Teaching communication used to be simple: teach writing and speaking. But today?s students must be able to communicate with pictures, both moving and still; audio; and text. This article shows how to design a series of lessons in which students create digital class videos during the course of content-specific units, discussing pre-production,…

This essay draws primarily upon Ralph Bunche's personal papers and the two most recent scholarly biographies of him (Henry, 1999; Urquhart, 1993) to analyze his formative years and what they might illuminate about the formation of character. It also places this chapter of Bunche's life within its larger historical context. Special attention is…

The word "borderlands" has many meanings in North American historiography, but this short overview focuses on the time and place that American historians have long known as the "Spanish Borderlands." Historian Herbert Eugene Bolton, the much-studied father of what came to be known as the "Bolton School," popularized the term "Spanish Borderlands"…

Generations are shaped by history and embedded in culture. This chapter explores how history and popular culture can be useful lenses for understanding generations.

Historian Patricia Limerick's book, "The Legacy of Conquest" focuses on the history of American West within the context of conquest as "the historical bedrock of the whole nation" and the American West as "a preeminent case study in conquest and its consequences." To live with that legacy, contemporary Americans ought to be well informed and well…

This paper investigates the returns to education in two Southern EU countries, Portugal and Spain, both characterized by a relatively high self-employment rate. The impact of education on both wage earners and the self-employed is analyzed by using a comparable data set coming from the European Community Household Panel during the period…

This article speaks to the fragmentary information available about the 12 plaintiffs other than Oliver L. Brown who also were participants in the Brown v. Board of Education case. In particular, it highlights the experiences of Lucinda Todd, the first plaintiff in the case. It uses this case in a discussion of the importance of illuminating…

Promotional materials, which portrayed the Kansas climate, resources, and landscape in optimistic tones, were a common medium used to smooth the rough edges of the physical environment to Euro-American settlers in the second half of the nineteenth century. This article examines promotional literature of that era and evaluates the strategies…

Era Bell Thompson's "American Daughter", published in 1946 by the University of Chicago Press, is an autobiographical account of an African American woman who comes of age on the plains of North Dakota in the early twentieth century. It deserves to read and included in Great Plains studies because it recounts one of the rarest of…

The view from Pikes Peak is breathtaking. In the summer of 1893, Katherine Lee Bates sat on the summit of Pikes Peak, inspired by the panorama to pen the words to "America the Beautiful." Her poem was set to the tune "Materna" by Samuel Augustus Ward two years later to become one of our nation's most beloved anthems. Many…

Slavery's unequivocal evil lies at the heart of debates over apologizing for America's "peculiar institution" and awarding reparations. In The Problem of Evil: Slavery, Freedom, and the Ambiguities of American Reform, a provocative collection of original essays, the editors Steven Mintz and John Stauffer, along with 23 contributors,…

Fifth-grade students with learning disabilities (LD) and their typically achieving (TA) peers participated in an 8-week investigation about 19th-century U.S. westward migration. During their investigations, the students analyzed primary and secondary sources to understand the experiences of these emigrants and Native peoples. The analysis of…

During the first decades of the federal government's Indian boarding schools, stories of morbidity and mortality among students were prevalent. In August 1915 Commissioner of Indian Affairs Cato Sells arrived in San Francisco to address the Congress of Indian Progress, an organization dedicated to the social advancement of American Indians. Waxing…

The Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma is headquartered in southeastern Oklahoma and has a tribal citizenry of just over 175,000. The tribal government currently compacts almost all of the tribe's Bureau of Indian Affairs and Indian Health Service program funding and runs dozens of tribal businesses that today fund more than 80 percent of the tribal…

In this article, the author contends that the vast majority of American historians no longer regard American culture--whether high culture or mainstream popular culture--as an essential area of study. The much-vaunted culture turn in the humanities has run its course in one of the first disciplines it influenced. Indeed, most of the books today…