The National Humanities center presents reading guides with primary source materials for the study of the British Atlantic Colonies 1690-1763: Becoming American. Primary source materials include letters, pamphlets, journals, newspapers, maps, paintings, poems, and more. Resources are divided into the topics: Growth, Peoples, Economies, Ideas, and American.

This webquest gives students an overview of our Constitution, its parts, why it was written, what it does, and what changes have been made.

Instructor Notes: Teachers can assign this content to their students in iCivics account and then Clicking the Assign button on this activity. Teachers will then have the option to add a Class into iCivics OR Sync a roster from Google Classroom. This will allow teachers to see student's responses. There are also Downloadable Resources available to support this learning activity.

This collection uses primary sources to explore the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. 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.

Role of the engineer as patent expert and as technical witness in court and patent interference and related proceedings. Rights and obligations of engineers in connection with educational institutions, government, and large and small businesses. Various manners of transplanting inventions into business operations, including development of New England and other US electronics and biotech industries and their different types of institutions. American systems of incentive to creativity apart from the patent laws in the atomic energy and space fields. For graduate students only; others see 6.901.

Website Description:
In Do I Have a Right? students run their own firm of lawyers specializing in constitutional law. They decide if potential clients have a right, match them with the best lawyer, and win their case. The more clients you serve and the more cases you win, and the faster your law firm grows!

Do I Have Right? includes:
*Full edition or a Bill of Rights edition
*Option to play in English language or Spanish language
*Option to hear or mute English voiceover, music, and/or sound effects

Website Description:
Make your students’ gameplay more meaningful by using our constitutional rights activity and assessment set designed specifically for Do I Have a Right?. This easy-to-use Extension Pack helps you give context and purpose to the game, as well as reinforce and assess the game concepts. That means deeper learning for students and best practices around game-centered learning for you! Extension Packs require PowerPoint and are designed for use with projectors or interactive whiteboards.

This Extension Pack now includes English language learner (ELL) supports. We've included tips and practice that help make differentiated instruction a breeze. Best of all, new instructional scaffolds now mean this lesson is adaptable for a wide range of learners!

Student Learning Objectives:
Students will be able to...
*Describe the arguments for and against listing people’s rights in the Constitution (Bill of Rights).
*Identify key rights granted by the Bill of Rights and the 13th, 14th, 15th, 19th, and 26th Amendments
*Recall the specific amendment that guarantees a particular right
*Recognize complaints not involving constitutional rights

This lesson calls for students to take a stand on whether there should be drug testing in schools or not. Students stand along a spectrum – ranging from “test everyone” to “never test anyone” – to represent their position on the issue. As the class discusses and debates, students are encouraged to consider opposite views, and can move along the spectrum to reflect changed opinions. The lesson concludes with a conversation about the possible outcomes of the policies brought up during the session.

In this engaging, interactive strategy, introduce the Bill of Rights, Natural Rights, and other constitutional concepts to your students – as a response to extraterrestrials landing in Oregon!

The First Amendment holds some of our biggest rights as American citizens. Nick reviews them for us!

TRANSCRIPT
"We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America."

Our constitution sounds pretty good to me. Nothing to change there, right? Wrong. Even the founding fathers knew they couldn't make a perfect guide for running the country. Enter amendments. An amendment is any improvements, revisions, or corrections to the Constitution. There are currently 20-plus amendments to the Constitution, but I want to focus on the first one. It provides some of our most important rights.

The First Amendment states: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." So within the First Amendment, we've got these five protected rights. Freedom of religion, the freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to assembly, and the right to petition the government. Let's take a look at these a little closer.

Freedom of religion was super important to the founding fathers. It's one of the reasons they came to America in the first place. They wanted to escape other countries where they were forced to follow a specific religion. Because of the First Amendment you can now practice any religion or no religion at all. The freedom of speech and assembly can be grouped together. They basically mean we can express our own opinions. We're allowed to speak out and get together in groups to express our ideas. Of course, there are some exceptions. For example, you can't tell lies about people, or they could try to sue you for it.

That idea of telling the truth leads me to the next protection which is super important for folks who work in the news like me, the freedom of the press. It means journalists are allowed to report on what's going on without fear that the government might get upset and stop them from doing their work. In some countries without the freedom of the press like China, journalists are only allowed to report what the government wants. As you can imagine, if the government makes a mistake or isn't treating people fairly, they aren't going to want the news to tell people about it.

Finally the right to petition the government empowers citizens to address their leaders directly if they're concerned about actions or issues. You may have heard about people writing their Senators, governor's or other politicians to share their opinions or express concern. The First Amendment aimed to set Americans apart from other countries and governments that impose stiff rules and regulations over their citizens or punish them for speaking out. It's all about letting our country stay by the people and for the people. As the country grows and changes so do the needs of the Constitution. It's not stuck in the 1700s. It's a living, breathing part of our democracy.

This unit will use a variety of resources to give students a guide to understanding Treaty Rights and the importance of Treaty Rights to Indigenous peoples. It is important for all people, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, to understand Treaty Rights, how they were established, and how they apply today.

According to many scholars, modern liberal democracy has advanced in waves. But liberal democracy has also had its setbacks. Some argue that it is in trouble in the world today, and that the young millennial generation is losing faith in it.

The goal of the jury selection process in both civil and criminal proceedings is to seat an impartial jury. Longstanding processes and procedures are followed to ensure that a trial is fair for the two opposing parties. The Supreme Court decision in Edmonson v. Leesville Concrete Co. (1991), however, wasn’t about a violation related to either party’s constitutional rights; it was about the rights of prospective jurors. Constitutional protections apply to the rights of all private individuals in a courtroom, including prospective jurors.

Before Edmonson, the law only prevented race-based peremptory challenges in criminal trials. With Edmonson, the Court extended the prohibition to civil trials. “Racial discrimination,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote in the opinion of the Court, “has no place in the courtroom, whether the proceeding is civil or criminal.” It threatens the fairness and impartiality of the proceedings and violates equal protection principles.

In this lesson, students analyze the interplay of processes and procedures that courts use to seat an impartial jury and gain appreciation for the essential role of juries in the justice system. They also explore the responsibilities and limits placed on government by the Constitution in the context of civil and criminal trials.

This lesson discusses the constitutional right to petition, and how petitions have been used in American history. Students will review historical and contemporary petitions and offer ideas about how petitions might be used in their community or state.

The First Amendment protects some of our most cherished rights, including religious liberty, free speech, a free press, the right to assemble, and the right to petition our government for a redress of grievances. Together, these essential rights are connected to the freedom of conscience—protecting our ability to think as we will and speak as we think. As we examine the First Amendment’s text and history, we will explore debates over the First Amendment’s five freedoms, analyze landmark Supreme Court cases, and examine how the First Amendment has been used by groups of all perspectives to promote their vision of a more perfect Union.

Slavery was embedded into America’s fabric by the time of the framing and ratification of the Constitution. At the Constitutional Convention, the delegates refused to write the word “slavery” or enshrine a “right to property in men” in the Constitution’s text, but they did compromise on the issue of slavery, writing important protections for slaveholders into our nation’s charter. Debates over slavery continued (and increased) in the decades to come, culminating in Abraham Lincoln’s election as America’s first anti-slavery president, Southern secession, and the Civil War. Following this bloody war, the Reconstruction Republicans worked to rebuild our nation on a stronger constitutional foundation, passing our nation’s first civil rights laws and ratifying the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. These amendments ended slavery, wrote the Declaration of Independence’s promise of freedom and equality into the Constitution, and promised to end racial discrimination in voting. Many scholars refer to this key period as America’s “Second Founding.”

The original Constitution did not specifically protect the right to vote—leaving the issue largely to the states. For much of American history, this right has often been granted to some, but denied to others; however, through a series of amendments to the Constitution, the right to vote has expanded over time. These amendments have protected the voting rights of new groups, including by banning discrimination at the ballot box based on race (15th Amendment) and sex (19th Amendment). They also granted Congress new power to enforce these constitutional guarantees, which Congress has used to pass landmark statutes like the Voting Rights Act of 1965. While state governments continue to play a central role in elections today, these new amendments carved out a new—and important—role for the national government in this important area.

The founders were children of the Enlightenment, a European intellectual movement beginning in the late 1600s. The ideas that fueled this period were a celebration of reason, the power through which human beings might understand the universe and improve their condition. Overall, the movement strived for knowledge, freedom, and happiness. These ideas sparked transformational changes in art, philosophy, and politics. When crafting a new constitution, the founders followed this Enlightenment model and drew lessons from history and from their own experiences. Between the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, the American people were governed at the national level by the Articles of Confederation and at the state level by state constitutions. From the founders’ perspective, these frameworks of government were noble experiments, but also deeply flawed. With the U.S. Constitution, the Founding generation established a new national government designed to address the deficiencies in these forms of government—creating a new government that was strong and deliberative enough to achieve common purposes and check mob violence but also restrained enough to protect individual liberty.

Shortly after the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, the Founding generation added the Bill of Rights—the Constitution’s first 10 amendments. These amendments guarantee many of our most cherished liberties, including the freedom of religion, the freedom of speech, the right to keep and bear arms, and the right to a jury trial. After the Constitutional Convention, the absence of a bill of rights emerged as a key part of the debates over ratification. Anti-Federalists—those who opposed the Constitution —pointed to the missing bill of rights as a fatal flaw in the new document. Several states ratified the Constitution with an understanding that amendments would be promptly added by the new government. This module will explore the origins of the Bill of Rights, explain its importance to the debate over the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, and walk through the specific rights enshrined in each of the first 10 amendments.

While the United States had officially guaranteed Native American rights and recognized the sovereignty of Native American nations through several legally binding treaties since the eighteenth century, the government repeatedly violated these treaties, opening land that was reserved for Indian nations to settlers, speculators, and developers. Native Americans’ right to a sovereign existence included maintaining traditional relationships to the lands and waters that Native peoples had historically used. But 200 years of treaty violations, land theft, and forced assimilation by the federal government threatened the existence of many Indian nations. In their protests to the federal government from 1968 to 1978, Native American activists demanded that the federal government honor its treaty obligations so that tribes could restore their traditional relationships to the land, an effort that continues today. The National Park Service, as a steward of many Indigenous lands, played a significant role in this history that will continue into the future.

How did we go from thirteen British colonies to the United States of America? Explore the major hardships of life under British rule, why some colonists decided to break away, and how they set a path for a new and independent government.