Lessons
The 13 Colonies and Colonial Day
During our unit on the 13 original colonies, students celebrated Colonial Day. For Colonial Day they made homemade bread to bring in for our "tavern", dressed up in costume, built "log" cabins, wrote postcards home to England, and colored quilting squares, all to immerse themselves in a deeper understanding of what daily life in the colonies looked like and the self-sufficiency that was required.
New American Schools of Thought
In the early half of the 19th century the American identity was truly blossoming with a new wave of art, literature, and intellectualism all its own including the Hudson River School and Transcendentalism. In this lesson, students look at primary sources of American art and literature to determine what the key characteristics of this new way of thought are and what mattered to these artists and thinkers.
Progressive Era Civil Rights
My lesson on Progressive Era Civil Rights puts a great deal of emphasis on the different approaches within the African-American Community towards gaining Civil Rights. As a result, we spend a good deal of time comparing and contrasting Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois. We also discuss Ida B. Wells and her anti-lynching efforts and the rise of African-American entrepreneurship.
The Spanish American War
The Spanish American War lesson primarily focuses on the role of Yellow Journalism, which is especially poignant in our world of media influence and "fake news". After examining and discussing fictional newspaper headlines, students recap the the build up to the Spanish American War in a mini-lecture and then examine primary source accounts of the sinking of the USS Maine from two conflicting sources to witness the effects of Yellow Journalism.
From Appeasement to War
The Appeasement Era is usually an under discussed topic in American history classrooms. Nevertheless, it is a crucial subject to understanding the development of World War II. With hind sight being 20-20, many people don't understand how the European powers could have thought that appeasing Hitler could have been the right decision. As a result, we spend much of this lesson exploring that exact question, putting ourselves in the shoes of Europeans at that time, and debating the decision of appeasement.