In 1967, riots triggered by episodes of police brutality and harassment of African Americans erupted in over 150 U.S. cities. President Johnson asked Congress to investigate, and the result was the Kerner Commission report, which stated: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal.” The report highlighted shortages of jobs, inadequate education, discrimination, and harsh police tactics. In this lesson students will look at the report’s findings, and how ignoring them had an impact that continues today.

Content Advisory:
This video includes footage of police violence.

Reconstruction has long been taught as a lost cause narrative. The true story is one of great force. The great force of a powerful activist Black community that strived to establish a multiracial democracy and achieved great successes and political power. The great force of a violent white community that exploited, abused and murdered those of that Black community who would assert their civil and human rights. The great force of a federal government that was there and then wasn't. This episode is your introduction to that true story.

Our guides to this era are Dr. Kidada Williams, author of I Saw Death Coming and Dr. Kate Masur, author of Until Justice Be Done.

While Black citizens fought for their civil and human rights in the Reconstruction era, state and federal governments alike passed law and policy pertaining to them. Courts ruled. Legislatures made law. These are the legal shifts that both supported the Black freedom struggle and actively worked against it. Our guides to the last part of our Reconstruction series are Gilbert Paul Carassco, Kate Masur and Kidada Williams.

By reading primary sources outlining the rights of prisoners of war, along with the primary accounts of American prisoners of war held by the Japanese, students should critically assess the nature of violations committed by the Japanese forces during World War II. Through this assessment, the students should be able to determine the specific ways Japanese forces violated the rights of American POWs. Students should also consider how the Geneva Conventions, and Japan’s lack of ratification, apply to the debates that surrounded Japanese war crimes at the postwar Tokyo Trials.

She Resisted: Strategies of Suffrage is an interactive audio and visual experience where students are able to explore, investigate, and examine the various strategies women use to gain the right to vote. Students will be able to analyze the various techniques, methods, and strategies women used to assist in answering what women would do to get to vote and how far would they go to achieve enfranchisement.

This brief lesson and collection of primary sources look at the arrest of Susan B. Anthony following her casting her ballot in the 1872 Presidential election in her hometown of Rochester, New York. Documents include U.S vs. Susan B. Anthony, Indictment for Illegal Voting; U.S. vs. Susan B. Anthony, Exhibit B, a transcript of the hearing including examination of witnesses by the defense and prosecution attorneys, and Susan B. Anthony s testimony in her own defense; and U.S. vs. Susan B. Anthony, Record of Conviction. It also offers extension activities and links to additional primary sources.

"This document is a one-week lesson plan consisting of five one-hour lessons on the
history of Uyghurs and East Turkistan, and on the modern-day repression campaign being
perpetrated against Uyghurs in China by the government of China and the Chinese Communist
Party (CCP). Through teaching about Uyghurs, these lessons teach skills such as reading
comprehension, source analysis, argument analysis and synthesis, research, summary and
verbal presentation, and argumentative writing. These lessons are designed for 11th and 12th
grade social science and history students but could be taught in other grade levels. The
activities in the lessons are ideally suited to classroom learning. However, acknowledging that
many schools have transitioned to distance learning due to the Covid-19 pandemic, each lesson
contains a note on how to adapt the lesson for distance learning. "

"Asking students to grapple with an issue as horrible as genocide, termed 'the crime without a name' by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, is a daunting, wrenching, and, above all, sad challenge. Yet, as the film "Ghosts of Rwanda" shows, while people and governments turned their backs on what was happening in Rwanda in the spring of 1994, some individuals stood up to the horror and acted effectively, often with breathtaking heroism. Students can witness both the depths to which humans can sink and the heights to which they can soar. This guide offers classroom teachers an array of opportunities to teach history and to explore the notion of individual and collective responsibility."

On Constitution Day, students will examine the role of the people in shaping the United States Constitution. First, students will respond to a provocative statement posted in the room. They will then watch a video that gives a brief explanation of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, or listen as the video transcript is read aloud. A Constitution poster is provided so students can examine Article VII and discuss it as a class.
The elementary and middle school educator will then
guide students through a read-aloud play depicting two Constitutional Convention delegates who disagreed about ratifying the Constitution.

Transgender people have long faced discrimination in employment, marriage, medical care, and other areas, and are far more likely to experience homelessness, unemployment, and mental illness than people whose gender identity matches the gender they were assigned at birth. Today, ​lawmakers across the country have introduced anti-trans legislation, seeking to bar transgender students from participating in sports and limiting access by minors to gender-affirming medical care. The movement that began nearly half a century ago still faces many obstacles.

Content Advisory:
This lesson covers historical and contemporary demands for equality by transgender people. The film and associated resources address sexuality, violence against transgender people, and other topics that may upset or offend some people.

The United States Constitution gets a lot of credit for being the first of its kind. The progenitor of democratic constitution making. The spark that started a global fire. Is that the long and short of it, or is there more to the story?

Linda Colley, author of The Gun, The Ship and the Pen, weaves a longer, more complex narrative in this episode. We explore why constitutions (governmental limits, citizens rights and all) became necessary and who put pen to paper before 1787.

This is a lesson/unit plan on Holodomor, including historical background information, maps, and primary source documents.

This series of eight lessons is organized as a mini-unit for teaching the Armenian Genocide. They were designed to complement Facing History and Ourselves' resource books, Holocaust and Human Behavior and Crimes Against Humanity and Civilization: The Genocide of the Armenians. Most of these lessons are designed to be used with the film The Armenian Genocide (Two Cats Productions), which aired on PBS on April 17, 2006 and is available to borrow from our library or stream if you are in our educator network. These texts depict, in words or images, evidence of horrible atrocities such as murder and starvation. We recommend previewing materials in order to gauge if they are appropriate given the maturity level of your students.

While we estimate that teaching all eight lessons would require approximately 10 hours of class time, we know that the actual pacing of these lessons depends on your students and your context. These lessons can also by used individually with the understanding that the later lessons rely on students' previous knowledge of the Armenian Genocide. It is our hope that you use these lessons as a jumping off point in creating learning experiences that will engage students in the history of the Armenian Genocide and the important questions this history raises about human behavior.

Language note: While this unit is titled "The Genocide of the Armenians," the word genocide did not exist in 1915 when the Armenians were being massacred and forced on death marches. To avoid historical anachronism, the first seven lessons of this unit circumvent the use of the word "genocide" with students. The final lesson introduces students to the modern term "genocide," and to the different ways people claim or deny this term. You might choose to introduce students to the term "genocide" earlier in the unit, while informing them that the events they are learning about inspired the genesis of this term.

Something to think about: The purpose of these lessons is to help students understand a particular moment in history, the Armenian Genocide, as a way to explore core questions about human behavior. While students are asked to travel across time and space in order to connect this history to their own ideas and experiences, it would be irresponsible for students to make generalizations about a particular religious or national group that cuts across time and place. In other words, students should be strongly discouraged from seeing this history as a lesson about all Turks, all Muslims, all Armenians, or all Americans, in the same way that scholars who teach about the Holocaust are careful not to condemn all Germans or all Christians for acts committed by the Nazis and their followers.

Background
In our increasingly interconnected world it has become clear that what happens in one country affects all of us in many ways, some more visible than others. Responding to genocide, ethnic violence, and abuses of human rights stand as the primary challenges of our day. There was great hope that the end of the Cold War would usher in a new era with a blossoming of democracy and human rights; instead violence around the world makes it clear that finding the tools to prevent genocide is as urgent as ever. Historians note that in the last hundred years more human beings died through genocidal violence and state-sanctioned murder than on that era's countless battlefields.

It was no accident that the failure to prevent escalating abuses of the human rights of Ottoman minorities climaxed with the systematic deportation and mass murder of the Armenian population of the empire in World War I. While other minority groups had broken free from the Ottoman Empire, the Armenians hoped that reforms--supported by the Western powers-would bring change. Instead a new nationalism spread through the Ottoman leadership that left no place for the Christian minorities within the empire. Under the cover of World War I the genocide of the Armenians began.

In 1915 journalists, politicians, and ordinary people considered how best to respond to the accounts of "horrors" and "outrages" in Turkey's Anatolian desert. Unable to remain silent, local and national leaders challenged tradition by boldly proclaiming that responsibility for human life does not stop at national borders. Their solutions set important precedents for international law. In fact, the phrase "crimes against humanity," made famous as one of the counts at the post-Holocaust Nuremberg Trials, was first used to describe the massacres of Armenian civilians in the spring of 1915.

As the pillaging of Armenian villages continued, diplomats debated questions of national sovereignty. In the absence of military intervention, coalitions of individuals, religious groups, and voluntary associations were able to raise millions of dollars to house and feed refugees from the slaughter. While those efforts saved many, humanitarian relief alone could not stop the mass murder of women, children, and men. In the wake of the genocide, official promises to hold the perpetrators accountable faded, as did support for the new Armenian state.

To many who had followed the bloody history of Turkey's campaign against its own people, the impunity enjoyed by those who had ordered and carried out the killings was unbearable. One of them was Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew and a law student. Lemkin confronted one of his law school professors. He asked, "Why is the killing of a million people a lesser crime than the killing of a single individual?" His professor used a metaphor to explain that courts did not have any jurisdiction: "Consider the case of a farmer who owns a flock of chickens. He kills them and this is his business. If you interfere, you are trespassing." But, replied an incensed Lemkin, "the Armenians are not chickens." Lemkin dedicated the rest of his life to finding a way to make sure that the law would recognize the difference. In 1944 Lemkin coined the word "genocide" and later he drafted the United Nations Convention on Genocide. The convention was ratified on December 9, 1948, one day before the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Although this convention requires that its signatories take whatever steps are necessary to prevent genocide, too often the international community does little but stand by while mass killings continue in places like Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In his role as a columnist for the New York Times, Nicholas Kristoff warns readers about the consequences of silence. "There is something special about genocide," he writes, "When human beings deliberately wipe out others because of their tribe or skin color, when babies succumb not to diarrhea but to bayonets and bonfires, that is not just one more tragedy. It is a monstrosity that demands a response from other humans. We demean our own humanity, and that of the victims, when we avert our eyes."

We hope that this series of lessons will help a new generation to understand that genocide is a threat to all of us: it is indeed a "crime against humanity."

This Google Book includes a look at the Congressional record of debate in both the House and the Senate regarding creating a "Leif Ericson Day" in 1964.

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.

Did you know that two major energy sources – hydro and solar power – have deep roots in Wisconsin history? It’s true. You might even say a current of energy-related ingenuity surged through our great state throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Read on if we’ve ignited your curiosity.

Students will be able to identify the differences between suffragettes and suffragists and the goals of the suffrage movement. After reading about the twentieth-century suffrage movement, students will be able to create either a protest poster, political cartoon, or speech that accurately portrays the arguments of suffragists, suffragettes, and anti-suffragistsStudents should have learned about Jane Addams as a Progressive Era figure, especially her role in Hull-House. Students should also have learned about the Seneca Falls Convention and the earlier suffrage work of the nineteenth century.

During the Civil War women played an important role both on the battlefield and on the home front. They helped after battles as nurses, ran businesses and farms, and worked in munitions factories while their fathers and brothers were off at war. They supported the war effort by contributing to organizations like the United States Sanitary Commission, and in rare cases even disguised themselves as soldiers and participated in battles.
Students will be able to:
1. Name four roles that women had during the Civil War.
2. Describe four contributions women made to the war effort.
3. Explain three difficulties women faced during the Civil War.

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.