In this lesson, students select American authors to research, create timelines and biopoems, and then collaborate on teams to design and perform a panel presentation in which they role-play as their authors. The final project requires each student to synthesize information about his or her author in an essay.

In this lesson students learn how Birth of a Nation reflected and influenced racial attitudes, and they analyze and evaluate the efforts of the NAACP to prohibit showing of the film.

This lesson is designed to help students prepare to read a historical novel. Students are required to complete research pertaining to the work's setting, time-period or decade. Afterwards, students use the online site and software, Prezi, to communicate and share their findings.

In this lesson, students engage in a process of reading using Bloom's Taxonomy in order to provide them with a tool to better understand whatever they are reading.

Students will explore the Supreme Court case Board of Education v. Earls, in which high school sophomore Lindsay Earls challenged her school's drug testing policy. Students will watch a documentary on the case, apply the Fourth Amendment to the case, and further their understanding by participation in activities such as creating an anti-drug campaign and a moot court or mock trial.

In this lesson, students will investigate how teenagers became a distinct demographic group with its own identity in the postwar years, and, in turn, how their influence helped push Rock and Roll into the mainstream. In so doing, they helped secure Rock and Roll's place as the most important popular music of the 20th century.

In this lesson, students assume the role of entertainment industry professionals responsible for marketing a selection of movies from the early Rock and Roll era. Following an examination of trailers, posters, newspaper articles, and the Motion Picture Production Code of 1930, students will present to the class on the various stakeholders that helped shape the way Rock and Roll culture was introduced to mainstream movie audiences in the 1950s.

In this lesson, students will trace some of the technological developments that made the electric guitar possible. Using a variety of Internet sources, students will conduct research into some of the early models, including the hollow-bodied Gibson ES-150, introduced in 1936, and the Fender Telecaster, the first mass-marketed solid-body electric guitar, introduced in 1952, at the dawn of the Rock and Roll era. They will explore not only how these instruments transformed the Blues sound, but how they laid the groundwork for the development of the electric guitar as an essential Rock and Roll instrument.

The subject of this lesson is the music of which Fats Domino speaks: the R&B of the pre-Rock and Roll era.

In this lesson, students will examine the history and popularity of "We Shall Overcome" and investigate six additional songs from different musical genres that reveal the impact of the Civil Rights movement. These are: Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit," a poignant Blues song depicting the horrors of lynching; Bob Dylan's "Oxford Town," a Folk song about protests after the integration of the University of Mississippi; John Coltrane's "Alabama," an instrumental Jazz recording made in response to the September 1963 church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four African-American girls; Nina Simone's "Mississippi Goddam," a response to the same church bombing as well as the murder of civil rights activist Medgar Evers in Mississippi; Sam Cooke's "A Change is Gonna Come," a Soul song written after Cooke's arrest for attempting to check in to a whites-only motel in Shreveport, Louisiana; and Odetta's "Oh Freedom," a spiritual that Odetta performed at the 1963 March on Washington.

After reading books, students share book talks through digital storytelling. First, students plan scripts and then find images to illustrate their scripts. They also add text, narration, music as well as pan and zoom effects. Finally, the joy of reading is prompted through the sharing of the students' digital stories.

In this Random House for High School Teachers reader's guide to Bound Feet and Western Dress by Pang-Mei Natasha Chang, students will explore the memoir that chronicles the life of Chang's great-aunt Yu-i in China, between the fall of the last emperor and the Communist revolution.

Teachers generally warn student writers to avoid sentence fragments but professional writers use sentence fragments effectively for a variety of reasons. Using Edgar Schuster's study of sentence fragments from "The Best American Essays," this lesson encourages students to examine fragments in action, determine their effective rhetorical uses, and reflect on their own uses of sentence fragments.

Using documents from the Garrison Family Papers (the anti-imperialism scrapbook of William Lloyd Garrison, Jr.) at Smith College, students will analyze the impact of British colonial rule in India and predict the outcome of India’s nationalist movement.

This brochure assignment teaches how shifting purposes and audiences can create change in a student’s writing. After exploring published brochures, students determine key questions, research a topic and work through the writing process to create their own informative brochure complete with visuals.

In this Random House for High School Teachers reader's guide, the introduction, questions, and suggestions for further reading are intended to enhance student discussion of Edwidge Danticat's book, Brother, I'm Dying, a memoir of the tragedy and losses of a Haitian family and the hope of a new life in America.

This lesson introduces students to the importance of building a constituency to support or oppose public policies using the case study of the Montgomery Bus Boycott as an example. Students read primary documents from the boycott and discuss how the documents show how leaders tried to build support.

This webpage has approximately 300 political cartoons and lessons for classroom use covering an variety of current events. Each cartoon has talking points, a blank cartoon students can caption and additional resources. Note* This lesson works well with the following cartoon evaluation resource (Cartoon Evaluation Worksheet): http://nieonline.com/cftc/pdfs/eval.pdf

This lesson is 1 of 3 in a unit. In part 1, students learn how the Ford Motor Company successfully introduced mass production strategies to the auto industry.