The real story of slavery's end involves one of the most significant social movements in the history of the United States and the heroic actions of the enslaved themselves. Revealing this history helps students begin to answer fundamental questions that urgently need to be addressed in classrooms across the country: How does major social change…

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow used to be both the best-known poet in the English-speaking world and the most beloved, adored by the learned and the lowly alike, read by everyone from Nathaniel Hawthorne and Abraham Lincoln to John Ruskin and Queen Victoria--and, just as avidly, by the queen's servants. "Paul Revere's Ride" is Longfellow's best-known…

Asserts that with heroes, people confront crisis and terror; experiencing the extraordinary and expanding their notion of what it means to be human. Once central in schooling, the study of heroes helped students find the good to be imitated and the evil to be avoided. Suggests that while the notion of heroes has changed since then, the need for…