This lesson discusses how a teacher can use the game of chess to instruct students on Medieval class structure. The students become engaged with the game and discover the connections with the history as they improve their skills in chess.

Students will examine a variety of primary sources (political cartoons, photographs, speeches, and posters) to examine the source, message, audience, and intent of the source. Through analysis of these sources, students will assess the need for aid in Europe after World War II and assess the impact of the aid program on participating countries.

How do you make sense of contrasting accounts of historical events? What makes one source more reliable than another? How does corroborating information across sources help confirm or discredit historical accounts? In this lesson, students engage in such questions as they evaluate and compare different types of primary source documents with different perspectives on working conditions in English textile factories at the beginning of the 19th century.

In this lesson students will be introduced to Islamic culture while viewing the PBS video series Islam: Empire of Faith. Students will have the opportunity to research aspects of Islam by using the World Wide Web, library books, and other research tools. Students will also have the opportunity to work with classmates in creating an ABC Book of Islam based on their research, accompanied by visuals. *This is lesson 2 of unit on Islam entitled: Islam-Empires of Faith.

In this simulation activity, the classroom will be turned into a feudal system with the teacher as King. Students will participate in various aspects of feudal life as either lords, knights, peasants, and serfs.

This article explains the development of feudalism in Europe. It explains how lords were able to support a military force of knights.

Students will explore the world of Medieval Europe. They will learn the way the people lived and how Phragmites was part of this world. Students will then be assigned a social class role in the system of feudalism and research information about their character's privileges and disadvantages. Students will experience the feudal system through activities and presentations to relay what they learned to their class. Students may choose a variety of creative outlets to express their character's life in their own creative way with a group or separately.

This article examines the spread of Islam and its influence on art. With the spread of Islam outward from the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century, the figurative artistic traditions of the newly conquered lands profoundly influenced the development of Islamic art.

In 1095, Pope Urban II launched the First Crusade, calling forth knights and peasants from across Western Europe to march against Muslim Turks in the Byzantine Empire and ultimately ?re-conquer? the holy city of Jerusalem. In this lesson, students compare Christian and Muslim perspectives of the First Crusade by analyzing different accounts of the siege of Jerusalem.

This resource is an article from the Smithsonian Magazine about a Russian family which fled into Siberia in the 1930's and was not seen by other humans until the 1970's. The article discusses why they fled, how they lived, and what impact this had on their children.

This lesson plan is designed as a guide that offers different ways to engage your students in the article "Fractured Lands" by Scott Anderson, published by The New York Times with support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. In “Fractured Lands,” Anderson explores the modern Middle East through the eyes of six individuals, tracing their lives from the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq through the Arab spring, up to the present day. While these people come from different countries, ethnicities and socio-economic backgrounds, their interlinked narratives provide a window into a turbulent region and help the reader understand the macro-narrative of modern Middle Eastern history. Throughout “Fractured Lands” Anderson raises questions about leadership, governance, identity, dissent and the consequences of history, which enrich our understanding of current events and may also help us better anticipate the future.

This annotated inquiry leads students through an investigation of the French Revolution. Adolescent students are quite concerned with challenging authority and establishing their independence within the world; the concept of revolution brings those two concerns to their most world-altering levels. This inquiry gives students an entry point into thinking like historians about the French Revolution. The question of success invites students into the intellectual space that historians occupy. By investigating the question of the French Revolution’s success, students will need to make decisions about what the problems of the Revolution were, how to give weight to the events of three different periods of the Revolution, and what distance, if any, was between intentions and effects.

In this lesson, students consider how ordinary citizens contributed to and experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall. They then develop scrapbooks depicting how people experienced the wall and use the books as symbolic bricks in building a classroom Berlin Wall.

Students will gain the ability to recognize important names of the enlightenment and will understand the basic idea that the order of society was changed from a system of government in which people served the government to a system that envisioned the government serving the people that formed it.

The graphic novel Persepolis is set in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. Most students are unaware of the changes associated with the events during that time, but the repercussions of the revolution are still being felt throughout the world. In this lesson, students work in small groups to research a specific topic related to Iran, using a WebQuest to focus their research on relevant and reliable information. After the research is complete, students present their information to the class through a technology-enhanced presentation.

Galileo has long stood as an emblem of intellectual freedom and the triumph of truth over superstition. Yet his achievements can also help students recognize the contingency of even the most inevitable-seeming historical developments and how the consequences of historic turning-points extend into our lives today.

Students will: -use maps to identify the absolute and relative location of Mexico; - examine the physical features that affect the cultures in the Central regions; -analyze vegetation and economic resources available due to location; -develop an understanding of the formation of Tenochtitl n and the use of a system of chinampas. Lesson # 1: Gepgraphy of Mexico is part of a larger unit and begins on page 6.

Students will be able to explain the sources of German nationalism -- including cultural, intellectual, religious, political, and social -- and describe the tensions between nationalism as cultural or linguistic "sameness," e.g. , "German," as well as nationalism as defined by loyalty to a national political institution, e.g. , "Germany." Students will also analyze the creation of the German Empire as constructed "from above" by Prussian leadership through political institutions, economic interest, diplomacy, and war and the consequences of this for political, religious, and nationalistic opponents of German unification. Lastly, students will examine the co-option of traditional political factions such as liberals and conservatives by German unifiers and the emergence of new political groups as various national minority parties, including the Catholic Center Party and the Social Democrats, as a result of unification.

This article examines European exploration in the Americas. During the earliest years of European expansion onto the American continents, the search for gold was one of the driving factors in the exploration and colonization of the vast lands

In this Teaching with the News lesson, students will assess the role of graffiti in political protest, use a short video to analyze the relevance of graffiti during the Egyptian revolution and articulate opinions on graffiti and censorship.