The month of May is an opportunity for reflection on and commemoration of all that Jewish Americans have accomplished and contributed to U.S. history and culture. This piece highlights NEH projects and classroom resources for teaching about these experiences in America.
In 1831, an ambitious and unusually perceptive twenty-five-year-old French aristocrat, Alexis de Tocqueville, visited the United States. His nine-month sojourn led to the writing of Democracy in America, universally regarded as one of the most influential books ever written.
The Berlin Wall & Beyond is an online high school curriculum for teaching World History, which focuses on the critical post-World War II period. Once united as allies in their war against the Nazis, the United States and the Soviet Union became the world’s competing powerbrokers for the next 40 years. Amidst the redrawing of national boundaries and the political realignments taking shape, Berlin quickly became the symbolic capital of the Cold War.
Between the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln (February 12) and George Washington (February 22), our commercial republic* has come to celebrate a national holiday unofficially called “Presidents' Day” (February 16), which generically honors all the presidents. Washington and Lincoln stand out as unrivaled figures in American history. Their importance is reflected in the large number of lessons about them in our collection.
In their book Salem Possessed, Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum remark upon the prominent place the Salem witch trials have in America's cultural consciousness. They observe, “For most Americans the episode ranks in familiarity somewhere between Plymouth Rock and Custer's last stand.”
This feature outlines the context of The Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 which produced the “Declaration of Sentiments,” a CCSS exemplar for grades 11 – CCR. This document made a bold argument, modeled on the language and logic of the Declaration of Independence that American women should be given civil and political rights equal to those of American men, including the right to vote.
This essay written by a distinguished historian of American literature, gives an overview of the American slave narrative tradition, discusses five representative slave narratives, and provides a framework for cultural analysis of these works showing their intention and their arguments.
This collection focuses on presidential inaugurations across U.S. history and includes audio and video excerpts of speeches, links to full texts of speeches, lesson ideas, and other resources for teaching about this quadrennial event.
