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Spotlight on: Primary Source

Phillis Wheatley’s poem on tyranny and slavery, 1772

Government and Civics, Literature, Religion and Philosophy

Born in Africa, Phillis Wheatley was captured and sold into slavery as a child. She was purchased by John Wheatley of Boston in 1761. The Wheatleys soon recognized Phillis’s intelligence and taught her to read and write. She became...

Spotlight on: Primary Source

Slave auction catalog from Louisiana, 1855

On March 13 and 14, 1855, the firm of J. A. Beard & May placed on the auction block 178 enslaved men, women, and children at the Banks Arcade in New Orleans, Louisiana. They were part of the estate of William M. Lambeth, who had...

Lesson Plan

The End of the Vietnam War: Conscience, Resistance, and Reconciliation

Unit Objective This unit is part of Gilder Lehrman’s series of Common Core State Standards–based units. These units were developed to enable students to understand, summarize, and analyze original texts of historical significance....

Lesson Plan

The Transcontinental Railroad in Images and Poetry

Art, Literature, Science, Technology, Engineering and Math

4, 5, 6

Unit Objectives Students will analyze a variety of primary sources related to the completion of the transcontinental railroad. investigate celebratory images and a poem to discover some of the key outcomes that arose from the ability...

Lesson Plan

Railroads: The "Engine" to Promote National Unity and Economic Growth

Economics, Geography, Government and Civics, Science, Technology, Engineering and Math

9, 10, 11, 12, 13+

Objectives Students will examine, explain, and evaluate a variety of literary and visual primary sources that describe and depict the development and impact of railroads on sectional relationships, national unity, and economic growth...

Lesson Plan

All Aboard: Making Connections with the Transcontinental Railroad

5, 6, 7, 8

LESSON 1 Objectives Students will Read and understand primary source writings from two key documents that encouraged settlers to go west and that established congressional support of what would eventually become the transcontinental...

Lesson Plan

The Transcontinental Railroad: Interpreting Images

Art

10, 11, 12

Objectives Students will be able to apply the distinction between inferring (inference) and implying (implication). analyze primary source illustrations, including paintings, political cartoons, and promotional posters. Essential...

Spotlight on: Primary Source

Patriotic Postal Covers: "Lincoln & Davis in 5 Rounds," 1861

Art

Patriotic postal covers are an important part of the material culture of the Civil War era. People often collected these covers in special keepsake albums. Such decorative envelopes were used as advertisements and to promote various...

Spotlight on: Primary Source

Conscientious objectors: Madison pardons Quakers, 1816

Government and Civics

In 1816, seven Quakers in Baltimore, Maryland, petitioned President James Madison for pardons after refusing to serve in the militia or pay the exemption fee. Secretary of State James Monroe requested additional information on the men...

Spotlight on: Primary Source

On the emigrant trail, 1862

Geography

Samuel Russell, his mother, and his sisters emigrated to the Mormon settlement at Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1861. The next spring, Russell joined a “down-and-back” wagon train to escort new pioneers to the settlement. These caravans...

Spotlight on: Primary Source

Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy, 1936

World History

On August 14, 1936, President Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke at length on the state of international affairs in an address delivered at Chautauqua, New York. Roosevelt’s speech focused on maintaining peace in the face of increasing...

Spotlight on: Primary Source

Literacy and the immigration of "undesirables," 1903

Government and Civics, World History

During the Progressive era, tens of millions of immigrants came to the United States from Europe to fulfill their American dream. During this period most came from southern and eastern Europe, particularly from Italy, Russia, and the...

Spotlight on: Primary Source

Buying Frederick Douglass’s freedom, 1846

Economics

After he had escaped from slavery in 1838, Frederick Douglass became a well-known orator and abolitionist. He wrote an autobiography in 1845, but because he was a runaway slave, its publication increased the chances that he would be...

Spotlight on: Primary Source

A political cartoon of Grant and Lee, 1864

Art, Government and Civics

During the first three years of the Civil War, a series of Union generals led the Army of the Potomac against Confederate General Robert E. Lee with little success. In March 1864, Abraham Lincoln appointed General Ulysses S. Grant...

Spotlight on: Primary Source

Preventing labor discrimination during World War II, 1942

Economics, Government and Civics

In early 1942, as men of working age enlisted in the military and war production accelerated, US industries experienced a labor shortage. President Roosevelt established the War Manpower Commission "to assure the most effective...

Spotlight on: Primary Source

Politics and the Texas Revolution, 1836

Government and Civics

Texas’s fight for independence from Mexico was an uphill battle from the very beginning. Texians were outnumbered and outmatched by the much more powerful Mexican military, and the province was plagued by quarrels within its own...

Spotlight on: Primary Source

Poem on a Civil War death: "Only a Private Killed," 1861

Literature

Approximately 3.5 million men served in the Union and Confederate military during the Civil War. Recent scholarship indicates that at least 750,000 men died. Lewis Mitchell of the 1st Minnesota Volunteers was one of those men. On...

Spotlight on: Primary Source

FDR urges NAACP support before WWII, 1940

On June 14, 1940, Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote to Arthur B. Spingarn, president of the NAACP, to praise the NAACP’s fight for "increasing participation by Negroes in the benefits and responsibilities of the American democracy."...

Spotlight on: Primary Source

William Cullen Bryant opposes the protective tariff, 1876

Economics, Government and Civics

During the Civil War, the United States needed to raise funds urgently. It did so by raising the tariff, which taxed goods imported from other countries. In the days before the national income tax, the United States depended on the...

Spotlight on: Primary Source

William H. Taft recalls dispute with Theodore Roosevelt, 1922

Government and Civics

President Theodore Roosevelt mentored and groomed William Howard Taft to be his successor in the White House. However, once Taft was elected in 1908, he based his administration on a more business-centric and limited-government form...

Spotlight on: Primary Source

Calling out the militia after Lexington and Concord, 1775

On the night of April 18, 1775, 700 British soldiers began to march toward Concord, Massachusetts, to seize and destroy arms the American patriots had stored there. Warned by Paul Revere and William Dawes, minutemen confronted and...

Spotlight on: Primary Source

World War I poems: “In Flanders Fields” and “The Answer,” 1918

Literature, World History

Ella Osborn’s 1918 diary provides insight into the experiences of an American nurse serving in France at the end of World War I. In addition to her notes about the men under her care and events in France, Osborn jotted down two...

Spotlight on: Primary Source

Civilian defense on the home front, 1942

Art, Government and Civics

In the early days of World War II, air raids and other attacks on populated areas in Europe generated fears that similar attacks could happen in the United States. On May 20, 1941, more than six months before the United States entered...

Spotlight on: Primary Source

Nominating an African American for vice president, 1880

Government and Civics

Born a slave in 1841, Blanche Kelso Bruce was the first African American to be elected to a full term in the US Senate. During his term as a senator from Mississippi (1875–1881), he advocated the rights of African Americans and other...

Spotlight on: Primary Source

The service of Medal of Honor recipient Dr. Mary Walker, 1864

Government and Civics

A graduate of Syracuse Medical College, Mary Walker served as a doctor during the American Civil War and was the only female acting assistant surgeon in the Union Army. In April 1864, Walker was captured by the Confederates in...

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