This series of lessons introduces students to the expectations of members of different groups. In the first lesson, students explore what it means to be members of their closest groups like the family, classroom, and a team. Towards, the end of the lesson students move on to discussions about more abstract groups such as a neighborhood or a town. In the second lesson, students learn the difference between the rights and responsibilities of US citizens outlined in the US Constitution. Finally, the accumulating activity asks classrooms to stage a mock election where students are asked to choose a fun class activity. Students are asked to use their knowledge of rights and responsibilities to make a choice that serves the common good of the class.

This lesson is the first part of the History's Mysteries Unit, "What Makes a Good Leader?" In this introductory lesson, students what qualities a good leader possesses. They also explore how different leaders in different situations such as a classroom, neighborhood, or local government are likely to have different skill sets.
Other lessons in this unit include:
-History's Mysteries: Grade 1, Unit 2, Mystery #2-Why Did People Think George Washington was a Good Leader?
History's Mysteries: Grade 1 Unit 2, Mystery #3-Do Good Leaders Always Do Good Things?

Over the course of nine months, eleven Hmong language educators took an Ethnic Studies course with Dr. Jenna Cushing-Leubner & Heritage Language/Ethnic Studies teacher Natalia Benjamin at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, and attended the Boston Ethnic Studies training with Katie Li and her team. Afterwards Dr. Vicky Xiong-Lor of Clovis Unified and Doua Vue of Fresno Unified lead the team through self-healing activities and created a Hmong Ethnic Studies curriculum. This is the first phase of curriculum creation with more to come.

Hmong Museum is the first museum dedicated to the preservation and education of Hmong culture, history, experiences, and arts. We do this through the creation and collaboration of programs that:

Document Hmong history & knowledge
Exhibit Hmong culture & art
Share Hmong experiences & stories

Learn Uake, Hmong Museum Education Resources for K-12, offers a unit of study (10 lessons) for grades 7-12. Learn Uake is a central location for students, teachers, and parents to find enriching research-based resources about Hmong people, history, culture, and art.

The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) enlisted young people and local leaders to register and encourage southern African-Americans to vote during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960's. Because the young organizers faced tremendous risks by challenging segregation and encouraging people to vote, the group earned a reputation as the "shock troops" of the Civil Rights Movement. Hollis Watkins joined SNCC in the early 1960's and canvassed potential voters in the area of McComb, Mississippi. He also participated in direct actions, for which he served time in jail. Watkins remembered the risks SNCC organizers faced when working alone and in pairs, and the support they received from the African-American community.

This inquiry focuses on examining a painting from a Holocaust survivor, a quote from a survivor, and an excerpt from an interview from a liberator to explore how art can express the pain of the Holocaust and how using a combination of first-hand sources can provide a better understanding of specific events of the Holocaust. The questions, tasks, and sources in this inquiry asks student to examine one piece of art using visual thinking strategies then use their observations on the painting in combination with a survivor quote and a liberator interview to construct a claim that using a combination of sources provides a better/more comprehensive understanding of the final days of the Holocaust and liberation.

This 2016 Inquiry Challenge winner leads students through an investigation of the actions made by ordinary people during the Holocaust: to participate, to help, or to stand by. By investigating the compelling question “Are bystanders guilty too?” students evaluate the different routes of action/inaction, as well as the associated risks. The formative performance tasks build on knowledge and skills through the course of the inquiry and help students recognize different perspectives in order to better understand the ways in which everyday people had choices to either help or be complicit in persecution. Students create an evidence-based argument about whether bystanders should be seen as guilty after considering the actions of persecutors and rescuers, and assessing viewpoints concerning bystander responsibility in a totalitarian regime.

This illustration from the widely-circulated 1950 book How to Survive an Atomic Bomb, which designated "appropriate" civil-defense jobs for men and women, reflected the contemporary labor market. While more women worked outside the home, they were largely confined to a female job ghetto, where wages were low, and prestige and opportunities for career advancement limited. Their subordination in the labor market coincided with a new postwar sexual ideology marked by rigidly defined gender roles that emphasized women's submissiveness and confinement to housework.

Many working people responded to industrial capitalism with strategies that were neither purely individualistic nor collective. On the one hand, the quest for home ownership, which absorbed so many working-class families, was an individual--or family-based--effort. On the other hand, working people often employed their own community-based institutions such as savings and loan associations to achieve the goal of owning their own homes. Outsiders, like the authors of this 1889 Pennsylvania government report on building and loans associations, might celebrate the ways that these associations served as an "antidote against anarchism." But for working people themselves, the building and loan associations were simply vehicles for attaining independence and security.

Images of women in the kitchen are a familiar scene in the history of home economics, but what these images don’t show is the important role that home economics played in getting women into higher education. From its inception, collegiate home economics was multidisciplinary and integrative with an emphasis on science applied to the real world of the home, family, and community. It was an academic science designed by women for women. In the first half of the 20th century, these programs prepared women for teaching but also for careers in extension services, state and federal government, industry, restaurants, hotels, and hospitals.

The cowboy of Western mythology rode the range during the heyday of the long cattle drives in the l860s and 1870s. Despite the individualism emphasized in myth, most cowhands were employees of Eastern and European capitalists who raised cattle as a corporate enterprise to serve a growing appetite for beef in the U.S. Cowboys were overworked hired hands who rode in freezing wind and rain or roasted in the Texas sun; searched for lost cattle; mended fences; ate monotonous and bad food; and suffered stampedes, quicksand, blizzards, floods, and drought. The work was hard, dangerous, and often lonely; pay averaged from $25 to $40 a month. Many became cowboys for lack of other job opportunities; one of every three cowboys was an African American or Mexican. In the late 1930s writers employed by the Federal Writers Project in Texas interviewed more than 400 cowboys, providing some of the only firsthand sources about late 19th-century cowboys. In this interview, cowboy Richard Phillips offered a firsthand glimpse of the hard life that awaited the men who trailed cattle to market.

This lesson recounts efforts to improve homesteading laws and make land ownership possible for more settlers. The distribution of government lands had been an issue since the Revolutionary War. Preemption -- settling the land first and paying for it later -- became national policy; however, supporting legislation was stymied until the secession of Southern states. See one of the first applications for land under this law. Teaching activities are included.

This collection uses primary sources to explore the Homestead Acts. 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.

This collection uses primary sources to explore the Homestead Strike. 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.

The ideology of success--the notion that anyone could make it with enough hard work--was widely promoted in Gilded Age America. One of its most famous proponents was the author Horatio Alger, whose novels showed how poor boys could move from "rags to respectability" through "pluck and luck." Between the late 1860s and his death in 1899, Alger published more than 100 of these formulaic stories about poor boys who made good more often because of fortunate accidents than because of hard work and denial. The tale of Frank Courtney's lucky break in The World Before Him (1880) was typical of these stories. In this selection, young Frank grabs the proverbial golden ring of success less by pluck than by sheer luck.

The canteen girl stood as symbol of American volunteerism and femininity in World War I. Sponsored by the YMCA and other charitable organizations, canteens were efforts to maintain soldiers' morale and to keep them from vice. In Uncensored Letters of a Canteen Girl, Kathleen Morse described the challenges of dispensing hot chocolate and planning entertainments with sparse supplies. At the same time, her letters revealed the less tangible work of the canteen girls: to boost morale by providing reminders of the comforts of home and by representing the sweethearts, sisters, and mothers left behind.

With U.S. entry into World War I, President Woodrow Wilson appointed Herbert Hoover to head the newly created U.S. Food Administration. A mining engineer who had successfully organized the massive effort to get food to Belgium's citizens after the German army's sweep through that country in 1914, Hoover was now charged with managing domestic agriculture and conservation in order to feed the U.S. Army and assist Allied armies and civilians. "Food Will Win the War," declared the Food Administration through its ubiquitous posters and publicity efforts. Planting gardens, observing voluntary rationing, avoiding waste--these efforts at food conservation all came to be known as "Hooverizing." Women's magazines also took up the home conservation crusade, some employing military analogies to promote the recommendations of the Food Administration. Presenting domestic work as patriotic effort, this U.S. Food Administration campaign in Good Housekeeping offered women a membership shield and even provided instructions for sewing a "patriotic" housekeeping uniform.

In this article, written 24 years after the war for the children's magazine St. Nicholas, former Harper's Weekly sketch-artist Theodore R. Davis recollects the hazardous and inventive ways that pictorial journalists reported the Civil War. While photography was still in its infancy--unable yet to capture action or to be cheaply reproduced in periodicals or books--artists' battlefront sketches were the public's primary source of visual news of the war's people, places and events. Davis, who was 21 at the start of the war, was typical of this new type of reporter, recording direct observations or collected stories in rough sketches and notes that were dispatched to newspaper offices in New York where they were made into wood engravings and printed as illustrations in publications such as Harper's Weekly, Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, and the New York Illustrated News (the South had no comparable pictorial news resource).

Committees improve the organization of the Senate and House of Representatives. Members of Congress can’t be experts on all issues. For this reason, the Senate and House of Representatives developed committees that focus on particular subjects. Committees look at the way that government functions; identify issues that require review; gather and evaluate information; and make legislative
recommendations to the full House or Senate.