Study guide for the "Remarkable Journey: Founding the Asian Indian Community in North Carolina," a documentary that illustrates the history, culture, lives, and contributions of Indian-Americans in North Carolina.

In this lesson, students will investigate and debate the legacy of John Brown, building reasoning and critical thinking skills and an understanding of the complexity of historical events and historical memory.

In this activity, students use a story map to follow the historic route of the Buncombe Turnpike and learn more about its economic and cultural impact on western North Carolina. Students will also see how the landscape has transformed in the nearly 200 years since the creation of the Turnpike.

Students will simulate the experiences of an immigrant's passage to and arrival in America during the turn of the century, relating these experiences to Emma Lazarus's poem The New Colossus. Students will also explore the process to become a naturalized citizen and learn about the
different ethnic groups immigrating to America.

Many students feel that adults don’t listen and that as teens, they have little power to affect change.  In this lesson, students will explore the successful youth movement during the Vietnam era to change the voting age from 21 to 18‐years‐old. Students will understand that largely due to the valid protests from young people (“Old enough to fight!  Old enough to vote!”) the Twenty‐Sixth Amendment was ratified.

George Washington served the country for many years before becoming President. He was a general during the American Revolution and served as president of the Constitutional Convention, where the Constitution was written. After all that, he was ready to retire. The electoral college had different plans for George Washington though. All 69 electors chose him to be the first President of the United States of America. George Washington was the only President to receive all of the electoral college’s votes. Americans supported the choice for President and celebrated Washington as he traveled from his home in Mount Vernon to New York City, then onto the nation’s capital. On April 30, 1789 George Washington, at age 57, took the first oath of office as President of the United States under the Constitution. John Adams was his vice president.

President Jefferson’s style was very different from that of Adams and Washington; because of that, many Americans looked forward to his inauguration. As people from across the nation gathered in the new capital to listen to Jefferson’s inaugural address, many wondered if the less formal president did in fact, want to limit the powers of government. They didn’t have to wait long.

Up to this point you have been studying the domestic issues that faced the new nation. In this chapter we’re going to study the same relative time period as the last chapter but focus more on foreign policy issues. By 1803, America was tangled in a war between Great Britain and France once again. Both countries were taking American ships that were trading with their enemy. President Jefferson tried hard to follow Washington and Adams lead and remain neutral.

Americans moving westward in the mid-1800s did so for a variety of reasons. Stories of rich farmland in the Oregon Territory interested many to sell everything they owned and head out for a new beginning. The flood of immigrants from Europe, along with a higher birth rate, fueled a push west as large-scale farming could help support growth in the East. The US population had grown from more than five million in 1800 to more than twenty-three million by the mid-1800s. Others looked to make it rich in the expanding fur trade and were up for the adventures of trapping. In 1849, the news of gold in California caused a mad dash for wealth. Some were curious about the mysterious West and felt that what lay across the Mississippi River might just be the change they were looking for. Whatever the reason, an estimated 4,000,000 Americans moved into the new frontier between 1820 and 1850 and in the process shaped a new identity in the American West built on ruggedness, new feelings of freedom, and a spirit of individualism.

The nation continued to grow in size and wealth, each region experiencing its own different kind of economic growth which caused them to develop differently. Citizens differed across regions in their ideas of political, economic, and social progress. For the success of the growing nation, Americans throughout the country tried to compromise on their disagreements. Unfortunately, no amount of compromise could minimize the harsh growing pains the nation was about to experience.

During the last part of the eighteenth and the first part of the nineteenth centuries, there was a growing interest in social reform, or an organized movement to improve the quality of life for particular groups of people. The motivations behind these movements were both political and religious.

This inquiry examines the emergence of the women's suffrage movement in the 19th century as an effort to expand women's political and economic rights, and it extends that investigation into the present.

This interactive timeline highlights the stories of the women of Vance Birthplace in the mountains of North Carolina. From prehistory to the twentieth century, students can explore each woman's experience of life in the Reems Creek Valley through videos, primary and secondary sources, and graphics.

In this lesson, students examine primary sources from Wilson Library’s online exhibit, “Sour Stomachs and Galloping Headaches,” to form new understandings and theories about the common ailments and epidemics our ancestors faced, as well as the medical “cures” they used to treat their illnesses. Students will analyze and evaluate the various primary sources in the exhibit via a Historical Scene Investigation (“HSI”) activity, which leads students through an investigative process of similar to what crime scene investigators do when they examine evidence from a crime scene and formulate theories about what happened. In this HIS, students will first examine the evidence by filling out case reports that ask them to evaluate the primary resources from the website. Then, they will attempt to diagnose different patient illnesses and prescribe different cures to treat these patients based on what they uncovered in their case reports.