Primary
National Humanities Center

National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: America in 1850: Frederick Douglass

For Students 9th - 10th Standards
The National Humanities Center presents collections of primary resources compatible with the Common Core State Standards - historical documents, literary texts, and works of art - thematically organized with notes and discussion...
Primary
National Humanities Center

National Humanities Center: America in Class: America in the 1920s: The Age

For Students 9th - 10th Standards
The National Humanities Center presents collections of primary resources compatible with the Common Core State Standards - historical documents, literary texts, and works of art - thematically organized with notes and discussion...
Primary
National Humanities Center

National Humanities Center: America in Class: America in the 1920s: Only Yesterday Year by Year

For Students 9th - 10th
The National Humanities Center presents collections of primary resources compatible with the Common Core State Standards - historical documents, literary texts, and works of art - thematically organized with notes and discussion...
Primary
National Humanities Center

National Humanities Center: America in Class: America in the 1920s: Machine: Radio

For Students 9th - 10th
The National Humanities Center presents collections of primary resources compatible with the Common Core State Standards - historical documents, literary texts, and works of art - thematically organized with notes and discussion...
Primary
National Humanities Center

National Humanities Center: America in Class: America in the 1920s: City & Town

For Students 9th - 10th
The National Humanities Center presents collections of primary resources compatible with the Common Core State Standards - historical documents, literary texts, and works of art - thematically organized with notes and discussion...
Primary
National Humanities Center

National Humanities Center: America in Class: America in the 1920s: Native & Foreign

For Students 9th - 10th
The National Humanities Center presents collections of primary resources compatible with the Common Core State Standards - historical documents, literary texts, and works of art - thematically organized with notes and discussion...
Article
National Humanities Center

National Humanities Center: Teacher Serve: How Slavery Affected African American Families

For Students 9th - 10th
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor Heather Andrea Williams discusses the lives of enslaved African American families and how slavery made their lives different from other families.
Article
National Humanities Center

National Humanities Center: Teacher Serve: Slave Resistance

For Students 9th - 10th
Essay explores the beginnings of slave resistance and its various forms. Includes ideas for guiding a student discussion.
Article
National Humanities Center

National Humanities Center: Teacher Serve: The Demise of Slavery

For Students 9th - 10th
In this essay, J. William Harris, Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire, explains the developments that brought about the demise of slavery.
Article
National Humanities Center

National Humanities Center: Teacher Serve: The Traditional Arts and Crafts of African Americans Across Five Centuries

For Students 9th - 10th
Detailed essay provides an overview of Africa's contributions to American culture while discussing how basket makers, potters, and quilters helped preserve American history through their works.
Article
National Humanities Center

National Humanities Center: Teacher Serve: Beyond the Written Document: Looking for Africa in African American Culture

For Students 9th - 10th
Paulla A. Ebron, professor at Stanford University, takes a look at how objects, landscapes, orally transmitted stories, and songs along with written documents can be used to study cultural history.
Article
National Humanities Center

National Humanities Center: Teacher Serve: Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs: American Slave Narrators

For Students 9th - 10th
Lucinda MacKethan, English professor at North Carolina State University, offers a comparison of two classic slave narratives: Frederick Douglass's 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: an American Slave and Harriet Jacobs's...
Article
National Humanities Center

National Humanities Center: Teacher Serve: The Civil Rights Movement: 1919 1960s

For Students 9th - 10th
Article provides an overview of the Civil Rights Movement in America between 1919 and the 1960s with detailed discussion on racial equality, nonviolence and passive resistance, and segregation.
Website
National Humanities Center

National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: The Heroic Couplet: Its Rhyme and Reason

For Students 9th - 10th
Lengthy academic essay that argues that traditional poetry, including the heroic couplet, is still relevant in the modern world. While this is discussed, the history of the heroic couplet is provided. A good definition of the term with...
Primary
National Humanities Center

National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: The American Negro and His Fatherland

For Students 9th - 10th
Read excerpts from this speech given by Re.v. Henry McNeal Turner, a bishop in the AME church, who, by the late 1890s, supported the Back to Africa movement and felt that African Americans would have a better life in Africa.
Primary
National Humanities Center

National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Power: Taming the Octopus: The Populist Party Platform, 1892

For Students 9th - 10th
The 1892 platform of the Populist Party that argued for significant changes to improve the economic condition of farmers and industrial workers. Included are discussion questions and a link to the exact wording of the platform.
Primary
National Humanities Center

National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Desegregation Integration, Making of African American Identity: V.3

For Students 9th - 10th
This resource presents James Farmer (1920-1999), a major figure in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s, and the distinction he draws between integration and desegregation, two terms often used interchangeably and often confused.
Primary
National Humanities Center

National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: Separation and Power, Making of African American Identity: V. 3

For Students 9th - 10th
An essay that examines the relationship between racial separation and power. In this essay Stokely Carmichael advocates for the coalescence of political and economic power within the black community in a way that liberates and insulates...
Unit Plan
National Humanities Center

National Humanities Center: Toolbox Library: "The Private," the Gilded and the Gritty: America, 1870 1912

For Teachers 9th - 10th Standards
Hamlin Garland's short story, "The Return of a Private", that describes the post-Civil War conflicts for western farmers with nature and with other settlers.
Unit Plan
National Humanities Center

National Humanities Center: Teacher Serve: The American Civil War: An Environmental View

For Students 9th - 10th
The telling of the Civil War from an ecological view from the National Humanities Center. The toll of life taken of young men and animals, the devastation of cities, towns, farmland, trees, and forests - all these factors are discussed...
Article
National Humanities Center

National Humanities Center: Teacher Serve: The Rise of Fundamentalism

For Students 9th - 10th
The National Humanities Center offers an essay on the definition and discussion of generic fundamentalism and historic fundamentalism, with suggestions on how to guide student discussion.
Handout
National Humanities Center

National Humanities Center: Teacher Serve: Native American Religious Beliefs and Practices

For Students 9th - 10th
Brief descriptions of the religious practices of six Native American groups, including the Iroquois and the Muskogee. A great resource from the National Humanities Center.