This course for middle and high school teachers uses video, online text, classroom activities, and Web-based activities to explore American history from the Pre-Columbian era through Reconstruction. The video programs are divided into three segments: (1) "Historical Perspectives," an overview of the historical era; (2) "Faces of America," in which…

The purpose of this quantitative study was to explore the effects of strategy instruction on lower and higher-level learning in the hypertext format of a WebQuest. The SQ3R and Classification/Categorization study strategies were used to investigate the effects of comprehension in a recall and essay task. Two hundred fifty-four eighth-grade…

During a class discussion, a professor placed a quote on the overhead by Lewis Terman, former Stanford professor, APA president, and vicar of IQ testing and gifted education in America. The passage stressed that Mexicans and Blacks are born morons, not capable of learning, and should be segregated from Anglos in special classes. In addition, in…

On June 28, 1951, France ratified the 1949 Geneva Conventions, which prohibited the torture of prisoners of war. On August 2, 1955, the United States of America ratified the same document. Between 1954 and 1962, France fought a war against Algeria, which sought its independence from colonial rule. From September 11, 2001 until the present, the…

A schism now exists between Blacks and Jews in the United States, 2 groups that were strong allies during the civil rights movement. The authors describe the historical antecedents of and contributing factors to this schism and present information on and lessons learned from 2 Black-Jewish dialogues that were conducted.

Forrester Blanchard Washington (1887-1963) was an African American social work pioneer recruited to the first New Deal administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as director of Negro Work in the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. This role gave Washington a platform from which to object strenuously to the development of social policies that…

The issue of mental health services available to adults and children in the United States who are deaf is addressed. Included is a historical perspective on the changes in these services over the last 50 years. Within this scope, the current status of services is described in some detail. Psychological research on children who are deaf is…

This article presents several winning activities for students in the classroom. These activities include: (1) making Abraham Lincoln costumes; (2) creating frosty scenes from torn-paper collage for a grammar activity; (3) listening to Dr. Martin Luther King's "I have a Dream" speech; (4) hosting an architectural challenge for a kindergarten class;…

While Blackface minstrel performances today are considered inappropriate and many Americans find the language and images racially offensive, such performances were the "most popular entertainment" in antebellum America. Songs about idyllic plantation life in the South resonated with Americans adjusting to the new industrial cities of the North.…

It has long been commonplace in reading studies to say that despite the efforts of authors, publishers, censors, and others to restrict access to print culture, readers evade those restrictions and exert control over their reading. This control can take many forms, from obtaining banned books to interpretive practices that subvert intended…

Poor people have been described in a range of ways. This article begins by tracing the term "underclass" in its social and political context from the 1960s to present, examining its transference from academia to lay usage through analysis of widely accessible periodicals of the time. Next, it engages the work of Earl Shorris, a writer who devised…

Most narratives of teacher activism began at the turn of the twentieth century. Though historians acknowledge the formation of earlier local associations, they tend to dismiss them as merely "social organizations." The clubs that teachers formed between the 1870s and 1890s were indeed social, but the author argues that their social…

In 1939, Texas artist Alexandre Hogue completed "The Crucified Land," a striking comparison of water erosion on a Denton, Texas, wheat farm to the martyrdom of Jesus of Nazareth. "The Crucified Land" was originally intended as the final canvas of Hogue's "Erosion" series, which the artist began in 1932 as a…

In this article, the author presents Kenji Ima who recalls his life in America's World War II prison camps. In the summer of 1945, after more than three years in the prison camp, Kenji Ima and his friends returned home from Minidoka. Seeing the marble edifices of the King Street railroad station and the towering buildings of Seattle, "was…

The purpose of this article is to: (1) Examine the historical development of the Federal Reserve System; (2) Provide background on Ben Bernanke, the new Fed chairman; (3) Explain the basic tools of monetary policy used by the Fed; (4) Examine the causes of the Great Depression, a topic of special interest to Bernanke; and (5) Provide some key…