This collection uses primary sources to explore the polio epidemic and vaccine. Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and draw diverse material from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. Each set includes an overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee.

There are few ideas more sacred than the physical, emotional, and spiritual connections individuals have had with nature. The love of these beautiful landscapes has inspired countless generations to protect and preserve these lands and to make sure that the wild, untamed beauty will continue to awe future generations who have yet to come across their magnificence. On March 1, 1872, Yellowstone National Park was federally recognized as the country’s first protected area, 44 years before the National Park Service was founded in 1916. And with this first step, the conservation, culture, history, and preservation of parks and protected areas began. Not only do these parks and protected areas ensure the vitality of natural resources, but of historical and cultural resources as well. Constructing and defining the National Park Service as the revered organization that it is today was no easy task. While some individuals have used their talents to create and preserve the physical landscape—physically building the parks and developing policies and laws—others have used their literary and artistic skills to showcase their beauty and history. No one person is the guardian or champion of these protected areas—with collaboration, vision, and connection to the land, we are part of the parks equally as the parks are part of ourselves. Created by Clemson University Libraries.

This lesson plan introduces students to Thomas Edison's life and inventions. It asks students to compare and contrast life around 1900 with their own lives and helps students understand the connections between the technological advancements of the early twentieth century and contemporary society and culture.

Uses primary sources to explore the impacts World War I had on the struggle for civil rights in Connecticut and America.

Students study select court transcripts and other primary source materials from the second Scottsboro Boys Trial of 1933, a continuation of the first trial in which two young white women wrongfully accused nine African American teenagers of rape.

In this activity students perform a role play of a talk show between Lowell workers and factory owners. To research their characters, students analyze primary sources. This activity is used to teach with the film Daughters of Free Men, but can be completed without the film.

An inquiry-based lesson plan about child labor and education in 19th century Connecticut for use with Where I Live: Connecticut

Aspects of the tragic as a mode of literature and a quality of lived experience pursued in readings that extend from the warfare of the ancient world to the experiences of modern life. Authors include Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, Balzac, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Conrad, Dinesen, Faulkner, and Camus. Includes viewing of at least two films. "Tragedy" is a name originally applied to a particular kind of dramatic art and subsequently to other literary forms; it has also been applied to particular events, often implying thereby a particular view of life. Throughout the history of Western literature it has sustained this double reference. Uniquely and insistently, the realm of the tragic encompasses both literature and life. Through careful, critical reading of literary texts, this subject will examine three aspects of the tragic experience: The scapegoat; The tragic hero; The ethical crisis. These aspects of the tragic will be pursued in readings that range in the reference of their materials from the warfare of the ancient world to the experience of the modern extermination camps.

This collection uses primary sources to explore the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and draw diverse material from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. Each set includes an overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee.

On June 28, 1919, Germany and the Allied Powers signed the Treaty of Versailles in the Hall of Mirrors at the famous Palace of Versailles, officially ending World War I. World War I, or the Great War, lasted from 1914 to 1918, and claimed the lives of nearly ten million soldiers and approximately thirteen million civilians. Germany and its allies in the Central Powers had lost the war, so representatives of the victorious Allied Powers including the United States, France, and Britain negotiated the terms of the treaty. President Woodrow Wilson and his allies wanted the treaty to provide a lasting peace following Wilson’s Fourteen Points speech delivered on January 8, 1918. European powers sought peace but also wanted to punish Germany, who they blamed for causing the war. Germans also expected that the Fourteen Points would be the basis for the peace talks when they signed the armistice in November 1918. When the Allied Powers met in Paris to discuss the world after the war, however, a much more punitive plan emerged.

Examines a number of famous trials in European and American history. Considers the salient issues (political, social, cultural) of several trials, the ways in which each trial was constructed and covered in public discussion at the time, the ways in which legal reasoning and storytelling interacted in each trial and in later retellings of the trial, and the ways in which trials serve as both spectacle and a forum for moral and political reasoning. Students have an opportunity to study one trial in depth and present their findings to the class.

This Trinity College Library collection comprises more than 1500 images of people, places and events related to Hartford, CT, and its history. A large portion of the collection resulted from efforts of the former Trinity College Hartford Studies Project to preserve the abandoned photographic archive of a now defunct Hartford newspaper. At that time the photographs were reproduced on slide film, with the slides later digitized by Trinity College Library for this collection. The photographs reside at Hartford Public Library.

In this lesson students read a series of documents about the American and Mexican reasons for and against the 1846 U.S.-Mexico War. As they read the documents students identify when the authors employ various foreign policy ideologies such as Manifest Destiny, Racial and Cultural Superiority, and Self Defense. This lesson was designed to be implemented with a Smartboard, but it can be completed without this technology.

The classic American drama Twelve Angry Men can be used to frame discussion of the constitutional right and civic function of the trial by jury. The lesson explores the specific provisions associated with this right as well as the strengths and weaknesses of the system.

The corrupting influence of slavery on marriage and the family is a predominant theme in Solomon Northup's narrative Twelve Years a Slave. In this lesson, students are asked to identify and analyze narrative passages that provide evidence for how slavery undermined and perverted these social institutions. Northup collaborated with a white ghostwriter, David Wilson. Students will read the preface and identify and analyze statements Wilson makes to prove the narrative is true.

This lesson focuses on the slave narrative of Solomon Northup, a free black living in the North, who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the Deep South. Slave narratives are autobiographies of former slaves that describe their experiences during enslavement, how they became free, and their lives in freedom. Because slave narratives treat the experience of one person, they raise questions about whether that individual's experiences exceptional.

In this activity students compare an eighteenth-century print of a slave ship and a table of data about the voyages of the slave ship to draw facts and make inferences about the transatlantic slave trade. This activity was designed for the Smartboard, but it can be completed without a Smartboard.