The month of May is an opportunity for reflection on and commemoration of all that AAPI individuals and organizations have accomplished and contributed to U.S. history and culture. This piece highlights NEH projects and classroom resources for teaching about these experiences in America.
The We the People Bookshelf theme, “A More Perfect Union,” is the literary complement of library programs observing the sesquicentennial of the Civil War in American history and culture.
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.
The story of America—its founding, its shaping, its mythology—is told in many ways. Their influence may not always be obvious, but artists and their works have played an essential, powerful role in telling some of these stories.
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.
When we think of using primary source oral histories in our classrooms, there is one resource that is often overlooked but ideally suited to the world history, civics, or global studies curriculum -- the oral histories of our diplomats.
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.
