Preamble to the Constitution Courtesy of The National Archives.

• Balancing Three Branches at Once: Our System of Checks and Balances
• The Boston Tea Party: Costume Optional?
• The Constitutional Convention: Four Founding Fathers You May Never Have Met
• The Constitutional Convention: What the Founding Fathers Said
• Declare the Causes: The Declaration of Independence
• The Federalist Debates: Balancing Power Between State and Federal Governments
• The First Amendment: What's Fair in a Free Country?
• Jefferson vs. Franklin: Renaissance Men
• Jefferson vs. Franklin: Revolutionary Philosophers
• The Preamble to the Constitution: How Do You Make a More Perfect Union?
• Revolutionary Tea Parties and the Reasons for Revolution
• Voices of the American Revolution

• Africans in America
• American Memory Project (Library of Congress)
• American President
• Avalon Project at the Yale Law School
• CongressLink
• Conversations with History
• Digital Classroom (National Archives and Records Administration)
• Documenting the American South
• Exploring Amistad
• Freedmen and Southern Society Project
• Great American Speeches
• History Matters
• Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project
• New Americans
• New Deal Network
• Oyez Project: A Supreme Court Multimedia Database
• Papers of George Washington
• Presidential Speeches
• Smithsonian American Art Museum
• U.S. Women's History Workshop
• We Shall Overcome: Historic Places of the Civil Rights Movement
• Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1775-1940

We the People

The Idea of America

Encourage your high school junior students to enter The Idea of America essay contest, part of the National Endowment for the Humanities We the People initiative. Ample motivation for entering is provided by the chance to win $5,000 and national recognition. Ample means for generating and researching excellent essay topics can be found on EDSITEment. With over ninety-five EDSITEment lessons focused on some aspect of U.S. history, literature or culture, and with panel-reviewed websites providing unprecedented access to primary documents and artifacts, EDSITEment offers you and your students a wealth of resources for studying the historical origins and core ideas and values of the American Republic.

For example, The Federalist Debates: Balancing Power Between State and Federal Government provides students with a richly detailed historical context for considering what has been and continues to be a central debate in American political life: how should power be distributed between states and the federal government? As do many other EDSITEment lessons on U.S. history, this lesson involves direct engagement with primary historical texts and other documents and artifacts central to the American story. Also providing historical background for framing topics for The Idea of America essay contest are such EDSITEment lessons as 1) The Constitutional Convention: What the Founding Fathers Said; 2) The Constitutional Convention: Four Founding Fathers You May Never Have Met 3) Jefferson and Franklin: Revolutionary Philosophers; 4) Jefferson and Franklin: Renaissance Men 5) The Boston Tea Party: Costume Optional? 6) Revolutionary Tea Parties and the Reasons for Revolution. In addition, these lessons provide teachers with useful tools, such as interactive timelines and downloadable graphic organizers that can help students to comprehend the concrete details of American history.

While designed for younger students, other EDSITEment lesson plans also raise challenging questions about the founding principles of this nation. For example, lessons such as Declare the Causes: The Declaration of Independence, and The Preamble to the Constitution: How Do You Make a More Perfect Union? bring alive the principles of democratic self-government established in the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights, and can be adapted for older students engaged in the study of primary documents. In Balancing Three Branches at Once: Our System of Checks and Balances, students analyze primary documents to demonstrate the challenges facing those forming a new government. Finally, the continuing significance of the founding principles of the American Republic can be explored in lessons such as The First Amendment: What's Fair in a Free Country, which helps students to learn about individual liberty and responsibility through the study of Supreme Court cases.

After exploring some of EDSITEment's U.S. history lessons and generating their essay topics, your students may want to begin their research on EDSITEment websites such as American Memory Project the Oyez Project, and Digital Classroom of the National Archives and Records Administration which provide unprecedented access to historical documents and electronic archives. These and the other EDSITEment-reviewed resources listed below are a great place to start researching and developing a focused and well-documented topic on the role that principles of democratic self-government have played in our nation's history.

Online Primary Documents on EDSITEment websites for reference:
Declaration of Independence
Digital Classroom, NARA

U.S. Constitution
Avalon Project, Yale University Law School
http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/constpap.htm

Annotated Constitution
CongressLink http://www.aboutgovernment.org/print_historicaldocuments.htm#constitution

Bill of Rights
Avalon Project at Yale Law School
http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/rights1.htm

Emancipation Proclamation
Digital Classroom, NARA
http://www.archives.gov/exhibit_hall/featured_documents/
emancipation_proclamation/transcript.html

Gettysburg Address
American Memory Collection, Library of Congress
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/gadd/gadrft.html