The Nietz Old Textbook Collection is a collection of 19th Century schoolbooks in the Untied States. The collection is used by faculty and students.

With this digital collection, students will explore the wider, literary context for the canonical works of the American Renaissance. Students will consider the following essential questions: 1. What was the literary context in which canonical American Renaissance writers wrote and published? 2. What kinds of literature were popular in the mid-nineteenth-century United States? 3. How did now-canonical writers engage or respond to popular literary forms?

In this lesson focused on 1960's American youth counterculture and the war in Vietnam, students will explore the divide between the classes, with politicians enforcing strategies largely executed by working class young men. Students will analyze the cultural context and impact of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s song, “Fortunate Son.” Extension activities include comparing this song to other protest songs and exploring how songs lend themselves to social commentary.

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.

In this lesson, students look to Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf as case studies that illustrate why African Americans left the South in record numbers and how communities came together in new urban environments, often around the sound of the Blues. Students will examine factors that prompted African Americans to migrate from the South to northern cities during the Great Migration, including the burdens of the sharecropping economy and racial discrimination, as well asanalyze various accounts of the Great Migration era in different mediums, including photographs, paintings, letters, and census data, determining which details are emphasized in each account.

In this lesson, students will watch a 25-minute video, Aretha Franklin ABC News Close Up (1968), as a pre-lesson activity. In class, students examine a timeline of landmark events that occurred during the women's movement from 1961 to 1971. While watching multiple live performances of Aretha Franklin, including "Dr. Feelgood," "Do Right Woman," "Respect," "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman," and "Chain of Fools," students will seek to identify Gospel influences and investigate whether issues related to women's rights are reflected in the songs as well. The extension activity includes an insightful personal narrative that provides an account of sexism that existed during the Civil Rights era.

In this lesson, students investigate a collection of musical performances, television interviews, and movie trailers, discussing how black artists of the 1970s, including James Brown, George Clinton, and Curtis Mayfield, addressed black audiences through the music and aesthetics of Funk, casting a light on all that the Civil Rights movement could not do for a racially divided America.

In this lesson, students will explore how the Charleston reflected the culture of the 1920s. Students will delve into the origins of the dance, its controversial past, and how and why it is symbolic of the Jazz age. Assessment includes an essay prompt and a rubric.

In this lesson from EDSITEment, students will explore Kurt Vonnegut’s satire and think about the implications of the pursuit of equality in relation to the American creed. But the way of life he depicts also invites students to think anew about the meaning and importance of the “American Dream,” and about whether technology helps or hinders the American character and our prospects for happiness. Audio and visual resources are included.

This lesson allow students to explore the forces that prompted the literary modernism movement, specifically focusing on modernist poetry. By allowing students to explore the movement independently, they will also be able to develop research and inquiry skills.

In this lesson, students closely examine Dickinson's poem "There's a certain slant of light" in order to understand her craft. Students explore different components of Dickinson's poetry and then practice their own critical and poetry writing skills in an emulation exercise. Finally, in the spirit of Dickinson's correspondences, students will exchange their poems and offer informed critiques of each others' work.

By studying other female characters in "The Awakening,"Â students will see how Chopin carefully provides many examples of a socially acceptable "role" that Edna could adopt.

This lesson encourages close study of Wood's painting, American Revolution primary sources, and Longfellow's poem to understand the significance of this historical ride in America's struggle for freedom. By reading primary sources, students learn how Paul Revere and his Midnight Ride became an American story of patriotism.

American author Pearl S. Buck spent most of her life in China. She returned to America in 1934, "an immigrant among immigrants"¦in my native land." In this lesson, students will explore American attitudes toward immigration in the 1930s through Pearl S. Buck's essay, "On Discovering America." They will explore the meaning of the term "American" in this context and look at how the media portrayed immigrants.

Trace the elements of history, literature, polemic, and autobiography in the 1847Â Narrative of William W. Brown, An American Slave.

Students explain the meaning of the term "individualism" and discuss the way ideals of individualism changed over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; discuss the importance of race and gender in negotiations of American political and cultural independence; explain the relationship between eighteenth- century Enlightenment ideals and nineteenth-century Romanticism; and discuss transformations in American spiritual beliefs between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, from the Great Awakening to Deism to more Romantic conceptions of divinity.

In this activity students analyze the lyrics to a popular Vietnam War protest song and discuss how music can be used to motivate people and for protest. Then students will create a new stanza for the protest song "I-Feel-Like-I'm Fixin'-To-Die Rag."

To better understand how to find locations on a globe and the different types of terrain and physical features of these places, students will explore 3 stations : Places around the world in VR, Vocab activities with Maps and Globes, and a teacher led station about different physical features in different locations. 🌍🗺️Lesson Link

In this lesson, students explore the historical context of Walt Whitman's concept of "democratic poetry" by reading his poetry and prose and by examining daguerreotypes taken circa 1850. Next, students will compare the poetic concepts and techniques behind Whitman's "I Hear America Singing" and Langston Hughes' "Let America Be America Again," and have an opportunity to apply similar concepts and techniques in creating a poem from their own experience.