The 1920s and 1930s gave rise to new forms of popular humor, humor with a sophisticated edge drawn from a more prosperous, cosmopolitan urban experience. In New York, a circle of urbane humorists with a national audience rose around the New Yorker magazine and the famous "Algonquin Round Table," an informal group that met occasionally at the Algonquin Hotel. Ironic, witty, emphasizing word play and "in jokes," the New Yorker work of Benchley, Thurber, Perelman, and Dorothy Parker satirized the pretensions of ordinary middle-class life. "Do Insects Think?," a 1922 essay by Robert Benchley, gleefully mocked the pretentious tone of American science, as well as the cult of pep, productivity, and activity that characterized the 1920s. Doing nothing, it suggested, offered the best evidence of intelligence.

Dr. Krashen, professor emiritus from the University of Southern California, is a linquist specialist who strongly supports school libraries. He explains the intention of this paper as, "My goal in this paper is to suggest another approach that is consistent with theory and research: self-selected pleasure reading in English. Libraries and teacher librarians play a central role in carrying out this suggestion."

In the years following the 1920 ratification of the 19th Amendment extending voting rights to women, the National Woman's Party, the radical wing of the suffrage movement, advocated passage of a constitutional amendment to make discrimination based on gender illegal. The first Congressional hearing on the equal rights amendment (ERA) was held in 1923. Many female reformers opposed the amendment in fear that it would end protective labor and health legislation designed to aid female workers and poverty-stricken mothers. A major divide, often class-based, emerged among women's groups. While the National Woman's Party and groups representing business and professional women continued to push for an ERA, passage was unlikely until the 1960s, when the revived women's movement, especially the National Organization for Women (NOW), made the ERA priority. The 1960s and 1970s saw important legislation enacted to address sex discrimination in employment and education--most prominently, the Equal Pay Act of 1963, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Title IX of the 1972 Higher Education Act--and on March 22, 1972, Congress passed the ERA. The proposed amendment expired in 1982, however, with support from only 35 states÷three short of the required 38 necessary for ratification. Strong grassroots opposition emerged in the southern and western sections of the country, led by anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schafly. Schlafly charged that the amendment would create a "unisex society" while weakening the family, maligning the homemaker, legitimizing homosexuality, and exposing girls to the military draft. In the following 1970 Senate hearing, two representatives of labor unions voiced opposition to the ERA, arguing that it would threaten protective legislation based on gender difference.

The Fourteenth Amendment established the equal protection clause, later used in key desegregation cases.

The Supreme Court's 1896 ruling legalized the separate but equal doctrine that sanctioned segregation.

The Supreme Court's 1927 opinion in Gong Lum v. Rice affirmed legalized school segregation.

This 1946 federal court ruling marked a victory for Mexican Americans and chipped away at the separate but equal doctrine, declaring segregated schools based on national origin unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court's landmark opinion overturned its earlier ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson and declared segregated schools unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court's opinion in Brown II reflects the struggle between federal and state governments on how and when school desegregation would occur.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 helped enforce the Brown ruling, a decade later.

This collection of excerpts from legislation and court decisions documents key phases of the legal struggle to gain and implement equal education.

In this intriguing article for American Theater magazine, author Rob Weinert-Kendt interviews American actor Bill Pullman and Norwegian director Stein Winge as they launch a completely revisioned version of Shakespeare's  for a Norwegian audience.

The experiences of the half million Africans Americans from the South who headed North between 1916 and 1921 varied widely among individuals. Four letters by southern migrants who had settled in Philadelphia, Chicago, and East Chicago, Indiana, provided some insights into the diverse experiences migrants had in the North. Resettled southerners wrote to folks back home about "the true facts of the present condition of the north." These "facts" ranged from salaries, living conditions, and recent births and deaths, to the score of the latest Chicago White Sox baseball game. The letters, which were originally published in the Journal of Negro History, also described what it feels like to be out of the South: "don[']t have to mister every little white boy comes along."

In a fifth grade classroom based around projects, everything has its place. This classroom profile shows you the design and purpose of Debra Harwell-Braun's fifth-grade classroom.

Tobacco was promoted in Europe in the 17th century as a cure for a number of ailments, including toothache, fatigue, and joint pains, as well as a calming agent. Smoking for enjoyment, however, was mainly responsible for the growth of the tobacco industry. By the time the following Collier's article was published in 1950, a campaign to warn smokers--who by then made up more than half of the American population--of potential dangerous effects of smoking was underway. Opposed to these efforts, the author argued that scientific attempts to link tobacco products to lung cancer and heart disease had failed and that the antismoking crusade interfered with needed research into more likely cancer causes. In 1951, an important medical study in London concluded that smoking was "an important factor" contributing to lung cancer. Despite a growing antismoking movement, aided by a 1979 Surgeon-General's report linking smoking to heart disease and the classification of nicotine as an addictive drug by the Food and Drug Administration in 1995, over five trillion cigarettes were sold that year. Threatened with state and local class-action lawsuits, the U.S. tobacco industry agreed in 1998 to a consent decree that settled 37 pending cases, quieted future claims, and ended certain types of tobacco advertising.

This resource introduces students to the value the use of historical objects to teach the Declaration of Independence.  Links and and a video present the Jefferson Desk while teaching primary source skills.

This LearnZillion video models how to select significant and relevant evidence by selecting examples from a written text. The video reviews the writing process and provides an example thesis based on "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" and the development of concurrent themes. The process of choosing pieces of texual evidence that best support the thesis will be modeled.

This resource provides a 50 minute lesson plan for teaching the difference between explicit information and drawing conclusions. The lesson provides materials for guided and independent practice on the website as well as a leveled book list.

Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley was born around 1818 in Virginia, a slave of the Burwell family. At fourteen she was loaned to the Rev. Robert Burwell, her master's son, who lived in North Carolina. There she gave birth to her son George, the product of an unwanted encounter with a white man. After several unhappy years with Robert Burwell and his family, Keckley was sent to live in St. Louis with Anne Burwell Garland, a married daughter of the Burwells. In this selection from her 1868 memoir Behind the Scenes, Keckley describes how she bought her freedom from the Garland family, a process that was completed in November 1855. Her sincere efforts to live within slavery's rules are striking and indicate how deeply the slave system's practices and values permeated both the black and white cultures of the South. After her emancipation Keckley earned her living as a dressmaker in Washington, D.C.; she died there in poverty in 1907.

The course provides the technological background of treatment processes applied for production of drinking water. Treatment processes are demonstrated with laboratory experiments.