This online textbook is designed for grade 8 and up and covers all of North Carolina history, from the arrival of the first people some 12,000 years ago to the present. There are eleven parts, organized chronologically, a collection of primary sources, readings, and multimedia that can be rearranged to meet the needs of the classroom. Special web-based tools aid reading and model historical inquiry, helping students build critical thinking and literacy skills.

In this lesson, students view archival photographs, combine their efforts to comb through a database of more than 2,000 archival newspaper accounts about race relations in the United States, and read newspaper articles written from different points of view about post-war riots in Chicago.

Containing more than 50 articles from the award-winning Tar Heel Junior Historian magazine and over 40 lesson plans, this multidisciplinary Educator Notebook will enrich your exploration of North Carolina and American history with diverse perspectives. This resource's link takes you to a very short form that gives you free downloadable access to the complete PDF book.

Students will watch various documentary videos (10-12 minutes) about significant events in the United States in the 1990s. For each short video, students will complete a graphic organizer. Students will then engage in discussions with their peers about the documentaries using a set of predetermined questions and through a variety of suggested discussion strategies.

In this lesson, students work in cooperative groups to prepare presentations on business organization and Big Business during the second part of the Industrial Revolution (1860-1910) in the United States.

In this lesson, students will explore the persistence of the American Dream by juxtaposing the writings of Horatio Alger Jr. and John Steinbeck with the artistic output of Elvis and Cash. If the American Dream as an ideology has always been a balance between myth and reality, these artists, and Rock and Roll culture more generally, gave the myth something real. Through a survey of literature, album art, songs, television news reports, film, and other materials, students will examine how these artists became symbols of the American Dream for their many fans.

In this lesson, students use primary sources to answer the essential question: Was the bracero program an exploitation of or an opportunity for Mexican laborers? Students will justify their answer with evidence from the analysis of the primary sources.

In this lesson, students draw a connection between George Washington’s establishment of the two-term precedent for the presidency and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s breaking of that precedent nearly 150 years later. In this lesson, students will analyze multiple primary and secondary sources, both collaboratively and independently. Discussion and debate is a large focus of this lesson. Students will make interdisciplinary connections between history and government/civics.

Students explore the right to education and the battle that ensued to end centuries of unequal opportunities for African-Americans.

This lesson highlights the changing relationship between the city center and the suburb in the postwar decades, especially in the 1950s. Students will look at the legislation leading up to and including the Federal Highway Act of 1956. They will also examine documents about the history of Levittown, the most famous and most important of the postwar suburban planned developments.

This lesson plan attempts to dissolve the artificial boundary between domestic and international affairs in the postwar period to show students how we choose to discuss history.

In this Teaching with the News lesson, students explore the human, economic, social, and political costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is an extension activity included for advanced students.

In this activity, students use primary source documents to assess the validity of this statement: "The Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education paved the way for a new level of justice for all Americans," with reference to political, economic, and social developments during the last three decades of the twentieth century.

In this lesson, students will analyze the Allied war aims, strategies and major turning points of the war by reading the prescribed text pages and participate in class discussions and by defining terms and names into notebooks. They will describe the impact of events on the people at the home front by creating cartoons summarizing events depicted in the New York Times articles and describe the role and sacrifices of members of the American armed forces by writing a letter home from the perspective of a D-Day survivor.

In this activity students investigate various perspectives on the debate over the annexation of the Philippines by the United States after the Spanish-American War. Students read a variety of primary sources on the annexation question and the struggle for Philippine independence, debate the relevant issues while in character of proponents of either side, attempt to reach consensus on the issue, and report the outcome to the class.

In this lesson, students will examine photographs, songs, interviews, and other archival documents from the Dust Bowl era. Students will list problems ordinary Americans faced during the Great Depression and cite examples of the attempts of government and citizens to solve these problems.

In this lesson, students will understand examples of persuasive language and will learn about conditions in the Dust Bowl region in the mid-1930s by examining a speech by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and a letter written by farmer Caroline Henderson.

This unit addresses the development of women’s rights in the United States. It begins with an overview of women’s roles in the nineteenth century, then moves to a discussion of the fight for women’s suffrage, and concludes by looking at the ultimately failed battle to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. Students will interpret primary-source documents such as a legal ruling, cartoons and a painting using a Primary Source Analysis Worksheet that teaches them to approach such materials systematically. Throughout the lesson, the students work on detecting the perspectives of various figures and groups in U.S. history in terms of their views on the role of women in society. In particular, the lesson addresses the backlash against the civil and women’s rights movements of the 1960s, focusing on the figure of Phyllis Schlafly and her group, “Stop ERA.”

Students will analyze documents pertaining to the woman suffrage movement as it intensified following passage of the 15th Amendment that guaranteed the right to vote for African American males. Documents were chosen to call attention to the struggle's length, the movement's techniques, and the variety of arguments for and against giving women the vote.

Students will hear stories from former civil rights activists, analyze what motivated students to join the movement, what their experiences were like, and consider the relevance of this history today.