Abraham Lincoln delivers "House Divided" speech

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  Lesson Plan / History & Social Studies

  Lesson 1: An Early Threat of Secession: The Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the Nullification Crisis

  Americans affirmed their independence with the ringing declaration that “all men are created equal.” But some of them owned African slaves, and were unwilling to give them up as they formed new federal and state governments. So “to form a more perfect union” in 1787, certain compromises were made in the Constitution regarding slavery. This settled the slavery controversy for the first few decades of the American republic, but this situation changed with the application of Missouri for statehood in 1819.

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  Lesson Plan / History & Social Studies

  Lesson 2: Slavery's Opponents and Defenders

  This lesson plan will explore the wide-ranging debate over American slavery by presenting the lives of its leading opponents and defenders and the views they held about America's "peculiar institution."

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  Lesson Plan / History & Social Studies

  Lesson 3: The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854: Popular Sovereignty and the Political Polarization over Slavery

  Popular sovereignty allowed the settlers of a federal territory to decide the slavery question without interference from Congress. This lesson plan will examine how the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 affected the political balance between free and slave states and explore how its author, Stephen Douglas, promoted its policy of popular sovereignty in an effort to avoid a national crisis over slavery in the federal territories.

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  Lesson Plan / History & Social Studies

  Lesson 4: Abraham Lincoln, the 1860 Election, and the Future of the American Union and Slavery

  This lesson plan will explore Abraham Lincoln's rise to political prominence during the debate over the future of American slavery. Lincoln's anti-slavery politics will be contrasted with the abolitionism of William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass and the "popular sovereignty" concept of U.S. Senator Stephen A. Douglas.

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Bloomsday: James Joyce’s novel, “Ulysses,” takes place in and around Dublin, Ireland