This collection uses primary sources to explore American Indian boarding schools. 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.

In the 1870’s, the United States Government began a system of education for Native Americans in the U.S. Richard Pratt, a military veteran of the Civil War, was chosen to lead a school intended to assimilate Native American children into white American culture. Students there would be forced to cut their hair, speak the English language, change their names to Christian names, and change from their traditional religious beliefs to Christianity. Pratt founded the Carlisle Indian School in Carlisle, PA in 1873. The boarding schools would have a profoundly negative impact upon generations of Native Americans and forced many to lose contact with their traditional culture. Several boarding schools were operated in Wisconsin, including one in Lac du Flambeau, WI.

The National Humanities center presents reading guides with primary source materials for the study of America in 1870 - 1912: The Gilded and the Gritty. Primary source materials include poems, paintings, essays, stories, articles, speeches, court cases, cartoons, and more. Resources are divided into the topics: Memory, Progress, People, Power, and Empire.

" In this course we will read essays, novels, memoirs, and graphic texts, and view documentary and experimental films and videos which explore race from the standpoint of the multiracial. Examining the varied work of multiracial authors and filmmakers such as Danzy Senna, Ruth Ozeki, Kip Fulbeck, James McBride and others, we will focus not on how multiracial people are seen or imagined by the dominant culture, but instead on how they represent themselves. How do these authors approach issues of family, community, nation, language and history? What can their work tell us about the complex interconnections between race, gender, class, sexuality, and citizenship? Is there a relationship between their experiences of multiraciality and a willingness to experiment with form and genre? In addressing these and other questions, we will endeavor to think and write more critically and creatively about race as a social category and a lived experience."

Does race still matter, as Cornel West proclaimed in his 1994 book of that title, or do we now live, as others maintain, in a post-racial society? The very notion of what constitutes race remains a complex and evolving question in cultural terms. In this course we will engage this question head-on, reading and writing about issues involving the construction of race and racial identity as reflected from a number of vantage points and via a rich array of voices and genres. Readings will include literary works by such writers as Toni Morrison, Junot Diaz, and Sherman Alexie, as well as perspectives on film and popular culture from figures such as Malcolm Gladwell and Touré.

This course seeks to provide a supportive context for students to grow significantly as writers by discovering and engaging with issues that matter to them. Writing on social and ethical issues, we can see ourselves within a tradition of authors such as Charles Dickens, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, George Orwell, Rachel Carson, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., who have used the power of the pen to inspire social change.