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…

This article reports on the results of an exploratory qualitative study of the collective memories of Secession held by a diverse group of university students (n = 54) at a large southern research institution. Participants completed a survey that asked them to produce a narrative of Secession as well as to rank a selection of heroes and provide an…

In the 1960s federal agencies in the US encouraged the building of protected schools designed to survive a nuclear attack. A number of designs, including underground schools, were constructed. In order to promote the building of protected schools, the US government produced a number of propaganda films for school boards and governors. In addition…

A lesson exploring the Pledge of Allegiance, its history, and the addition of the phrase "under God," can serve as a jumping off point into major themes of U.S. history and First Amendment freedoms. Although the Pledge is ubiquitous in contemporary America, educators and students are often uninformed about the history and meaning of the…

The importance of visual literacy development is demonstrated using social studies examples from an innovative, collaborative arts program. Discussion of the Visual Thinking Strategies approach, connections to the Common Core State Standards, prompts for higher-order critical thinking, and the application of historical and social science ideas in…

In this article, the authors demonstrate how a series of National Archives documents related to professional baseball players and the military draft can launch a lesson on the American home front during World War I, as the 100th anniversary approaches.

After the Civil War (1861-1865), the United States faced a problem of "reconstruction" similar to that confronted by other nations at the time and familiar to the US since at least the Mexican-American War (1846-1848). The problem was one of territorial and political (re)integration: how to take territories that had only recently been…

Historians of American foreign relations are continuing to expand the ways in which they approach the Cold War. The range of perspectives has evolved thanks to the influence of emerging fields and new emphases in history. The end of the Cold War revealed the many ways in which the conflict was a protracted global war. But it also brought a renewed…

Steven Spielberg's latest movie "Lincoln" updates Americans' national understanding of their sixteenth president and provides a partial, artful lesson on the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment that abolished slavery. Starring Daniel Day-Lewis, this movie will become a defining work on President Abraham Lincoln's character and leadership…

War is one place where the complexity of victory and defeat should be explored more deeply. Unfortunately, war--whether experienced directly as a soldier in Afghanistan or a Syrian in an Aleppo suburb, or indirectly through a news item on the Internet or American television--is a near inescapable aspect of most people's daily life. Yet unless…

The Uncle Tom's Cabin inquiry illustrates the Inquiry Design Model structure as students examine Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel to explore how words can affect public opinion.

This study explores the possibilities for learning content that might accompany the use of an historically accurate graphic novel as part of a language arts instructional unit. During a 6-day unit, 16 sixth grade students engaged in graphic novels in ways that support comprehension, both in the context of a graphic novel text set and a specific…

This article describes a fourth grade project involving elementary students, their teachers, elementary preservice teachers, and university faculty. The project focused on a work of juvenile historical fiction, culminating in social studies lessons that were interdisciplinary. This collaboration between educators was made possible by a…

Using the of Humans of New York photoblog concept, the exemplar lesson plan described in this article incorporated technology and the replacement, amplification, and transformation framework to modify a traditional social studies lesson on the American Civil War into an engaging and inquiry-based lesson. Students researched individuals who lived…