Columbia American History Online

The United States in Vietnam
Resource Type: Classroom Simulation
In this simulation, a special congressional committee—the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Vietnam—will examine changes in U.S. foreign policy toward Vietnam from 1954 through 1975. The committee will investigate why the United States entered the war but failed to prevent the communist takeover of the Republic of South Vietnam. Students will impersonate historical characters who are called to testify before this fictitious Senate subcommittee. The historical characters will explain, from their perspective, why the United States entered the war, why it escalated its military involvement there, and then, despite the escalation, why it suffered defeat. Do the senators and journalists reporting on the investigation blame any one U.S. president? Or do they blame rather a wide range of circumstances both domestic and international? This simulation will expose students to a variety of conflicting interpretations of the U.S. role in Vietnam.

The Legacy of the Counterculture
Resource Type: Point-Counterpoint

The New Left
Resource Type: Point-Counterpoint

The U.S. Entry into Vietnam
Resource Type: Point-Counterpoint

The War on Poverty
Resource Type: Point-Counterpoint

Primary Source Analysis: Protest Music
Resource Type: Teaching Activity

Primary Source Analysis: The Sixties
Resource Type: Teaching Activity

Primary Source Analysis: Nixon and Vietnam
Resource Type: Teaching Activity

Primary Source Analysis: Nixon and Vietnam
Resource Type: Teaching Activity

Vietnam and President Nixon
Resource Type: Document-Based Question
This DBQ focuses on Richard Nixon's conduct of the Vietnam War. The documents are drawn from the period between 1968, when Richard Nixon successfully campaigned for the U.S. presidency, and 1973, when the Paris Peace Accords, which formalized the end of U.S. involvement in the war, were signed by the United States, South Vietnam, and North Vietnam. Students will investigate the extent to which the Nixon administration was able to achieve the "honorable peace" he promised the American public.

Review of Invisible Man
Resource Type: Primary Source
New York intellectual Irving Howe affirms Ralph Ellison's book Invisible Man as a "Negro novel."

Eisenhower at a Football Game
Resource Type: Primary Source
Eisenhower served as president of Columbia University; here he is seen waving a Columbia University pennant in one hand and an Army pennant in the other at a college football game.

Discovery and Settlement: New Amsterdam
Resource Type: Document-Based Question
The present-day issues of tolerance and diversity are explored in colonial society. These primary sources provide contemporary perceptions of Native Americans, African Americans, Jews, and European settlers.

The American Revolution: Defeat and Victory in New York
Resource Type: Document-Based Question
New York City was a center of loyalist support and trans-Atlantic trade during the revolutionary era. The documents on the Battle of Brooklyn, the British occupation, and the end of the Revolutionary war demonstrate how these events were turned into victories for New York, establishing the city's path toward national and world prominence.

City Problems: Poverty and Slums
Resource Type: Document-Based Question
Exploring the cholera epidemic in mid-nineteenth century New York City, this selection of primary sources provides a case-study of immigration, urbanization (e.g., slums such as the Five Points), and social and moral reform that can be applied to the study of any city in the industrialized world.

The Five Points Slum
Resource Type: Primary Source
Five Points, the great slum of antebellum New York, was located at the convergence of Worth, Baxter, and Park Streets in present-day lower Manhattan. Its residents suffered terribly during the cholera epidemic of 1832.

Report of the Magdalen Society
Resource Type: Primary Source
Led by John Robert McDowell, a Princeton divinity student, the Magdalen Society was founded in 1831 to help reform prostitutes living in the Five Points slum.

Petition to Have the Five Points Opened
Resource Type: Primary Source
Merchants owning property along the periphery of Five Points petitioned the municipal government in 1829 to demolish the heart of the slum by widening and extending Anthony and Cross Streets.

Cholera Outbreak
Resource Type: Primary Source
This article, written during the cholera epidemic of 1832, conveyed the opinion that only certain social types contracted the deadly disease.

The Cholera Epidemic
Resource Type: Primary Source
Many of New York's Protestant leaders interpreted the 1832 cholera epidemic as proof of God's displeasure with contemporary morality.

Cholera Epidemic Editorial
Resource Type: Primary Source
As far away as New Hampshire, editorials denounced the New York cholera epidemic of 1832 as divine retribution for decadence and sin.

Annual Report of the Interments
Resource Type: Primary Source
Dr. John Hoskins Griscom (1809–74), a Quaker physician, founded the New York Academy of Medicine and pioneered the field of public health. His advocacy for sanitation, medical care, and adequate housing led to the great reforms of the Progressive Era after the Civil War.

Charles Dickens on the Five Points
Resource Type: Primary Source
The famed British writer Charles Dickens published his account of his 1842 visit to America, where he found evidence of England's superior class system in the squalor of New York's Five Points slum.

Sunshine and Shadow in New York
Resource Type: Primary Source
Sunshine and Shadow in New York, a mid-nineteenth-century publication, depicts New York City as two polar societies, one affluent and vibrant, and one poor and diseased.

How the Other Half Lives
Resource Type: Primary Source
Newspaper reporters, such as Jacob Riis (1849–1914), played an instrumental role in exposing the destitution and misery of New York's immigrant and working-class neighborhoods.

Urban Society: Central Park and Social Reform
Resource Type: Document-Based Question
This microhistory of Central Park in New York City provides students with a laboratory for learning how social reformers attempted to clean the city of its slums and promote the well-being of its residents. These tools can be applied to the study of any large city.

President Johnson's Commencement Address
Resource Type: Primary Source
President Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–73) made this landmark speech in 1965 to students at Howard University in Washington, D.C., a historically black institution, to delineate the tenets of his Great Society program.

Modern Republicanism and the New Right
Resource Type: Document-Based Question
The development of a Republican majority is the focus of this DBQ, which explores the larger issues of modern republicanism in postwar America and the emergence of the new right. Electoral maps provide in-depth analyses of presidential elections since the 1960s.

Eisenhower and the Politics of the 1950s
Resource Type: Document-Based Question
This selection of primary sources gives students an opportunity to examine different layers of dissent during the Eisenhower presidency. Although President Eisenhower enjoyed great public support, his administration was challenged by problems at home and abroad.

Homogenized Society and Conformity
Resource Type: Document-Based Question
This carefully crafted selection of primary sources will allow students to weigh the multiplicity of factors that influenced American culture in the 1950s, such as the Cold War, government policies, legislation, corporations, and television. Students can focus on the extent to which consensus and conformity dominated relations among or within various social groups.

The Civil-Rights Movement
Resource Type: Document-Based Question
The civil-rights movement shifted from nonviolent civil disobedience to "black power." The rich selection of primary sources will help students explore the philosophies of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, the differences between the African American experience in the North and in the South, the role of government and political institutions, as well as global movements against imperialism.

Brown v. Board of Education: The Results of Segregation
Resource Type: Primary Source
This landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954 declared the segregation of black and white children in American public schools to be unconstitutional.

From Protest to Politics
Resource Type: Primary Source
Bayard Rustin (1910–87), one of Martin Luther King's closest advisors, was a key organizer of the 1963 March on Washington.

To Fulfill These Rights
Resource Type: Primary Source
President Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–73) made this landmark speech to students at Howard University in Washington, D.C., a historically black institution, to outline the Great Society program.

Power and Racism
Resource Type: Primary Source
Stokely Carmichael (1941–88), born in Trinidad, invented the rallying cry of "Black Power" in Mississippi, in 1966, as a leader of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He left America in 1969 for Africa, where he helped found the All-African People's Revolutionary Party.

Bobby Seale and Huey Newton
Resource Type: Primary Source
Bobby Seale (1936– ) and Huey Newton (1942–89), cofounders of the Marxist Black Panther Party in Oakland, California, in 1966, advocated self-determination and self-rule for black Americans in contrast to the nonviolent, integrationist strategy of Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–68) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Black Panther Party Platform
Resource Type: Primary Source
Bobby Seale (1936– ) and Huey Newton (1942–89), cofounders of the Marxist Black Panther Party in Oakland, California, in 1966, advocated self-determination and self-rule for black Americans in contrast to the nonviolent, integrationist strategy of Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–68) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Chocolate City
Resource Type: Primary Source
The militant black-power phase of the civil-rights movement had its musical corollary in the rise of funk, an urban, gritty genre most often associated in the late 1960s with James Brown (1928– ) and Sly and the Family Stone. The band Parliament burst onto the national scene in the mid-1970s.

Beyond Vietnam
Resource Type: Primary Source
This speech was delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1967, at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City.

The Counterculture
Resource Type: Document-Based Question
Although the decade of the 1950s deserves its reputation as an age of political, social, and cultural conformity, seeds of social discontent nevertheless permeated American society. This carefully crafted DBQ focuses on the intellectual and artisitic critics of the affluent society, as well as the origins of the women's and civil-rights movements.

Levitt On Communism and Home Ownership
Resource Type: Primary Source
As the first community of its kind, Levittown, New York, located 25 miles east of Manhattan on Long Island, heralded the postwar arrival of suburban America with its mass-produced housing. William Levitt is quoted as saying the following.

Schlesinger on Freedom
Resource Type: Primary Source
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a noted American historian, wrote this influential book to argue that a rejuvenated faith in democratic ideals and the continuation of New Deal liberalism would safeguard America from the twin threats of totalitarianism and fascism.

Joseph McCarthy's Speech
Resource Type: Primary Source
Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, an unremarkable member of Congress from Wisconsin, burst onto the national political scene in 1950, after announcing to a West Virginia audience that he held in his hand a list of 205 American Communists who worked in the U.S. State Department.

Convergence
Resource Type: Primary Source
Renowned for his technique of spontaneous "splatter" or "action" painting, Jackson Pollock (1912–56) emerged as the leading American artist of the abstract expressionist movement.

I Am Waiting
Resource Type: Primary Source
One of the beat poets, Ferlinghetti captures an alternative perspective on life in postwar America in this poem.

Levittown, New York
Resource Type: Primary Source
As the first community of its kind, Levittown, New York, located 25 miles east of Manhattan on Long Island, heralded the postwar arrival of suburban America with its hundreds of acres of mass-produced housing.

The Affluent Soceiety: Public vs. Private Sectors
Resource Type: Primary Source
John Kenneth Galbraith, a prominent Harvard economist, outlined in this article the necessary balance that should exist between the private and public sectors of the American economy.

Woolworth Counter Strike
Resource Type: Primary Source
In 1960, students at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College, a historically black institution, defied segregation by sitting at the luncheon counter of the F.W. Woolworth store in Greensboro.

The Other America
Resource Type: Primary Source
With this book, writer and social activist Michael Harrington helped launch the New Left movement of the 1960s and its concerns about American poverty and social injustice.

The Feminine Mystique
Resource Type: Primary Source
Founder of the National Organization for Women (NOW), Betty Friedan wrote this influential treatise critiquing the loneliness and dissatisfaction felt by many suburban housewives in postwar America.

The Secession Crisis
Resource Type: Document-Based Question
This selection of primary sources allows students to interpret the Civil War as an ideological battle, pitting abolitionists against slavery's apologists, and Northerners against Southerners. Students will understand why most of the Southern states chose secession over union.

William Lloyd Garrison on Abolitionism
Resource Type: Primary Source
Before 1830 most abolitionists believed in the concept of colonization, but after that time, the abolitionist movement was transformed.

Slavery a Positive Good
Resource Type: Primary Source
John C. Calhoun was vice president of the United States (1825-32) and U.S. senator from South Carolina for most of the period from 1832 to 1850.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Resource Type: Primary Source
By 1858, the former slave Harriet Jacobs had finished her autobiography, which was later edited by the famous abolitionist, Lydia Maria Child.

Illustrations of the Pro-Slavery Argument
Resource Type: Primary Source
These illustrations support the institution of slavery. Why?

Conditions of Slaves vs. Free Laborers
Resource Type: Primary Source
Historians consider George Fitzhugh (1806–81) as one of the most eloquent, influential, and popular spokespersons for slavery.

Lincoln on Striking Shoemakers
Resource Type: Primary Source
During the presidential campaign in 1860, Abraham Lincoln traveled to New England and gave the following speech related to the famous strike of shoemakers in Lynn, Massachusetts. The newspaper that reprinted the speech indicated the audience's reaction in the bracketed information, provided in the excerpt below.

Freedom Petition of Massachusetts Slaves
Resource Type: Primary Source
Four slaves submitted this letter to the provincial legislature in Massachusetts on April 20, 1773.

Common Sense
Resource Type: Primary Source
Thomas Paine (1737–1809) was born in England and emigrated to the colonies in 1774. In Common Sense, Paine articulates his argument for independence.

Abigail Adams to John Adams
Resource Type: Primary Source
In 1776, Abigail Adams wrote a letter to her husband, John Adams, who was then attending the Continental Congress in Philadelphia.

Manumission of Slaves in North Carolina
Resource Type: Primary Source
In the wake of the Revolution, many Southern states liberalized their provisions for manumission. By 1790, slaveholders could manumit their slaves throughout the South, except in North Carolina.

The Declaration of Independence
Resource Type: Primary Source
In the Declaration of Independence, the Continental Congress asserted American independence from Britain and justified its decision to do so by citing a series of alleged violations of American rights.

Memoirs of Captain Alexander Graydon
Resource Type: Primary Source
Alexander Graydon (1752–1818), a captain in the Continental army, recounted the problems he encountered as he recruited men to fight the war, and he commented on the meaning of the Revolution.

A Whig Freeholder on Emancipation
Resource Type: Primary Source
Pennsylvania, like many of the Northern states, established gradual emancipation.

Rewards for Revolutionary War Veterans
Resource Type: Primary Source
North Carolina, like other states, rewarded veterans of the American Revolution with the granting of land and slaves.

The Constitution and Slavery
Resource Type: Primary Source
The Constitution's clauses relating to slavery did not mention the word "slavery.”

Benjamin Rush on the Confederation
Resource Type: Primary Source
Benjamin Rush (c. 1745–1813) was an American physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence. He served as a member of the Continental Congress (1776–77) and for a time in the Continental army; he was also a member of the Pennsylvania convention that ratified the U.S. Constitution.

Jefferson on Slavery
Resource Type: Primary Source
Jefferson questioned the effects of slavery and slaveholding, and foretold its end.

Otis on the Rights of the British Colonies
Resource Type: Primary Source
James Otis (1725–83) was a political activist during the period leading up to the American Revolution. In pamphlets, he articulated grievances against the British government.

Give Me Liberty, or Give Me Death
Resource Type: Primary Source
At the second Virginia Convention, on March 23, 1775, Patrick Henry (1736–99) delivered this speech in which he argued that war with Great Britain was inevitable.

Lord Dunmore's Call to Slaves
Resource Type: Primary Source
In November 1775, Lord Dunmore called on slaves to desert their masters and join the British army.

Vermont's Constitution, 1777
Resource Type: Primary Source
The 1777 Vermont constitution included a clause that allowed for gradual emancipation.

Freedom Petition of New Hampshire Slaves
Resource Type: Primary Source
During the revolutionary era, many slaves petitioned colonial or state legislatures for their freedom and filed freedom suits, such as the one submitted by Nero Brewster, a slave, in Portsmouth on November 12, 1779.

An Act for Enfranchising Ned Griffin
Resource Type: Primary Source
In the wake of the Revolution, many Southern states liberalized their provisions for manumission. This came to an end between 1810 and 1820, as Southern lawmakers restricted, and in some cases barred, manumission.

Manumission of Slaves in Maryland
Resource Type: Primary Source
In the wake of the Revolution, many Southern states liberalized their provisions for manumission. This period of liberalized manumission came to an end between 1810 and 1820.

Jefferson on Emancipation
Resource Type: Primary Source
Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), in this letter to Edward Coles (1786–1868), maintained that emancipation was a task for the younger generation.

The Environmental Movements
Resource Type: Document-Based Question
The larger issues of western expansion, industrialization, urbanization, and progressivism are explored in this DBQ on the environmental movements that arose at the end of the nineteenth century.

Women and the Progressive Era
Resource Type: Document-Based Question
The discussion of women at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century is often separated into different chapters and topics. This DBQ asks students to combine what they have learned about American society and about the changing roles and perceptions of women to evaluate the women's movement during the Progressive Era.

The Yellow Wall Paper
Resource Type: Primary Source
Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a well-educated American woman who became depressed after her marriage in 1884. Diagnosed with neurasthenia and prescribed the "rest-cure,"she later wrote about her experience in The Yellow Wall Paper, published in 1899.

Black Women and the National Council of Women
Resource Type: Primary Source
Adella Hunt Logan, a leading member of the Tuskegee Women's Club, argued on behalf of the National Association of Colored Women that black women should be included in the National Council of Women in the United States.

Striking Shirtwaist-Makers Selling Socialist Newspaper
Resource Type: Primary Source
Many Jewish women were very involved in labor and socialist movements, as seen in this 1910 photograph of striking shirtwaist-makers selling copies of The Call, the New York socialist daily.

The Rebel Girl
Resource Type: Primary Source
Joe Hill, lyricist and labor activist, wrote songs for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), including this tribute to the women involved in the IWW.

The First Loan Fund Recipient
Resource Type: Primary Source
Frances Johnson was the first recipient of a college loan from a branch of the American Association of University Women. This enabled her to attend Cornell University. She is discussed in the minutes of the branch, published in 1925.

Marriage Rates of Alumnae
Resource Type: Primary Source
This table shows the marriage rates of women who graduated from a variety of American colleges during the period of 1820–1930.

Growth of Woman's Christian Temperance Union
Resource Type: Primary Source
This 1959 chart shows the growth in membership of women involved in the movement to prohibit the consumption of alcohol.

Scientific Advances and Thinking
Resource Type: Document-Based Question
By the late-nineteenth century, science and scientific thought influenced American intellectual life and culture. The documents attached to this DBQ allow students to assess how the achievements of science were both admired and feared.

Evolution and Religion
Resource Type: Primary Source
Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, one of the most famous Congregational preachers of his day, involved himself in controversy when he accepted Charles Darwin's theories of evolution.

The Warfare of Science with Theology
Resource Type: Primary Source
Andrew D. White was an American educator who wrote about the controversial reactions to Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species in his book, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, published in 1896.

Kodak Camera Ad
Resource Type: Primary Source
This advertisement for Kodak cameras appeared in a 1900 issue of the magazine Youth's Companion.

Remington Typewriter Company Ad
Resource Type: Primary Source
In a 1905 advertisement, the Remington Typewriter Company used two letters by Mark Twain to illustrate how his attitude toward the typewriter had changed over a period of thirty years.

Out in the Automobile
Resource Type: Primary Source
The comedian Arthur Collins and the tenor Byron Harlan wrote lyrics for many humorous songs. "Out in the Automobile" pokes fun at early-twentieth-century cars.

Brooklyn Bridge
Resource Type: Primary Source
An important American modernist painter, John Marin (1870–1953) established his reputation with his work in watercolors. Although known for his landscape paintings, Marin expresses his interest in urban life in Brooklyn Bridge, which associates the excitement of New York with the famous bridge. The bridge connects Manhattan to Brooklyn and had been completed about thirty years earlier, in 1883.

Mrs. Marion Crocker on the Conservation Imperative
Resource Type: Primary Source
Mrs. Marion Crocker of the General Federation of Women's Clubs wholeheartedly endorsed the conservation movement, and the scientific basis on which it stood, in this 1912 speech to the Fourth Annual Conservation Congress.

Mechanized Home Laundry
Resource Type: Primary Source
This drawing dramatically illustrates the increasing mechanization of domestic life during the second decade of the twentieth century.

Social Darwinism: Its Influence and Legacy
Resource Type: Document-Based Question
Social Darwinism is usually understood as an ideology that justified survival of the fittest, that argued against government intervention or social reform to improve society. The documents in this DBQ, however, point to the complexity of social-Darwinist thought, considering how a progressive version fueled the Progressive Era and how a conservative strand exerted tremendous influence in American political thought.

Sumner on Social Darwinism
Resource Type: Primary Source
William Graham Sumner was an American social scientist influenced by Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin. Sumner applied Darwin's evolutionary theory to human society.

Principles of American Reform Judaism
Resource Type: Primary Source
In 1885, American Reform rabbis met in Pittsburgh to outline the basic principles of American Reform Judaism.

The White Man's Burden
Resource Type: Primary Source
This cartoon, referring to Rudyard Kipling's poem of the same name, was published as the Spanish-American War ended and the insurrection in the Philippines against the Americans began.

Exhibition of American Negroes at World's Fair
Resource Type: Primary Source
The Exhibition of American Negroes at the 1900 Paris World's Fair tried to show that blacks in America had become part of the American middle class.

Board of Indian Commissioner Report
Resource Type: Primary Source
In this 1905 “Board of Indian Commissioner Report,” the federal government outlines its Indian policy.

Southern Society: Religion and Slavery
Resource Type: Document-Based Question
Using this DBQ, students will examine the paradoxical role of religion in the lives of slaves in the antebellum South. Different kinds of religion are explored as students confront the ways in which religion served to liberate or to oppress slaves.

Equiano: A Slave's Autobiography
Resource Type: Primary Source
Olaudah Equiano was enslaved as a child after he and his sister were kidnapped in Africa. His autobiography offers a rare comparison of African and American cultures.

A Slave Account
Resource Type: Primary Source
Henry Bibb was born a slave in Kentucky in 1815. He escaped to Canada in 1837 and subsequently wrote an account of his experiences.

A Slave Funeral
Resource Type: Primary Source
Charles Ball was a slave in western Maryland. In the following excerpt, he describes a slave funeral.

Religious Instruction for Slaves
Resource Type: Primary Source
Peter Randolph was a former slave and a minister at the Old African Baptist Church in Richmond, Virginia. In the following excerpt, he describes religious instruction for slaves.

Ex-Slave Becomes a Preacher
Resource Type: Primary Source
Members of the New Deal’s Federal Writers’ Project interviewed former slaves during 1936–38. The misspellings respect the speech and regional dialect of the ex-slaves. Anderson Edwards, born in Texas on March 12, 1844, recounts his experience as a preacher.

Family Worship on a Plantation
Resource Type: Primary Source
This picture illustrates a family worshiping on a plantation in South Carolina. Note the African American preacher and both black and white worshipers.

Master Going to Sell Us Tomorrow
Resource Type: Primary Source
Spirituals were sung by slaves, mostly outside of churches. They reflected the values and experiences of African Americans.

Go Down Moses
Resource Type: Primary Source
Many spirituals compared African American slaves to the ancient Hebrew slaves depicted in the Bible, who eventually gained their freedom.

The Master-Slave Relationship
Resource Type: Document-Based Question
The recent scholarship on slavery explores the complex relationship between master and slave and re-examines the historical agency of slaves. In reading the slave narratives provided in this DBQ, students can assess how slaves tried to retain their dignity in the worst of circumstances.

Letter from a Fugitive Slave
Resource Type: Primary Source
In this letter, escaped slave Anthony Chase explains to his former master Jeremiah Hoffman why he has run away.

Letter from a Slaveowner
Resource Type: Primary Source
In this letter, Henry Tayloe, a slaveowner, reveals to his brother the interest of Southern slaveholders in the institution of slavery.

Account of a Former Slave
Resource Type: Primary Source
In his 1846 autobiographical account, Lewis Clarke, a former slave, answers questions about the manner in which he lived before he gained his freedom in 1841.

Experiences of Female Slaves
Resource Type: Primary Source
The following excerpt is from the narrative of a former slave who lived on a small farm in Tennessee.

Masters and Slaves
Resource Type: Primary Source
Members of the New Deal’s Federal Writers’ Project interviewed former slaves during 1936–38. The misspellings respect the speech and regional dialect of the ex-slaves. Mother Ann Clark, born June 1, 1825, was a slave in Louisiana. She describes the ruthlessness of her master.

Slaves Picking Cotton
Resource Type: Primary Source
In this illustration, slaves are shown picking cotton while overseers watch from horseback.

A New Masculinity
Resource Type: Point-Counterpoint
Historians are grappling with the changing definitions of American male identity that developed at the end of the nineteenth century. Casey Blake argues that American men were looking for ways to "compensate" for what they regarded as the feminine elements of modern life, particularly those brought about by rapid urbanization and industrialization. In response, a new definition of manhood, what Blake terms "aggressive male individualism," emerged. A teacher examines the interpretations of Gail Bederman and Susan Curtis.

Young Generation's Response to Victorian Culture
Resource Type: Point-Counterpoint
Casey Blake explains why the generation of educated Americans that came of age during the 1880s and 1890s rejected the Victorian culture of their parents, which focused on maintaining rigid control and creating an order to life. A teacher examines competing interpretations and finds that historian George Cotkin does not regard the break from Victorian culture as having been as dramatic as Blake and Lewis Erenberg insist.

Science and Religion
Resource Type: Point-Counterpoint
Casey Blake argues that Americans in the late nineteenth century were excited about new scientific developments but were also somewhat fearful—or at least ambivalent—about how science might alter religious and moral values. Historians differ on the nature and extent of the tension between religious faith and a scientific approach to knowledge, which Americans sought to resolve. A teacher examines the subtleties of Charles Rosenberg, James Turner, and Paul Croce.

Social Darwinism
Resource Type: Point-Counterpoint
The doctrine of Social Darwinism was historically interpreted in a variety of ways, and as such it was used to defend a host of ideological perspectives, which in some cases conflicted with one another. A teacher examines the competing interpretations of Richard Hofstadter, Robert Bannister, and Mike Hawkins.

Women and Social Reform
Resource Type: Classroom Simulation
In this simulation, students will be assigned the role of a prominent, late-nineteenth-century, middle-class American woman. The goal is to understand the changing perceptions and roles of women in Progressive-era America, as they took on leadership roles in a variety of associational groups such as the YWCA and the Red Cross.

Social Darwinism
Resource Type: Classroom Simulation
This simulation captures American society in 1900 and presents a fictional meeting of educators. In their respective roles, students will debate the ways in which educational reform can improve American society. Students will understand how different strands of social-Darwinist thought informed American life, culture, and politics, imposing a legacy which continues to affect American education as well as the larger society.

Compromise Between the North and South
Resource Type: Classroom Simulation
In this dramatic simulation students will explore the possibility of an eleventh-hour compromise between the North and the South on the eve of the Civil War (1861–65). Students will understand how mounting tensions in the 1850s eventually led to the outbreak of war.

Decisions of Slaves to Leave the Plantation: Should I Stay or Should I Go?
Resource Type: Classroom Simulation
In this simulation students will examine the very complex decision that slaves faced regarding whether to leave the plantations in the early years of the Civil War and whether to join the Union forces. Students will understand how a single decision gravely affected the lives of slaves, their families, the outcome of the war, and even the period of Reconstruction.

The American Revolution and Slavery
Resource Type: Document-Based Question
The revolutionary era (1775–89) gave birth to contradictory definitions of freedom and equality. For some, freedom and equality entailed the right to property, including slave property. For others, freedom and equality implied universal entitlements that applied to all individuals, including slaves. This DBQ offers students the opportunity to debate these contradictory definitions by analyzing the definition of freedom each author uses in the provided documents.

The New World: Origins of Slavery
Resource Type: Document-Based Question
The following primary sources, focusing on Bacon's Rebellion, help students understand the condition of freemen and indentured servants on the eve of the revolt and how colonial legislation helped institutionalize slavery in the southern colonies.

Colonial Society and Economy
Resource Type: Document-Based Question
Colonial society (Virginia in particular) changed from a society with slaves to a slave society, where slavery was the foundation of the economic and social order. This selection of primary sources allows students to understand how commerce and agricultural production caused slavery to replace indentured servitude in the southern colonies and to create new forms of wealth.

Bacon's Rebellion: Colonial Society and Politics
Resource Type: Classroom Simulation
In this simulation, which focuses on Bacon's Rebellion, students will recreate colonial society with a view to understanding how the legal and economic infrastructure of the colonies facilitated the development of slavery.

The American Revolution and the Meaning of Equality
Resource Type: Classroom Simulation
In this simulation, which recreates the Revolutionary era, students are asked to probe and debate the contemporary meanings of freedom and equality. They will examine the defining principles of the Founding Fathers and the U.S. Constitution, with a view toward understanding their impact on American political institutions and thought.

Middle-Class America and Its Discontents
Resource Type: Classroom Simulation
This simulation asks students to place themselves in a Greenwich Village coffeehouse on the eve of the 1960s. Replicating a broad spectrum of American society, from conservatives to counterculture critics, students will understand how the fifties represented an era of consensus that paradoxically carried the seeds of protest that would fuel the rebellion of the sixties.

Industrialization and Sectionalism
Resource Type: Classroom Simulation
In this simulation, which examines the economic expansion and industrialization of the United States, students confront the increasing economic interdependence of the North and the South. The menacing tensions between the social and cultural realities of the two regions will be examined as students come to understand the many causes of the Civil War (1861–1865).

Civil-Rights Debate: Where Do We Go from Here?
Resource Type: Classroom Simulation
In this simulation students are asked to represent a variety of figures from American society in the 1960s. The goal is to understand the complex nature of race relations and power politics in the United States—especially how individuals and events at home and abroad influenced the civil-rights movement.

Mapping Early New York City
Resource Type: Classroom Simulation
In this innovative simulation students learn the skills of mapping. Although focused here on the early history of New York City, these skills can be applied to any urban center in any time period.

Moot Court: Central Park on Trial
Resource Type: Classroom Simulation
This simulation, a moot court, engages students in social and moral reform. By exploring how nineteeth-century social and political elites dispossessed various groups such as African Americans in order to build Central Park, students will understand how the present-day problems of gentrification and urban renewal have their roots in nineteeth-century reform.

Key Figures
Resource Type: Primary Source

Television: Sitcoms
Resource Type: Primary Source
Audrey Meadows and Jackie Gleason in a promotional portrait for The Honeymooners.

Television: Two-Edged Sword
Resource Type: Primary Source
Lucille Ball and her husband, Desi Arnaz, costars of I Love Lucy.

Television: Two-Edged Sword
Resource Type: Primary Source
Edward R. Murrow and Senator Joseph McCarthy on the news show See It Now, during the McCarthy-Army hearings (July 8, 1954).

Television: Two-Edged Sword
Resource Type: Primary Source
Edward R. Murrow and Senator Joseph McCarthy on the news show See It Now during the McCarthy-Army hearings (July 8, 1954).

The Suburbs: Homogenity
Resource Type: Primary Source
Ad for Levittown, N.Y.

Other Americans: The Beats
Resource Type: Primary Source
Allen Ginsberg, in a photograph taken at his enrollment in Columbia University (1943).

Other Americans: The Beats
Resource Type: Primary Source
While a student at Columbia University, Allen Ginsberg took courses with Lionel Trilling, the great literary scholar.

Other Americans: The Beats
Resource Type: Primary Source
Peter Orlovsky and Gregory Corso, fellow Beats, listen to Allen Ginsberg read poetry at Columbia University (1959).

Other Americans: The Beats
Resource Type: Primary Source
Cover from a 1959 edition of Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg. This collection was first published by City Lights Books in 1956.

Other Americans: The Beats
Resource Type: Primary Source
Allen Ginsberg at home (1966).

Feminism
Resource Type: Primary Source
Cover of a 1964 paperback edition of The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan. This book was first published in 1963.

Poverty
Resource Type: Primary Source
Michael Harrington, author.

Poverty
Resource Type: Primary Source
Cover of a 1963 paperback edition of The Other America: Poverty in the United States by Michael Harrington. This book was first published in 1962.

John F. Kennedy: Charm and Grace
Resource Type: Primary Source
Pablo Casals, cellist, performs for the Kennedys at the White House (1961).

Militancy
Resource Type: Primary Source
Broadside distributed at Columbia University by the Black Panther Party (1970).



	Historical thinking Discovering primary sources (106) Interpreting and analysing (47) Narrating history (19) Resource types Video Transcripts (11) Text Excerpts (4)

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