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Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest derives much of its comedic and thematic heft from the way in which it inverts the values of everyday life.
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…
More Americans get their history from Ken Burns than any other source. —Historian Stephen Ambrose
Curriculum unit on the historical context of Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle and how the book helped reform efforts in Congress to pass the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and…
Anton Chekhov began his career writing humorous pieces for popular magazines to support himself while he studied to become a doctor.
A curriculum unit of three lessons in which students explore Hopi place names, poetry, song, and traditional dance to better understand the ways Hopi people connect with the land and environment…
Winesburg, Ohio presents a galaxy of strange and distorted characters in a small town in Sandusky County, not far from Cleveland, well over one hundred years ago. Even a casual glance…
During the Early Modern era (1450–1750), the expansion in maritime trade and the incorporation of the Americas into worldwide exchanges meant the world became increasingly interconnected. These…
A French aristocrat visits Jacksonian America
In 1831, an ambitious and unusually perceptive twenty-five-year-old French aristocrat, Alexis de Tocqueville, visited the United States. His…
Did you realize the humanities understood as the study and interpretation of languages, history, literature, jurisprudence, philosophy, comparative religion, history of art, and culture along with…
Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), one of the most consequential writers of all time, was born into the French aristocracy and educated in the Latin and Greek classics at home by his father.
“Democracy in America” by Alexis de Tocqueville is one of the most influential books ever written about America. While historians have viewed “Democracy” as a rich source about the age of Andrew…
William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is a novel that engages middle school students in thought-provoking discussion, and provides practice in literary analysis skills. The three lessons in this…
This feature is a guide to using informational read-aloud text, “Amazing Whales!” by Sarah L. Thomson. It introduces this species to young naturalists in the primary grades K–1, who are mastering…
This unit is a study of the shifts in narrative voice and literary genres that Melville makes throughout Moby-Dick. It serves to introduce students to several unique features of the novel without…
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…
Tennessee Williams’ classic play The Glass Menagerie (1944) was an extension of the Expressionism that was then prevalent in mid-century Europe. The Expressionist Movement was marked by certain…
Teacher guide “The Song of Wandering Aengus” by W. B. Yeats includes information about the poem and discussion questions. The included supplementary documents provide contextual background on…
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…
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) was a nineteenth-century Danish philosopher. He is often called the “father of existentialism” for his exploration of anxiety and absurdity.
Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, is a CCSS exemplar for grades 11 – CCR taught at the upper high school level and in AP English. This three lesson unit looks at a variety of schisms and…
It is perhaps no surprise that Fyodor Dostoevsky is known as one of the greatest psychological writers of all time, given his own dramatic history of suffering.
In The Metamorphoses, the Roman poet Ovid synthesizes the mythology of his age into a treasury of stories about gods who were lovers, warriors, tricksters, and heroes. This CCSS unit…
Not only is Charles Dicken's A Christmas Carol a classic for the holidays, but it serves as an important novella in British literary history. This series of lesson plans allows students to explore…
In this triumph of magical realism, One Hundred Years of Solitude chronicles a century of the remarkable Buendía family’s history in the fictional Colombian town of Macondo. The three…
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…
Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909) was an American writer who hailed from South Berwick, Maine. Born into a well-established New England family, she enjoyed a comfortable childhood in the countryside,…
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,…
Download each section of the lecture by clicking on the part subtitle so that you can mark it up as you read. We recommend that you read the lecture twice.
Learn how to make the most of STEM in your humanities classroom and how to incorporate nonfiction into STEM with the National Library of Medicine's lesson plan resources.