Explore by Time Period

Dozens of downloadable teaching activities, books, films, and websites. Select by dates on the timeline above or era on the menu to the right.

Sample Teaching Activities

The Color Line - Colonial Laws

A lesson on the countless colonial laws enacted to create division and inequality based on race. This helps students understand the origins of racism in the United States and who benefits. Laws imposing penalties on white indentured servants and black slaves who ran away together likewise suggest that whites and blacks did run away together.

Unsung Heroes

Don’t we need our national idols? …Granted, it is good to have historical figures we can admire and emulate. But why hold up as models the 55 rich white men who drafted the Constitution as a way of establishing a government that would protect the interests of their class—slaveholders, merchants, bondholders, land speculators? Why not recall the humanitarianism of William Penn, an early colonist who made peace with the Delaware Indians instead of warring on them, as other colonial leaders were doing?

Hunger on Trial: An Activity on the Irish Potato Famine and Its Meaning for Today

Somewhere back in school I learned about the 19th-century Irish Potato Famine: More than a million people starved to death when blight hit Ireland’s main crop, the potato. The famine meant tremendous human suffering and triggered a mass migration, largely to the United States. All this is true. But it is also incomplete and misses key facts that link past and present global hunger.