Focused Learning Lesson: American History

Readers learn about sharecropping in the South in a unit about Ernest J. Gaines's A Lesson Before Dying. Focusing on the period after Civil War Reconstruction but before the Civil Rights Movement, a set of handouts help to establish the...

Can you boil the historical, cultural, and political events and movements from the last 150 years into a descriptive study guide? You don't have to—it's right here! A thorough resource includes informative text, discussion questions,...

If you want a light exercise to review 12 famous people, events, and movements in American history, with a focus on African-American history, this crossword puzzle may be useful. It requires familiarity with Rosa Parks, Martin Luther...

America was founded by dreamers, and the American dream still resonates in our country today. Track the American dream from its Puritan beginnings to its optimistic descendants with a instructional activity that focuses on speeches by...

Class members research African American inventors, the challenges they faced in their attempts to patent their works, and the importance of their inventions to the development of technology. After a brief introduction to inventors Elijah...

Is the modern American identity an outgrowth of European civilization, or is it a unique result of westward expansion? Frederick Jackson Turner's The Significance of the Frontier in American History raises an important question about the...

Groups of high school learners conduct research on a particular era of African-American history, focusing on events, people, and places important to that era. Next, they review children's literature in four different genres. As a...

Explore connections within and between informational texts with this lesson plan about encyclopedia articles. Middle schoolers write encyclopedia articles focusing on topics in American history. They discuss how to determine credibility...

African-American history is an integral part of what America is. Learners examine important events, read informational texts, and create quilts depicting specific eras in African-American history. Each image created for the quilt will be...

To gain an understanding of the treatment of African American soldiers during World War I, class members watch an excerpt from the History Detectives film, Our Colored Heroes, and then examine three recruitment posters from that time...