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 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

• American Memory Project (Library of Congress)
• Avalon Project at the Yale Law School
• CongressLink
• Digital Classroom (National Archives and Records Administration)

We the People

We the People

Join EDSITEment in support of the National Endowment for the Humanities We the People initiative, announced by President Bush in the fall of 2002. With over one hundred 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 We the People initiative 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.

EDSITEment lesson plans designed for younger students 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 your students may want to try online research through EDSITEment websites such as American Memory Project the Oyez Project, and the Digital Classroom of the National Archives and Records Administration, which provide unprecedented access to historical documents and electronic archives. These and other EDSITEment-reviewed resources on U.S. history and culture are great places for students to discover the people who contributed to the principles of democratic self-government and the roles they played in our nation's history. Students will then have a much clearer sense of who “We the People” are.

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

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

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/
emancipation_proclamation_transcript.html

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

EDSITEment Lesson Plans on American History, Government, Literature, and Culture:

Grade Level 9-12

Grade Level 6-8

Grades 3-5

Grades K-2