 1926 AFL convention in Atlantic City. Well

In 1981, the U.S. medical community noticed a significant number of gay men living in urban areas with rare forms of pneumonia, cancer, and lymph disorders. The cluster of ailments was initially dubbed Gay-Related Immune Disease (GRID), but when similar illnesses increased in other groups, the name changed to Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). The mid-1980s saw a number of advances toward understanding and treating the disease, but no vaccine or cure was forthcoming. Gay advocacy and community-based organizations began providing services and pressuring government to increase funding for finding a cure and helping victims. As two representatives of AIDS health services organizations stated in the following 1987 testimony to Congress, AIDS spread in disproportionately high numbers throughout U.S. minority and disadvantaged communities. They advocated increased federal funding for prevention efforts targeted at minority communities and administered by community-based organizations. Despite such efforts, the number of minority AIDS cases continued to rise sharply, and by 1996, African Americans accounted for a higher percentage of reported adult cases of AIDS (41%) than did whites.

This is a searchable database of the cornerstone documents of our government. It has more than 100,000 digitized copies of the National Archives most popular and significant manuscripts, photographs, maps, drawings and other documents.
The guide introduces educators and students to the National Archives' ARC. Searching in ARC to learn more about National Archives' historical documents could enrich a classroom activity, a homework assignment, or a research project.

In this lesson, students interrogate their own assumptions about Abraham Lincoln in order to arrive at a deeper understanding of who Lincoln was. They investigate primary source documents in order to analyze the elements of Lincoln's life that have become legend and those that have been forgotten by history.

The papers of Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), lawyer, representative from Illinois, and sixteenth president of the United States, contain approximately 40,550 documents dating from 1774 to 1948, although most of the collection spans from the 1850s through Lincoln’s presidency (1861-1865). Roughly half of the collection, more than 20,000 documents, comprising 62,000 images, as well as transcriptions of approximately 10,000 documents, is online. Included on this website in their entirety are Series 1-3 of the Lincoln Papers and the original materials in Series 4. Excluded from this online presentation is a sizeable portion of Series 4, which consists of printed material and reproductions of government and military documents made from originals in the holdings of the National Archives and Records Administration.

Treasures in the collection include Lincoln’s first and second inaugural addresses, his preliminary draft of the Emancipation Proclamation, the two earliest known copies of the Gettysburg Address (the Nicolay and Hay copies), his August 23, 1864, memorandum expressing his expectation of being defeated for re-election in the upcoming presidential contest, and a condolence letter written to Mary Todd Lincoln by Queen Victoria following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865. The Lincoln Papers are characterized by a large number of correspondents, including friends and associates from Lincoln’s Springfield days, well-known political figures and reformers, and local people and organizations writing to their president.

This supplemental lesson/activity from the Center for Civic Education looks at the concept of executive power and the challenges Lincoln faced as president. Students are asked to analyze and evaluate President Lincoln's decisions as they relate to decisions made during the Civil War.

Allies during World War II, the U.S. and the Soviet Union disagreed over a number of issues after the war. These included control of Eastern Europe, division of Germany, atomic energy, international loans, and the Middle East. On February 9, 1946, Soviet premier Josef Stalin asserted that the continued existence of capitalism in the West would inevitably lead to war. Foreign Service senior diplomat George Kennan sent President Harry Truman, still forming a Soviet policy, a lengthy telegram advocating containment. Commerce Secretary Henry A. Wallace--Secretary of Agriculture (1933-1941) and Vice-President from (1941-1945)--was one of the few liberal idealists in Truman's cabinet. Wallace envisioned a "century of the common man" marked by global peace and prosperity. In the following excerpt from a letter dated July 23, 1946, Wallace urged Truman to build "mutual trust and confidence" in order to achieve "an enduring international order." Truman asked Wallace to resign. In March 1947, Truman asked Congress for money "to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures." Thus articulated, the "Truman Doctrine" of containment served as the rationale for future American Cold War foreign policy initiatives.

A boy and his family endure a difficult nine-week journey across the ocean and survive the first winter at Plymouth. Based on true events, "Across the Wide Dark Sea" poetically narrates a young boy's account of risking the ocean to find religious freedom in a new land.

The following lesson is designed to help students explore the emergence of the American Indian Movement (c.1968 and beyond) in the context of the push for self-determination by native people, and within the broader movement for Civil Rights in American Society.

This resource would be appropriate for high school students, during a study of the Civil Rights Movement. It provides primary source materials for students to analyze using the APPARTS process.

This aligns to WI AIS Enduring Understanding #9 "American Indians and U.S. Citizenship".

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 the following letter to a 1969 Senate subcommittee hearing on extending the Act, New Jersey Senator Harrison A. Williams, Jr., provided statistics to show the law's effect. The position described in the letter was Attorney General John Mitchell's proposal to 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 Land of Liberty" was the ironic title of this cartoon published in an 1847 edition of the British satirical weekly Punch. As the cartoon suggests, Americans faced a number of dilemmas and crises that came to revolve around the institution of slavery and its expansion into the West. As slavery became more entrenched in Southern social and economic life, the war against Mexico, the forced removal of Native Americans from the Southeastern United States, and conflicts between rich and poor whites all highlighted the conflicts within Southern society and between the North and South about the place of slavery in a rapidly expanding republic.

In November 1865 a group of 52 black delegates met in Charleston's Zion Church to formulate a position regarding their future in the still uncertain world of the post-emancipation South. Their address invoked the language of the Declaration of Independence to claim full rights of citizenship for themselves, rights that were endangered by widespread southern "Black Codes." The Black Codes were a series of laws introduced in the months after the war by the reconstituted state legislatures of the South. These laws were enacted to restrict the movements and employment possibilities of blacks regardless of whether they had been free or enslaved before the war?in essence to replace the constrictions of slavery.

In this lesson, students watch a clip from the episode Woolworth Sign in which they learn about the use of sit-ins and nonviolence in the Civil Rights Movement. They then examine period images and news footage in order to analyze the strategies of the Civil Rights Movement and their effectiveness, and create a newspaper article about the events of the time period.

Teaching with Historic Places (TwHP) uses historic places in National Parks and in the National Park Service's National Register of Historic Places to enliven history, social studies, geography, civics, and other subjects. TwHP has created a variety of products and activities that help teachers bring historic places into the classroom.

Here you’ll find place-based educational resources relating to African American history and culture; including lesson plans and "Curiosity Kits" that are a series of articles that students can read individually or in a small group, in order to spark historical thinking.

This collection uses primary sources to explore the experiences of African American Soldiers in World War I. Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and draw diverse material from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. Each set includes an overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee.

To assist students in developing analytical skills that will enable them to evaluate primary documents and images such as photographs, political cartoons, and posters related to African American women during World War II.
This lesson can be integrated into a classroom activity by individual students, cross-curricular with Language Arts, and/or as a cooperative learning endeavor. Students will analyze Internet websites and access links to a variety of primary and secondary documents.
Students will also be introduced students to the Stanford History Educational Group’s Reading Like A Historian teaching strategies to help them investigate historical questions by employing the following reading strategies:
Sourcing, Contextualizing, corroborating, and close reading.

The 1890s witnessed the emergence of a commercial popular music industry in the United States. Sales of sheet music, enabling consumers to play and sing songs in their own parlors, skyrocketed during the "Gay Nineties," led by Tin Pan Alley, the narrow street in midtown Manhattan that housed the country's major music publishers and producers. Although Tin Pan Alley was established in the 1880s, it only achieved national prominence with the first "platinum" song hit in American music history--Charles K. Harris's "After the Ball"--that sold two million pieces of sheet music in 1892 alone. "After the Ball's" sentimentality ultimately helped sell over five million copies of sheet music, making it the biggest hit in Tin Pan Alley's long history. Typical of most popular 1890s tunes, the song was a tearjerker, a melodramatic evocation of lost love.