Exposure to propaganda can lead to biased attitudes that change the way people speak and act, sometimes without their conscious awareness. Propaganda has historically contributed to systemic discrimination, bias-motivated violence, and even genocide. By comparing historic and contemporary propaganda, students come to understand how people's values…

"The Stars and Stripes: The American Soldiers' Newspaper of World War I, 1918-1919" collection at the Library of Congress provides access to the newspaper distributed to military personnel during World War I. The news articles reveal what members of the American Expeditionary Force actually read about military battles and campaigns in…

Difficult histories expose learners to historical suffering and victimization that constitute a collective trauma. The difficulty stems from the strong emotional reactions or ethical responses learners may evince, undermining their trust in security and morality of this world. However, difficult histories may also expose learners to instances in…

This article discusses a new set of inquiries based on the C3 Framework that provides questions, tasks, and sources to launch classroom examinations of the Korean War and its many aftershocks. Compelling and supporting questions, formative and summative performance tasks, and disciplinary sources provide teachers and their students with the…

The Civil War ended in 1865. From 2011-2015, Civil War sesquicentennial events took place around the nation. The National Mississippi River Museum & Aquarium used the opportunity to feature two exhibits on the critical role that the river played during the Civil War. Both exhibits highlighted contributions to the war effort by the surrounding…

Though poetry can be used to examine a number of topics, this author feels that it is especially illuminating when exploring war. On its surface, war is a ludicrous spectacle of human failings. The fact that countries allow disputes to be settled by a demonstration of each nation's ability to kill citizens of the other nation defies logic. In…

The social studies curriculum travels through time and space and is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. To an outsider, the social studies curriculum is a single line on a program of studies, 45 minutes of a student's school day. Those on the inside, however, know that the field covers history, geography, civics, economics, and much…

Students today are used to a rich visual dimension of living. Students carry with them to school each day devices that allow them to capture their lives in real time. This is possible because of the hard labor of men who toiled for hours to capture for time immemorial images that have become engrained in the American narrative. When teaching the…

This lesson prompts students to explore the ways that individuals, groups, communities, and nations define who belongs and who does not. The outlined activities examine what it means to belong by introducing the idea of a "universe of obligation," the term sociologist Helen Fein coined to describe the circle of individuals and groups…

A textbook author reflects on the ethical and ideological choices she made in her quest to create a history book that would be relevant to demographically diverse high school students.

From handwritten letters of the American Revolution to typed emails from Iraq and Afghanistan, correspondence from U.S. troops offers students deep insight into the specific conflicts and experiences of soldiers. Over 100,000 correspondences have been donated to the Legacy Project, a national initiative launched in 1998 to preserve war letters by…

The Friends of the National World War II Memorial was established in 2007 to serve, in part, as an organization devoted to educating young people and visitors to the memorial in an effort to ensure that the lessons, legacy, and sacrifices of World War II not be forgotten. After 32 years of teaching history at West Springfield High School in…

In the winter of 2011, this author was working late in her classroom at Central Bucks High School West in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, when she opened an email offering a summer institute where 15 teachers would walk the D-Day beaches in Normandy, France. The catch--each teacher had to bring one high school student. The Albert Small Student/Teacher…

The use of testimony in teaching about the Holocaust has long been a practice, relying on resources such as memoirs, diaries, and audio recordings. Having first-person accounts provides a window into the experience of those who lived the historical events that now fill the pages of text. As we mark the 70th Anniversary of the end of World War II…

Once the Ottoman Empire joined the Central Powers on October 28, 1914, the fate of the Empire hinged on the outcome of World War I. The Ottomans waged war on multiple fronts: in the Caucasus against Russia, and to defend the Gallipoli Peninsula and the Arab territories against the British and French empires. One hundred years later, we live in a…