Using Primary Documents: "Agreeable to His Genius"

Explore primary and secondary sources in this historical analysis lesson. Young researchers define the terms primary source and secondary source. They read a primary source document provided by the teacher and answer questions about...

Engage your scholars by having them create "magic lantern shows" inspired by the film Dr. Toer's Amazing Magic Lantern Show: A Different View of Emancipation. As they study the South's Reconstruction through primary...

What was the most beneficial policy for nineteenth-century African Americans: to stay in the United States and work for freedom, or to immigrate to a new place and build a society elsewhere? Your young historians will construct an...

Some scholars consider the Civil War and Reconstruction a second American Revolution. Class members weigh in after examining primary sources, including a Congressional resolution calling for the Fifteenth Amendment and the credentials of...

Literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather laws? Scholars study the systematic ways African-Americans were kept from voting even after it was made a law. They analyze a series of primary source documents, complete a worksheet, and engaged...

Spy games are not just for professionals anymore! Scholars use short video clips, primary documents, and photographs to investigate Nazi spies in America during World War II.  The young detectives analyze the paranoia warfare can...

This collection uses primary sources to explore the history, successes, and failures of the Freedmen's Bureau during Reconstruction.

A collection of primary sources that explore women in the Civil War.

This collection uses primary sources to explore the politics of the Gilded Age.

During the era of Reconstruction, the planter class of the South tried to replicate the time before the Civil War by squashing rights given in the Thirteenth, Fourteenths and Fifteenth amendments. Using a video clip featuring renowned...