Experience the Challenge of Being Pete Gray

The construction of skyscrapers is no simple undertaking, involving the careful coordination and planning of many different people. The third lesson in this series explores this detailed process by first teaching children about the main...

A key challenge in teaching kids how to read informational text, particularly primary source documents, is finding suitable resources and then developing questions that guide readers. Never fear, help is here in the form of a series of...

Whose idea was it to build the Panama Canal? Why was the Isthmus of Panama chosen as the site? What were the challenges? To find the answers to these and other questions, young historians and geographers engage in a scavenger hunt,...

In this primary source analysis worksheet, students respond to 25 short answer questions that require them to analyze a photograph from the Tennessee State Archives.

Winston Churchill is a larger-than-life figure, designated by the BBC as the most important figure of the twentieth century. Yet, his political career began long before World War II, and it was marked with failure. A well-rounded...

Photos can challenge stereotypes. To gain an understanding of the big picture, groups examine a series of photographs and analyze how a photographer's choices can shape a viewer's reaction to an image. For the first set of photographs,...

A social justice instructional activity focuses on the Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia which struck down laws that prohibited marriages between African Americans and white Americans. The instructional activity begins with class...

Imagine the engineering challenges of constructing a subway system underneath a huge city the size of London. Viewers get a chance to see how they did it with a short video that the describes the methods used to construct the London...

Contains the text of a Lewis M. Clement's 1887 statement to the U.S. Pacific Railway Commission, which gives a clear and succinct accounting of the costs incurred and the problems encountered in building the Central Pacific Railroad.

Contains a series of letters published in May and June, 1869, in the "New York Tribune" written by Albert D. Richardson, one of the first people to travel on the transcontinental railroad from coast to coast.