The National Archives has put together a great collection of materials highlighting the role that African-American soldiers played in the Civil War. Documents include letters highlighting the treatment of black prisoners of war by the Confederates, partial service records for Frederick Douglass’s sons, and partial service records for Sgt. William Carney, who received a Medal [...]

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Written by Kaye Passmore and Amy Trenkle for the National Endowment for the Humanities, Picturing Lincoln is another Picturing America lesson plan. Using art as a medium to teach, students are asked to look at a photograph of Abraham Lincoln and make assessments. Later, students read a short biography of the president before exercising their [...]

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Picturing America, in an initiative funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, brings examples from the many different genres of American art into the classroom. The program provides new and interesting pathways for students to understand American history. In addition to the resource book, the website also offers several additional resources for teachers looking [...]

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Approaching the topic of slavery can be difficult, especially at the elementary school level when these issues might be discussed for the first time. Posted by the National Endowment for the Humanities, “Slave Narratives: Constructing U.S. History Through Analyzing Primary Sources” offers a helpful classroom solution. Students from third to fifth grade read and explore [...]

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“The Matthew Brady Bunch: Civil War Newspapers” is a series of lesson activities that ultimately has students produce their own newspaper articles on different aspects of the Civil War as a larger class project. Created by Amy Donnelly and Elizabeth Ridgway for American Memory, the project is intended for students in the seventh grade, though [...]

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Walt Whitman is the subject of not one, but two, interdisciplinary lesson plans hoping to explore the connection between the literature of the Civil War and the War itself. The first, aimed at students in grades from 7-12, is written by Nancy Hall and based off of Ken Burns’ documentary The Civil War, which has [...]

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A great general resource on the web is PBS Teachers. Easily searchable, resources are broken down by grade, subject, and topics. It seems that PBS strives to make their resources interdisciplinary and tie in with different media sources. One example uses the Ken Burns’ film, The Civil War, to explore the music of the period. [...]

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Though previously mentioned in another post, the The Valley of the Shadow Project has a wide range of primary sources from newspapers, maps, letters, and statistics all available for use in the 7-12 classroom. Broken up chronologically into three periods, the Project archives two communities (Augusta County, Virginia and Franklin County, Pennsylvania) between the years [...]

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