Teaching U. S. History Thematically

Book excerpt: "The second edition of this best-selling book offers the tools teachers need to get started with an innovative approach to teaching history, one that develops literacy and higher-order thinking skills, connects the past to students' lives today, and meets state and national standards. The author provides an introductory unit to build a trustful classroom climate; over 70 primary sources (including a dozen new ones) organized into six thematic units, each structured around an essential question from U.S. history; and a final unit focusing on periodization and chronology. As students analyze carefully excerpted documents-speeches by presidents and protesters, Supreme Court cases, political cartoons-they build an understanding of how diverse historical figures have approached key issues. At the same time, students learn to participate in civic debates and develop their own views on what it means to be a 21st-century American. Each unit connects to current events, and dynamic classroom activities make history come alive. In addition to the documents themselves, this teaching manual provides strategies to assess student learning; mini-lectures designed to introduce documents; activities to help students process, display, and integrate their learning; guidance to help teachers create their own units, and more"--