This 2020 issue of "Social Education," marking the centennial anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment, seeks to broaden understanding of the suffrage story in several ways: by considering the strategies and tactics used by the suffragists to foment their agitation; by acknowledging the ways in which further work was needed to secure…

On a hot July day in 1854, 24-year-old schoolteacher Elizabeth Jennings, accompanied by a friend, attempted to board a horse-drawn trolley to attend Sunday church services in Lower Manhattan. The Irish conductor refused, telling Jennings, who was African American, to await a horsecar for "her people." When Jennings resisted, the…

Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange's photojournalist activism during World War II was a direct response to President Franklin Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066 (EO 9066), which led to the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans in 10 camps across seven mostly western states. Approximately two-thirds of those imprisoned were U.S.…

The nationwide commemoration in 2020 of the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment is an opportunity to explore not only women's long struggle to achieve this landmark moment, but also to engage in an exploration of women's civic engagement during the woman suffrage movement. The terms "woman suffrage" and "suffragist" often…

When John Lewis sought to change segregation laws in 1960 Nashville, Tennessee, he did so through nonviolent sit-ins. Throughout U.S. history, activists like John Lewis have turned to social change tactics outside of the institutions of democracy from which they have been largely excluded. However, social studies curricula rarely frame these…

When teachers discuss the 2020 presidential election with students, now and in future years, they will, appropriately, place front and center the ramifications of the baseless challenges by Donald Trump and his supporters to Joe Biden's victory. Even as state and federal courts across the nation tossed out lawsuits challenging vote counts, the…

In the United States, there's a national infatuation with those who have broken barriers--racial, religious, gendered, and so on--and have presumably changed the rules of the game for others. News outlets and history textbooks seem unable to resist a good story of "firstness." Researchers have speculated why this is the case: What better…

Colson Whitehead's acclaimed book, "The Underground Railroad," follows Cora, a runaway slave seeking the nearly impossible goal of freedom. The fictionalized account of a runaway slave girl resonates with a reading of Harriet Jacobs's true account in "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl." One of the most influential works of…

A project-based approach to studying the civil rights movement can stimulate student engagement and their sense of connection to this historic period. The authors taught this project-based learning (PBL) unit on the American civil rights movement multiple times in the past 10 years to classes of middle school, high school general education,…

In 1957, a civil rights organization called Fellowship of Reconciliation created a comic book to teach America's youth about the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Entitled "Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story," the comic book was enormously successful. John Lewis, a young civil rights activist at the time, recalled that the book was…

Technological innovations and inventions are changing society and world culture so fast that it's often difficult to keep up. This article provides many web sites that will provide classroom teachers or even full social studies departments with information and lesson plans to integrate the importance of inventions and technology into their…

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.

A. Philip Randolph, the national president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was one of the driving forces behind the March on Washington Movement in 1941. In frustration over the federal government's lack of support for opportunities in the booming war industries and equality in the military, Randolph had begun to organize the March…

What would Benjamin Franklin's Facebook page look like? Would he be "friends" with William Pierce, James Madison, or Alexander Hamilton? Would there have been a separate Facebook group for the framers of the Constitution, where they would have posted comments on the wall regarding the different stipulations that needed inclusion in the…

"Mr. President, It is my Desire to be free," wrote Annie Davis to Abraham Lincoln, 20 months after he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. The Emancipation Proclamation affected only those parts of the country that were in rebellion against the United States on the date it was issued, January 1, 1863. The slaveholding border states of…