Esperanza Rising: Learning Not to Be Afraid to Start Over
In this lesson students will look behind the story at the historical, social, and cultural circumstances that help account for the great contrasts and contradictions that Esperanza experiences when she moves to California. The lesson also invites students to contemplate some of the changes Esperanza undergoes as she grows from a pampered child into a resourceful and responsible young woman.
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Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago”: Bringing a Great City Alive
In this lesson students examine primary documents including photographs, film, maps, and essays to learn about Chicago at the turn of the 20th century and make predictions about Carl Sandburg's famous poem. After examining the poem's use of personification and apostrophe, students write their own pieces about beloved places with Sandburg's poem as a model.
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Go West: Imagining the Oregon Trail
Students compare imagined travel experiences of their own with the actual experiences of 19th-century pioneers.
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Images of the New World
How did the English picture the native peoples of America during the early phases of colonization of North America? This lesson plan will enable students to interact with written and visual accounts of this critical formative period at the end of the 16th century, when the English view of the New World was being formulated, with consequences that we are still seeing today.
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Jack London's The Call of the Wild: “Nature Faker”?
A critic of writer Jack London called his animal protagonists “men in fur,” suggesting that his literary creations flaunted the facts of natural history. London responded to such criticism by maintaining that his own creations were based on sound science and in fact represented “…a protest against the ‘humanizing’ of animals, of which it seemed to me several ‘animal writers’ had been profoundly guilty.” How well does London succeed in avoiding such “humanizing” in his portrayal of Buck, the hero of his novel, The Call of the Wild?
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Jamestown Changes
Students study census data showing the names and occupations of early settlers of the English settlement at Jamestown, Virginia.
(Archaeology, U.S. Colonial History)
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Mapping Colonial New England: Looking at the Landscape of New England
The lesson focuses on two 17th century maps of the Massachusetts Bay Colony to trace how the Puritans took possession of the region,
built towns, and established families on the land. Students will learn how these
New England settlers interacted with the Native Americans, and how to gain
information about those relationships from primary sources such as maps.
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Metaphorical Gold: Mining the Gold Rush for Stories
Explore the Alaskan Gold Rush by "mining" EDSITEment resources for primary texts and period photographs. Just as writer Jack London discovered "metaphorical gold" in the Yukon, students can search several online databases for period details that will enhance their own narratives based on the Gold Rush era.
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Mission Nuestra Señora de la Concepción and the Spanish Mission in the New World
In this Picturing America lesson, students explore the historical origins and organization of the Spanish missions in the New World, and discover the varied purposes these communities of faith served.
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On the Oregon Trail
Work with primary documents and latter-day photographs to recapture the experience of traveling on the Oregon Trail.
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Pearl S. Buck: “On Discovering America”
American author Pearl S. Buck spent most of her life in China. She returned to America in 1934, "an immigrant among immigrants…in my native land." In this lesson, students will explore American attitudes toward immigration in the 1930s through Pearl S. Buck's essay, "On Discovering America." They will explore the meaning of the term "American" in this context and look at how the media portrayed immigrants.
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Pioneer Values in Willa Cather's My Antonia
Students learn about the social and historical context of Willa Cather’s My Antonia and work in groups to explore Cather's commentary on fortitude, hard work, faithfulness, and other values that we associate with pioneer life
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Sodbusters!
Students examine photographs of sod houses, build a model sod house, and picture themselves living in a soddie to gain a firsthand perspective on this important period of American history.
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The Monroe Doctrine: Origin and Early American Foreign Policy
Curriculum Unit overview. Monroe brought a vision of an expanded America to his presidency—a vision
that helped facilitate the formulation of what has become known as the Monroe
Doctrine. In this unit, students will review the Monroe Doctrine against a background
of United States foreign relations in the early years of the republic.
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The Statue of Liberty: Bringing the 'New Colossus' to America
While the French had kept their end
of the bargain by completing the statue itself, the Americans had still not fulfilled
their commitment to erect a pedestal. In this lesson, students learn about the
effort to convince a skeptical American public to contribute to the effort to
erect a pedestal and to bring the Statue of Liberty to New York.
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The Statue of Liberty: The Meaning and Use of a National Symbol
Help clarify the nature of symbols for your students as they study the Statue of Liberty, complete research on a national symbol, and use their research to communicate a message of their own.
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What is History? Timelines and Oral Histories
This lesson plan addresses the ways people learn about events from the past and discusses how historical accounts are influenced by the perspective of the person giving the account. To understand that history is made up of many people’s stories of the past, students interview family members about the same event and compare the different versions, construct a personal history timeline and connect it to larger historical events, and synthesize eyewitness testimony from different sources to create their own “official” account.
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Where I Come From
Students take research into their heritage a step beyond the construction of a family tree, traveling through cyberspace to find our what's happening in their ancestral homelands today.
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William Penn’s Peaceable Kingdom
By juxtaposing the different promotional tracts of William Penn and David Pastorius, students will understand the ethnic diversity of Pennsylvania along with the “pull” factors of migration in the 17th century English colonies.
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