IWitness includes features for teachers, including guidelines for using Holocaust survivor and witness testimony in education. The guidelines offer practical information and tips about how to integrate video testimony into classroom lessons and projects.   Students have the opportunity to use technology to become more active learners while encountering survivors and other eyewitnesses talking about their experiences before, during and after the Holocaust.

IWitness includes features for teachers, including guidelines for using Holocaust survivor and witness testimony in education. The guidelines offer practical information and tips about how to integrate video testimony into classroom lessons and projects.   Students have the opportunity to use technology to become more active learners while encountering survivors and other eyewitnesses talking about their experiences before, during and after the Holocaust.

Though the Great Steel Strike of 1919 failed in its immediate aims, it left a legacy in the steel regions of the United States that lasted for decades. In 1974 when historian Peter Gotlieb asked former steelworker Joe Rudiak, the son of Polish immigrants, about his participation in unionization struggles in the 1930s, he started by recalling his memories of the 1919 steel strike as a young boy. Here, Rudiak told how his father was blacklisted for acknowledging his support of the union. From such experiences, he explained, unionism got "embedded in you."

In the 1960s, lottery-like contests designed to publicize products through sweepstakes competitions spread rapidly. In the 19th century, every state banned lotteries--defined as competitions in which chances to win prizes were sold÷to protect citizens. In 1868, Congress prohibited the distribution of lottery materials through the mail. The mid-20th century sweepstakes, however, did not require contestants to purchase tickets or products to win prizes and were thus considered legal. In 1966, the number of national sweepstakes exceeded 600 and consumer groups accused them of deceptive practices. An FTC investigation in 1968 into sweepstakes from oil companies and supermarket chains found evidence of deception. In the following excerpts from letters to a 1969 Congressional investigation, citizens urged Congress to take action to regulate sweepstakes. Their efforts failed to produce a bill that passed through Congress, however, and by 1998, the FTC estimated that more than 400 million sweepstakes flooded the mail annually and that consumers lost more than $40 billion each year through sweepstakes and telemarketing scams. In 1999, Congress passed the Deceptive Mail Prevention and Enforcement Act. Among other consumer protections, this Act required sweepstakes materials to clearly state odds of winning, value of prizes, and rules.

Farm households depended heavily on the work of women and children. At first children were assigned simple tasks; later they learned chores that were differentiated according to gender roles. In the 1790s, young unmarried women such as Elizabeth Fuller pursued work in the dairy or in home manufacturing along with their housework and garden tasks. Fuller lived in the central Massachusetts town of Princeton; her diary recorded her health, social activities, and any unusual events in her life. Mostly, she faced a regular round of household tasks such as making cheese or baking pies. She often washed, carded, and spun wool, since her most significant labor was the household textile production that provided most farm families with their clothing.

Some of the sharpest and most violent class struggles in American history were fought in the hard rock mining towns of the nineteenth-century West. In Cripple Creek, Colorado, for example, violent conflict broke out in 1903 between members of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) and corporate mining interests determined to crush the union. Before it was over, thirty men had been killed in numerous gun battles. The civil war was not only fought with fists, bullets, and dynamite in the streets and mines of Cripple Creek; it also was a war of words waged in the press. In June, 1904, the Mine Owners' Association and the WFM submitted these statements to eastern newspapers, expressing opposing viewpoints on the purpose of the strike.

If you haven't visited Diverse Book Finder recently, you will find they have expanded their services to include YA books and are beginning to include small publishers in their collection.

The Democratic party arrived at its 1968 convention in Chicago torn apart by the Vietnam war and the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. As delegates and protestors arrived in Chicago in late August 1968, the Chicago American newspaper published a guide to the cast of characters" converging on the city. Illustrating student supporters of Eugene McCarthy

The word "tramp" came into common usage in the 1870s as a disparaging description of homeless men thrown out of work by the economic depression and forced to take to the road in search of a job or food. Many Americans viewed tramps with a combination of fear and disgust. Fears of the "tramp menace" that had been so strong in the seventies were revived during the even more devastating depression that began in 1893. Most government officials and business leaders reacted with horror at the prospect of jobless men wandering the roads. A notable exception was the Populist governor of Kansas, Lorenzo Dow Lewelling. His executive proclamation of December 4, 1893, defended the rights of the homeless against arbitrary arrest by local police. His proclamation, published in the Topeka Daily Capital on December 5, 1893, became known as the "Tramp Circular." Lewelling's sympathy for the tramping unemployed may have come, in part, from personal experience; he himself had wandered the roads in search of work in the 1870s depression.

Between July 13 and 16, 1863, the largest riots the United States had yet seen shook New York City. In the so-called Civil War draft riots, the city's poor white working people, many of them Irish immigrants, bloodily protested the federally-imposed draft requiring all men to enlist in the Union Army. The rioters took out their rage on their perceived enemies: the Republicans whose wealth allowed them to purchase substitutes for military service, and the poor African Americans--their rivals in the city's labor market--for whom the war was being fought. On July 20, four days after federal troops put down the uprising, a group of Wall Street businessmen formed a committee to aid New York's devastated black community. The Committee of Merchants for the Relief of Colored People Suffering from the Late Riots gathered and distributed funds, and collected the following testimony.

Based on a Tumblr site, this Huffington Post article showcases six recent pop songs translated into the style of Shakespearean sonnets. While there is no explicit education purpose, teachers can imagine many uses especially when introducing Shakespearean language to students.

Hundreds of writers and artists lived in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s and were part of a vibrant, creative community that found its voice in what came to be called the "Harlem Renaissance." Alain Locke's 1925 collection The New Negro --a compilation of literature by and essays about "New Negro" artists and black culture--became a "manifesto" of the movement. Some of black America's foremost writers contributed stories and poems to the volume. The work of these artists drew upon the African-American experience and expressed a new pride in black racial identity and heritage. Several factors accounted for the birth of the movement and propelled it forward. By 1920 the once white ethnic neighborhood of Harlem in upper Manhattan overflowed with recent African-American migrants from the South and the Caribbean. Black soldiers returning from World War I shared a new sense of pride, militancy, and entitlement, as expressed in Claude McKay's 1919 protest poem "If We Must Die."

Black Nationalist Marcus Garvey recognized that his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) would find its most enthusiastic audience in the United States, despite the organization's professed worldwide mission. After fighting World War I, ostensibly to defend democracy and self-determination, thousands of African-American soldiers returned home to find intensified discrimination, segregation, racial violence, and hostile relations with white Americans. Sensing growing frustration, Garvey used his considerable charisma to attract thousands of disillusioned black working-class and lower middle-class followers and became the most popular black leader in America in the early 1920s. The UNIA, committed to notions of racial purity and separatism, insisted that salvation for African Americans meant building an autonomous, black-led nation in Africa. To this end, the movement offered in its "Back to Africa" campaign a powerful message of black pride and economic self-sufficiency. In Garvey's 1921 speech, "If You Believe the Negro Has a Soul," he emphasized the inevitability of racial antagonism and the hopelessness of interracial coexistence.

For centuries pirates, known as the Barbary pirates, operated out of the North African states of Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli. European states paid tribute to them to ensure their people's safe passage. Without British protection and with few financial or diplomatic resources, the new American nation's ships and citizens were vulnerable on the high seas. Between 1785 and 1820, more than 700 Americans were taken hostage and often enslaved. The American public was fascinated by these captives' stories; their tales of desert cities, caravans, and harems bridged the previously popular Puritan captivity narratives and emerging slave narratives. The most influential of all these American Barbary narratives was James Riley's Loss of the American Brig Commerce. A Connecticut sea captain, Riley ran aground in 1815 and was captured by wandering Arabs. He used his enslavement to call into question the enslavement of Africans and express a common humanity with the desert people he encountered.

Digital Literacy and Responsibility. The student will learn new skills for using technology in productive, creative, and responsible ways. They will use the skills to help themselves and others in their world to make good decisions about technology. (Description taken from site, retrieved on May,3, 2016)

Davy Crockett was a frontiersmen, soldier, and politician who used his autobiography to help create an image of himself as a larger-than-life American hero. The description of frontier politics presented here is based on his campaign for a seat in the Tennessee legislature in 1821. In the early decades of the 19th century, property qualifications for voting were lifted and more white men gained access to the vote. With this greater access came new and more democratic styles of political activity. To recruit support at elections, office seekers made public meetings and popular entertainments part of political life. Crockett's account reflected these changes, suggesting that humor, hunting skills, and male camaraderie were as important to electoral success as a clear stance on the issues of the day.

Instructions for constructing and planting Fast Plants in the recycled "Bottle Growing System" that was designed by the Wisconsin Fast Plant Program. This is a low-cost growing system ideal for growing plants in the classroom, made from recycled soda or water bottles. These growing system are easy to build, use, and can be cleaned and reused for multiple years.

Immigrants and African Americans decisively shaped a multiethnic urban popular culture in the late 19th century, built in large measure on the emergence of vaudeville. Vaudeville blended slapstick comedy, blackface minstrelsy, and sentimental songs into a rich and highly popular cultural stew. Among the most successful vaudeville practitioners were two Jewish singers and comics from the mean streets of Manhattan's Lower East Side, Joe Weber and Lew Fields. Weber and Fields' routines usually featured broad stereotypes of German immigrants: Fields played "Meyer," the shrewd German slickster who wanted to "put one over" on Weber's "Mike," the dumb "Dutch" newcomer. At the peak of their popularity in 1904, Weber and Fields recorded this popular routine, "The Hypnotist," for commercial sale. Ironically, just a few months after recording this routine, the Weber and Fields team broke up, ending nearly three decades of public performances, the longest of any team in American popular theater.

The Communist-led Unemployed Councils mobilized jobless men and women in hundreds of local communities to demand jobs and better treatment from relief authorities. In these excerpts from a recorded interview, Anna Taffler, a Communist activist and a Russian Jewish immigrant, described how her own experience of facing eviction pushed her into organizing the unemployed. She also talked about the focus of local councils on issues like fighting for more relief and stopping evictions.