This resource features suggested books for Kindergarten that 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. 

This resource features transformative learning strategies that 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. 

I remixed this to .... This resource features transformative learning strategies that 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. 

Fears about the impact of movies on youth led to the Payne Fund research project, which brought together nineteen social scientists and resulted in eleven published reports. One of the most fascinating of the studies was carried out by Herbert Blumer, a young sociologist who would later go on to a distinguished career in the field. For a volume that he called Movies and Conduct (1933), Blumer asked more than fifteen hundred college and high school students to write "autobiographies"of their experiences going to the movies. In this motion picture autobiography, a high school "girl" talked about what the movies of the 1920s meant to her.

The annual convention of the Knights of Labor convened in Richmond, Virginia, a region divided by racial and political conflict, on October 4, 1886. In the 1880s, Southern politics was split between southern Democrats who sought to "redeem" the old order and a progressive (and in some places interracial) political movement that sought to extend the gains won by ordinary black and white southerners during the Reconstruction era. As more than one thousand delegates gathered from across the country in the former capital of the Confederacy, the labor and political reform movements hoped the convention would be a launching pad for their message of racial peace and political reform. But the convention and the Knights of Labor were quickly plunged into conflict over the organization's attitude toward the question of social equality between the races. Black Knight Frank J. Ferrell faced an uproar when he was invited to socialize with fellow white Knights at the convention. The attitude of an anonymous Knight of Labor, interviewed here, typified the not-in-my-neighborhood reaction of many white Knights to Ferrell's crossing of the color line.

America fought World War II to preserve freedom and democracy, yet that same war featured the greatest suppression of civil liberties in the nation's history. In an atmosphere of hysteria, President Roosevelt, encouraged by officials at all levels of the federal government, authorized the internment of tens of thousands of American citizens of Japanese ancestry and resident aliens from Japan. One of the most important of the legal challenges to the internment policy was Korematsu v. United States, a case brought by Fred T. Korematsu, a Nisei (an American-born person whose parents were born in Japan). Korematsu had been arrested by the FBI for failing to report for relocation and was convicted in federal court in September 1942. The U.S. Supreme Court, in a sharply divided 6-3 decision, upheld Korematsu's conviction in late 1944. The majority opinion, written by Justice Hugo Black, rejected the plaintiff's discrimination argument and upheld the government's right to relocate citizens in the face of wartime emergency.

Following the Civil War, the federal government brought newly freed people into the political and economic sphere through a variety of efforts known as Radical Reconstruction. But planters, unwilling to lose control over African-American laborers, attempted to rule the South through violence and legal and economic intimidation. The secret terrorist organization the Ku Klux Klan was part of the violent white reaction to Reconstruction. Founded by Confederate veterans in Tennessee in 1866, Klan nightriders targeted black veterans and freedmen who had left their employers and those who had succeeded in breaking out of the plantation system. African Americans who transgressed local norms of white supremacy were in particular danger as the testimony from Maria Carter and others at these 1871 Congressional hearings about the Klan made clear. Klan leaders often were prominent planters and their family members while poorer men made up the rank and file.

In this transcript of an interview recorded for Eyes on the Prize, Stokely Carmichael describes SNCC organizing campaigns and his views on Black Power.

In this digital history lesson, students corroborate competing accounts about La Malinche, one of the most significant and controversial figures in Mexican history. Students will reason historically about some of the most important historical documents on the conquest of Mexico in order to answer the central historical question: What was La Malinche’s role in the conquest of Mexico?

The power, global reach, and flexibility of multi-national corporations increased dramatically during the 1980's and 1990's as a revolution in communications technology and the increasing adoption of free trade agreements between countries allowed companies to shift production easily from one part of the globe to another. Many companies could now pressure labor unions by negotiating favorable contracts wherever labor costs and local tax laws suited them. However, the increasingly interwoven global economy, along with the technology that facilitated it, also gave rise to international labor organizing. As David Abdulah, education director of the Oilfield Workers Trade Union of Trinidad and Tobago, relates, union organizing and activism has become global, as workers in different countries develop networks across borders to keep up with and combat the unfair labor practices of the multi-nationals.

One of the prime frustrations of labor organizers in the late 1800s was the powerful myth that every American could attain untold riches if sufficiently hardworking and ambitious. The faith that some workers had in this mythology of the "self-made man" inhibited unionization and the spread of radical ideology. The anonymous writer of this 1877 editorial in the Labor Standard took aim at the national obsession with making money at any cost.

One of the greatest industrial tragedies in U.S. history occurred on March 25, 1911, when 146 workers, mostly young immigrant women, died in a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist company in New York City. The victims had been trapped by blocked exit doors and faulty fire escapes. The aftermath of the catastrophe brought grief and recriminations. Protest rallies and memorial meetings were held throughout the city. During one meeting at the Metropolitan Opera House, tension broke out between the working-class Lower East Siders who filled the galleries (and saw class solidarity as the ultimate solution to the problems of industrial safety) and the middle- and upper-class women in the boxes who sought reforms like creation of a bureau of fire prevention. The meeting would have broken up in disorder if not for a stirring speech by Rose Schneiderman, a Polish-born former hat worker who had once led a strike at the Triangle factory. Although she barely spoke above a whisper, Schneiderman held the audience spellbound.

Although absent from Hollywood portrayals of the old West, homosexuality was surely a feature of life on the frontier. "The West," observe John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman in their history of sexuality, "provided extensive opportunities for male-male intimacy. Some men were drawn to the frontier because of their attractions to men." Badger Clark was born in 1883 and grew up in Deadwood, South Dakota. His collection of western poems, Sun and Saddle Leather, was not published until the second decade of the 20th century. But the following verse about "The Lost Pardner" suggests a continuing--but largely forgotten--gay presence in the American West of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In this lesson, students will view a series of video clips that examine six major Supreme Court cases that dealt with LGBT issues. Students will identify the key issues and arguments made in these cases. After learning the background on these cases, students will learn more about Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinions in three of these cases and the Court’s reasoning.

After wearing black armbands to school in protest of the Vietnam War, three students – two of them siblings – were suspended by the Des Moines Independent Community School District for disrupting learning. The parents of the children sued the school for violating the children’s rights to free speech. The landmark Supreme Court case Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District determined it was a First Amendment violation for public schools to punish students for expressing themselves in certain circumstances. This lesson uses expert analysis, perspectives from the Tinkers, oral arguments and archival video to explore the case and the legacy of the ruling.

After wearing black armbands to school in protest of the Vietnam War, three students -- two of them siblings -- were suspended by the Des Moines Independent Community School District for disrupting learning. The parents of the children sued the school for violating the children's right to free speech. The landmark Supreme Court Case Tinker v. Des Moines determined it was a First Amendment violation for public schools to punish students for expressing themselves in certain circumstances. This lesson uses expert analysis, perspectives from the Tinkers, oral arguments, and archival video to explore the case and the legacy of the ruling.

The 1936 presidential election proved a decisive battle, not only in shaping the nation's political future but for the future of opinion polling. The Literary Digest, the venerable magazine founded in 1890, had correctly predicted the outcomes of the 1916, 1920, 1924, 1928, and 1932 elections by conducting polls. These polls were a lucrative venture for the magazine: readers liked them; newspapers played them up; and each "ballot" included a subscription blank. The 1936 postal card poll claimed to have asked one forth of the nation's voters which candidate they intended to vote for. In Literary Digest 's October 31 issue, based on more than 2,000,000 returned post cards, it issued its prediction: Republican presidential candidate Alfred Landon would win 57 percent of the popular vote and 370 electoral votes.

Students pair Dorothea Lange's photographs with passages from John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath. Students create an oral group presentation and discuss the relationship between the images and text.

The emotional and highly publicized case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti became a touchstone and rallying cry for American radicals. In 1920 the two Italian immigrants were accused of murder and although the evidence against them was flimsy, they were readily convicted, in large part because they were immigrants and anarchists. They were executed, despite international protests, on August 23, 1927. Aldino Felicani, printer and publisher of the anarchist paper Controcorrente, was a long-time acquaintance of Sacco and Vanzetti; in 1920 he organized the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee. In this interview with Dean Albertson, recorded in 1954, Felicani recalled his relationships with the accused men and his work on the defense committee. His story gave a sense of the emotion of the last days of Sacco and Vanzetti.

LATINO AMERICANS is the first major documentary series for television to chronicle the rich and varied history and experiences of Latinos, who have helped shape North America over the last 500-plus years and have become, with more than 50 million people, the largest minority group in the U.S