Chronicling America is an excellent source for newspapers published by marginalized communities and newspapers published in languages other than English. These papers can help students break through difficult research barriers in order to access the experiences and perspectives of communities not frequently included in the study of U.S. history.
Teach Immigration History from the University of Texas at Austin explains the important and complicated history of immigration to the United States for general audiences and high school teachers of U.S. history and civics courses. The backbone of the website is an 80-item chronology of key events, laws, and court rulings that are further explained by a dozen thematic lesson plans on topics such as citizenship, an overview of major laws, gender and immigration, and migration within the Americas.
Now celebrated in more than 40 countries, Jazz Appreciation Month offers an opportunity to explore cultural dynamics that inform jazz music across places, as well as the idiosyncratic ways in which jazz artists reimagine and perform their local for the global.
Philipsburg Manor, located in Sleepy Hollow, New York, is a historic site owned and operated by Historic Hudson Valley. The site tells the story of the 23 enslaved Africans who were the only full-time, year round residents of the Manor, and whose forced labor was the backbone of the Philipse’s international trading empire. In July 2019, Philipsburg Manor will host a summer teachers’ institute on Slavery in the Colonial North for K-12 teachers. For more information, visit www.HudsonValley.org.
On the same day when the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other national media outlets announced the reopening of the Emmett Till case, 36 K-12 educators from across the country were gathered for a panel discussion in the Tallahatchie County Courthouse, where the Till murder trial took place in 1955.
Critics have hailed The Things They Carried as one of the finest examples in American literature of writing about war. O’Brien served in Vietnam from 1969 to 1970, and, in The Things They Carried, wrote a co-created collection of linked stories that reads like a memoir. Used in high school literature and history classrooms across the U.S., our essay offers analysis of this popular book.
On April 14 we commemorate the death of Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865). The years in which Lincoln served as president, 1861–1865, were among the most momentous in America’s history. A month after his election, South Carolina seceded from the Union, triggering a four-year conflict that would leave nearly a million Americans dead or wounded, four million slaves free, and a nation changed forever.
Chronicling America, a collaborative project of NEH and the Library of Congress, offers a deep repository of historic American newspapers covering the years 1836–1922. Students can use newspapers available through Chronicling America to expose the rich texture of the women’s rights movement and its many milestones, meetings, and debates right from the beginning and in a way that few other resources can. As an added bonus, they will be working with the kind of complex informational texts that the Common Core English Language Standards recommends. In what follows, we'll be suggesting articles written from a variety of points of view that make arguments based on appeals to evidence.
As The Vietnam War by Ken Burns and Lynne Novick is now in the rearview mirror it’s important to focus on how we will offer students the best information about the Vietnam era. For it is no longer a question of “if” we talk about Vietnam, but rather “how.” At the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund our mission remains to honor and preserve the legacy of service and educate all generations about the impact of the Vietnam War.
We wanted to let you know about some great new resources available for National History Day to help your students investigate this year’s theme: Conflict and Compromise in History.
