Lesson Plan Pilgrims, the Plymouth Colony, and Thanksgiving, 1608-1621 Government and Civics, Religion and Philosophy, World History 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 Click here to download this five-lesson unit.
Spotlight on: Primary Source Cotton Mather’s account of the Salem witch trials, 1693 Government and Civics, Literature, Religion and Philosophy Most Americans’ knowledge of the seventeenth century comes from heavily mythologized events: the first Thanksgiving at Plymouth, Pocahontas purportedly saving Captain John Smith from execution in early Virginia, and the Salem witch...
Spotlight on: Primary Source Henry Knox’s Order of March to Trenton, 1776 Geography, Government and Civics, World History 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+ On Christmas Day in 1776 the American Revolution was on the verge of collapsing. Since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the American forces had been driven from New York City to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, and reduced...
Spotlight on: Primary Source George Washington on the abolition of slavery, 1786 Economics, Government and Civics 9 Of the nine presidents who were slaveholders, only George Washington freed all his own slaves upon his death. Before the Revolution, Washington, like most White Americans, took slavery for granted. At the time of the Revolution, one...
Spotlight on: Primary Source Two versions of the Preamble to the Constitution, 1787 Government and Civics 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+ On May 25, 1787, the fifty-five delegates to the Constitutional Convention began meeting in a room, no bigger than a large schoolroom, in Philadelphia’s State House. They posted sentries at the doors and windows to keep their "secrets...
Spotlight on: Primary Source George Washington’s reluctance to become president, 1789 Government and Civics 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+ From 1787 to 1789, as the Constitution was submitted for ratification by the states, most Americans assumed that George Washington would be the first president. In this April 1789 letter to General Henry Knox, his friend from the...
Spotlight on: Primary Source The duel: Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, 1804 Government and Civics 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 Alexander Hamilton, former secretary of the treasury, and Aaron Burr, sitting vice president of the United States, had feuded publicly for years. Their long-standing enmity came to a head in the spring of 1804. After an exchange of...
Spotlight on: Primary Source John Quincy Adams and the Amistad case, 1841 Government and Civics On July 1, 1839, fifty-three Africans, recently kidnapped into slavery in Sierra Leone and sold at a Havana slave market, revolted on board the schooner Amistad . They killed the captain and other crew and ordered the two Spaniards...
Spotlight on: Primary Source The Western Sanitary Commission reports on suffering in the Mississippi Valley, 1863 Government and Civics 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 In 1863 in the war-torn South, thousands were homeless and starving. Some of those most in need of aid were newly liberated enslaved people. The Western Sanitary Commission was organized on September 5, 1861, by General John C....
Spotlight on: Primary Source Sharecropper contract, 1867 Economics, Government and Civics 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+ Immediately after the Civil War, many former slaves established subsistence farms on land that had been abandoned by fleeing white Southerners. President Andrew Johnson, a Democrat and a former slaveholder, soon restored this land to...