U.S. History - Civil War and Reconstruction: Lesson Plans

In The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane presents war through the eyes —and thoughts —of one soldier. The narrative’s altered point of view and stylistic innovations enable a heightened sense of realism while setting the work apart from war stories written essentially as tributes or propaganda.

The Red Badge of Courage’s success reflects the birth of a modern sensibility; today we feel something is true when it looks like the sort of thing we see in newspapers or on television news.

Curriculum Unit overview. In this unit, students will trace the development of sectionalism in the United States as it was driven by the growing dependence upon, and defense of, black slavery in the southern states.

Lesson 1: An Early Threat of Secession: The Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the Nullification Crisis
Lesson 2: Slavery's Opponents and Defenders
Lesson 3: The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854: Popular Sovereignty and the Political Polarization over Slavery
Lesson 4: Abraham Lincoln, the 1860 Election, and the Future of the American Union and Slavery

Curriculum unit. By examining Lincoln's three most famous speeches—the Gettysburg Address and the First and Second Inaugural Addresses—in addition to a little known fragment on the Constitution, union, and liberty, students trace what these documents say regarding the significance of union to the prospects for American self-government.

Lesson 1: Fragment on the Constitution and Union (1861)—The Purpose of the American Union
Lesson 2: The First Inaugural Address (1861)—Defending the American Union
Lesson 3: The Gettysburg Address (1863)—Defining the American Union
Lesson 4: The Second Inaugural Address (1865)—Restoring the American Union

Curriculum Unit overview. More Americans lost their lives in the Civil War than in any other conflict. How did the United States arrive at a point at which the South seceded and some families were so fractured that brother fought brother?

Lesson 1: Factory vs. Plantation in the North and South
Lesson 2: People and Places in the North and South
Lesson 3: A Debate Against Slavery
Lesson 4: Life Before the Civil War
Lesson 5: Women's Lives Before the Civil War

Practice working with primary documents by comparing accounts of the Chicago Fire and testing the credibility of a Civil War diary.

Learn how slavery shattered family life through the pre-Civil War letters of those whose loved ones were taken away or left behind.

Explore American attitudes toward conflict through Civil War photographs and World War II poster art.

Relive the decisions that led to the attack on Fort Sumter to determine whether Lincoln aimed to preserve peace or provoke the hostilities that led to the Civil War.

The realities of slavery and Reconstruction hit home in poignant oral histories from the Library of Congress. In these activities, students research narratives from the Federal Writers' Project and describe the lives of former African slaves in the U.S. -- both before and after emancipation. From varied stories, students sample the breadth of individual experiences, make generalizations about the effects of slavery and Reconstruction on African Americans, and evaluate primary source documents.

This curriculum unit introduces students to important questions pertaining to the war: strengths and weaknesses of each side at the start of the conflict; the two turning points of the war-the concurrent battles of Gettysburg and Vicksburg-as well as the morality of the Union's use of "total war" tactics against the population of the South; Abraham Lincoln's wartime leadership.

Lesson 1: On the Eve of War: North vs. South
Lesson 2: The Battles of the Civil War
Lesson 3: Abraham Lincoln and Wartime Politics

Walt Whitman sought to create a new and distinctly American form of poetry. His efforts had a profound influence on subsequent generations of American poets. In this lesson, students will explore the historical context of Whitman's concept of "democratic poetry" by reading his poetry and prose and by examining daguerreotypes taken circa 1850. Next, students will compare the poetic concepts and techniques behind Whitman's "I Hear America Singing" and Langston Hughes' "Let America Be America Again," and will have an opportunity to apply similar concepts and techniques in creating a poem from their own experience.

Clues to Walt Whitman's effort to create a new and distinctly American form of verse may be found in his Notebooks, now available online from the American Memory Collection. In an entry to be examined in this lesson, Whitman indicated that he wanted his poetry to explore important ideas of a universal scope (as in the European tradition), but in authentic American situations and settings using specific details with direct appeal to the senses.

Students explore the historical context and significance of Lincoln's inaugural address through archival documents.

Students compile information to examine hypotheses explaining why the first nine states to grant full voting rights for women were located in the West.