Curriculum Resources: Presidents Day and Black History Month

Looking for a fun and educational way to celebrate Presidents Day this weekend?  Check out some new interactive educational video games on American history produced by WNET, the public broadcasting channel for New York City, geared specifically for middle school students.

Entitled Mission US, these FREE games allow students to see pivotal periods in American history through the eyes of a young person at the time.   In each chapter, the character has some tasks to perform, which cause him or her to interact with a number of other characters that provide contrasting viewpoints.  However, there are multiple pathways through the game.  What the character will experience will vary from game to game, based on the decisions made by the students directing the action.

The first game is entitled "For Crown or Colony?"  In this game, students play the role of a young printer's apprentice in Boston during the rising conflicts between British authorities and American revolutionaries.  The game provides the perspectives of people both for and against Independence, until the students are required to choose one side or the other.

The second mission is "Flight to Freedom."  This time, students play as Lucy, a 14-year-old slave in Kentucky, as she attempts to escape to Ohio.  Even if she makes it, there are plenty of challenges even in the supposedly "free" colonies.  This game presents the ethical dilemnas and viewpoints from all around (such as, is it OK to steal from struggling farmers as you travel along the Underground Railroad?)


While these two missions are the only ones completed right now, there are two more that will be released in 20123 and 2014.  Mission 3 covers the time of the transcontinental railroad and is entitled "The Race for the Golden Spike, while Mission 4, "The Sidewalks of New York," allows students to become muckraking journalists in early 20th Century New York.

While the first two games don't feature George Washington or Abraham Lincoln per se, they are great vehicles for a more nuanced exploration of their times than many curricular materials.  Mission 2 is also a great tie in with Black History month.  And there are some related games you can play, such as "Think Fast! About the Past," a timed historical knowledge game, and a music game.

Here are trailers for the first two missions:







The bottom line is, if your children enjoyed the "Liberty's Kids" PBS cartoon series on the American Revolution as much as my son did during his elementary school years, then you'll definitely want to check out Mission US.  And if they didn't, maybe this will do the trick of turning them on to US history.

Online Civil War Game for Middle Schoolers Opens Monday, May 15

There is a mystery related to the US Civil War afoot, and middle schoolers are invited to help solve it! This online game, sponsored by the National Civil War Museum, with help from Hershey High School in Pennsylvania, resolves around a puzzling document found in the museum’s archives. At the same time the online players are trying to unlock the secrets of this document, which hints at discovering the “The Jewels of the Valley,” Museum Curator Brett Kelley will walk in the footsteps of a Confederate soldier for almost 300 miles. Kelley is hiking from Fredericksburg, VA to Harrisburg, PA from May 15-May 30, 2011 by tracing the route of General Ewell’s army as they marched North to invade Pennsylvania. He is dressed in a wool Confederate uniform and carrying the supplies typical for a soldier of that time. His experience along the way will be recorded by students at Hershey High School at their blog, On The March.

See this news clip to see Brett and learn more about his long journey:



The initial document for The Jewels of the Valleys game has been released; you can see it here.   As the game progresses, additional clues will be made available through modern technology, including social media. The game will include analysis of primary source documents and Civil War communication technology, and seems to require some decoding of text, since the initial game site recommends you use this webpage as well as this one.

At the conclusion of Kelley’s march to Harrisonburg on May 30, prizes and certificates will be announced for:

Best Middle School Individual Historian
Best Middle School Team
Best High School Individual Historian
Best High School Team

Anyway, it looks like it will be a fun and interesting experience around a valuable cause.  To join in on the game sign up on the project wiki.

Have fun and good luck to all participants!

Curriculum Resource: Reconstruction

As I said earlier this week, teaching about the Civil War is tough for us.  It is also hard to teach about Reconstruction, which was another non-stellar point in our history.  However, in some ways Reconstruction is even harder because of the paucity of resources, especially compared to all the stuff that is available for the Civil War.

Here are some of the curriculum resources we found useful in covering the Reconstruction with our middle schoolers:

A History of US:  Reconstruction and Reform 1865-1870 by Joy Hakim is a great overview of the specific time of the Reconstruction.  This is a good book for middle schoolers.

Reconstruction and the Rise of Jim Crow  1864-1896 by Christopher Collier and James Lincoln Collier.  This one covers a longer time span and is at a bit higher level, so it would probably be appropriate for high school as well as middle schoolers.

They Called Themselves the K.K.K.:  The Birth of an American Terrorist Group by Susan Campbell Bartoletti.  This is an excellent book that I reviewed last year when it came out; you can read the full review here.  But the short version is that the book describes the evolution of the Ku Klux Klan from its earliest days as sort of a informal frat for ex-Confederates trying to feel better about their defeat to the powerful hate organization it was up through the 1960s, told mostly from first-hand reports.  It is appropriate to both middle and high schoolers.

Black Voices from Reconstruction 1865-1877 by John David Smith.  While not as engaging as the previous book, this one also contains personal and first-hand sources and covers some broader subjects of the time than were left out of the KKK book.  Again, this could be used by middle and higher schoolers.

Forty Acres and Maybe a Mule by Harriette Gillem Robinet.  A bit different from the previous titled, this is a fictionalized account of what life might have been like for a small group of freed African Americans, written by an author whose ancestors had been slaves of Robert E. Lee's.    This is a middle school level book.

The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow is the website for an award-winning educational documentary series that explores segregation from Reconstruction through the modern Civil Rights movement.  I haven't seen the videos themselves, but they sound like they would be really good to watch.  However, on the website, you can view a timeline of major events from Reconstruction up to the mid-20th Century, interact with maps and other online resources, read the stories of some significant black leaders from the Reconstruction on, and access lesson plans for both middle school and high school grades.

As always, if someone has some other good resources to add to this list, please put them in the comments below.

Are We Still Fighting the Civil War? If So, What Do We Teach our Children?

One of my favorite quotes is William Faulkner's unforgettable statement that "The past is never dead.  It is not even the past."  Nowhere is this more evident lately than in the educational issues that arise with the Civil War Sesquicentennial--the marking of the fact that earlier this month was the 150th Anniversary of the Southern takeover of Fort Sumter, usually hailed as the official opening of the American Civil War.

Dealing with the Civil War is tough for us as a nation.  To use another iconic quote, I think the American Civil War was truly for us the period in our history where "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."  It was a time when our commitment to our founding ideals of freedom and equality were really put the test, and ultimately prevailed.  But it was also a time where we had to face how our country had ignored those ideals for the cause of economic profits, both in the North and in the South.  It was a horribly sad time, destructive of land and of a generation of young people, and still the bloodiest and most deadly war in which the US has ever engaged.  But it also laid the foundations for an American dream that was even broader and more inclusive than the founding fathers ever imagined...even if it has taken decades of continued struggles to achieve it.

I think probably all nations have a civic mythology of their historic greatness that endows them with power and respect (see Hugh Grant's wonderful "England may be a small nation, but we're a great one, too" speech from one of my favorite movies ever, Love Actually, as one example).   Maybe it is because we are such a relatively young nation, and one that was gifted with incredible natural resources, but I think this idea of our past as inherently blessed and outstanding--our historic belief in America as "the city on the hill" and our Manifest Destiny--has an even stronger hold on our civic identity than it does on most countries.

So that is why I think it is so hard for us as a country to deal with this time in our history honestly and openly and in an unvarnished way.  It exposes some of our ugliest truths, and few of us like to acknowledge those.  Therefore, both sides like to romanticize their cause.  For the North, it is presented as a fight for the liberation of African Americans.  Except, really, it wasn't.  As Lincoln wrote towards the beginning of the war, "If I could save the Union without freeing any slaves, I would do it," (although he personally was in favor of the abolitionist cause).  At least at the beginning, the fight for the North was keeping the country together, not securing rights for black people.  Eventually Lincoln, and at least some other Northern leaders, realized that slavery had to be abolished to secure a united nation, but even so, few Northerners envisioned African Americans being given political and economic benefits equal to white people.

For the South, the argument has grown that it was not really an issue of slavery per se, but rather of states' rights of self determination.  Except, again, really, it wasn't....at least according to almost all legitimate historians of our times.  The investment in slaves at the time of the Civil War has been estimated to be about $3.5 billion in 1860 dollars.  As a share of the Gross National Product at the time, that would compare to almost $10 TRILLION in modern money.  People had more money invested in slaves than they did in railroads, factories, banks, and ships combined.  The cotton produced by slave labor was the driving economic product for the entire nation, both from cotton-selling states in the South and textile-producing states in the North.  It was not something that South plantation owners, who were the political powerhouses in the South, could even conceive of giving up voluntarily.  And while it is true that the majority of Southerners, especially those who actually fought in the war, owned no slave themselves, most were fueled by their horror and fear of what would happen to their communities if African Americans, whom they believed to be an inferior species of humans, were not kept under control via the institution of slavery.

However, we don't like admitting that our greed and economic tunnel vision led us to go against our founding principles and to have treated people as inhumanly as we did.  So not long after the war came to an end, the South began to glorify its role in the Civil War as an advocate for states' rights, lovingly couched as the romantic "Lost Cause," rather than seeing their support for slavery for the morally indefensible position that it truly is.  An article in the April 18th edition of Time magazine entitled "The Civil War: 150 Years After Fort Sumter:  Why We're Still Fighting the Civil War" by David von Drehle does a great job  of explaining how the South sold this vision to the country; you can read the article as a PDF by clicking here.

But though the states' rights argument is largely a face-saving myth, it has been powerfully effective (largely, I believe, because we want to see our 19th century ancestors with the same aura of wisdom and moral vision that we ascribe to our 18th century founders).  A recent survey by the Pew Research Center found that 48% of people believed that states' rights was the main cause of the Civil War compared to 38% who thought it was mostly about slavery (with 9% saying the two causes were equally important).  A Harris poll confirmed this finding, with 54% responding that states' rights was the primary motivation for the South's split from the US, compared to 46% attributing it to an attempt to preserve slavery.

So it is really interesting to see that the majority of Americans do not know what almost all professional historian agree was the root cause of the American Civil War.    Is that an indication that we are continuing to fight the Civil War--if not with each other, then with our ideals about how we would like our history to be?

A liberal (actually, he's a democratic socialist) columnist in the Washington Post recently wrote another interesting article about the Civil War still being waged in modern times.  In his April 12 column, "150 years later, we're still fighting," Harold Meyerson argues that the North and the South have continued the labor patterns of the pre-Civil War US, with the South's tradition of low-wage and few or no worker benefits or rights (epitomized by the Arkansas-based Wal-Mart) versus the North's support for organized, unionized, and better paid labor, battling for dominance out West (cough cough WISCONSIN cough) and in the nation at large.   I found his article to be interesting reading, and looking over only a few of the 270 comments to date shows that it has definitely generated some heated debate.

Another article I would recommend is a CNN post on April 11 by John Blake called "Four ways we're still fighting the Civil War."  Blake picks out four ways that today's politics are similar to those of the Civil War era:

1. A lack of the political center (You agree with us or you are the evil enemy, with no room for compromise)
2. Arguments over the role of the federal government (Some of the Tea Party leaders sound like antebellum Southerners)
3. Underestimating the extent of war once begun (Both North and South were convinced the conflict would be over within a few weeks because they underestimated the strength of the opposition....sound familiar?)
4. Presidents overstepping their bounds (I don't really agree that Obama's support of health care is comparable to Lincoln's suspension of Constitutional rights, but I guess there are some that are arguing that...)

So, like I said....it is not like the Civil War is really over.

But where does that leave us as parents and as educators?  What should we be teaching students when this event that they think of as ancient history is still so much in flux today?  Clearly, there must be mixed messages, if not outright errors, in what we are teaching students about the Civil War.  One of the most interesting data points in the Pew survey was the fact that the group that was most like to say that states' rights was the primary cause of the Civil War was people under 30, with 60% of that age cohort claiming that viewpoint.  The group that was least likely to choose the states' rights scenario were people who 65 or older--those who most likely to have experienced the turbulence of the racial civil rights battles of the 1960s.    That was the only group to select slavery over states' rights as the principle factor in the Civil War, which they did by a 50% to 34% margin.

Personally, I think it is a good thing that we are still unsettled as a nation about the meaning, the outcomes, and even the causes of the Civil War.  I think students will find history more interesting when they see it is not something cut and dried and in the past, but a study that is still being debated, still being questioned, still being fleshed, and DEFINITELY still relevant to the choices we are making about our future.  I believe it is wonderful for the students to consider that the Civil War is still not really "done," and that it may be their generation who will be the ones who "settle" it (or not....)

Other than that, I say that we need to tell them the truth.  I was raised in the "Great Man" presentation of history, where all these wonderful things happened thanks to our national demi-Gods like George Washington and company.  But I don't think that really serves our students.  First of all, it isn't true.    Not to disparage our Founding Fathers and other major figures of history, but sometimes....maybe a lot of the time...they were able to accomplish what they did because they were lucky, or happened to be in the right place at the right time, or were merely the manifestation of the mores of their times, rather than the causal agent.  Secondly, when we set up these figures on a pedestal, how can our children ever hope to emulate them?   Showing them as humans, flawed with strengths and weaknesses just like the rest of us, is, I believe, a more powerful place to develop our heroes and leaders of the future.  Third, we hate to look at our failings and our ugly parts and the times we didn't live up to our ideals.  But without truth, there can not be forgiveness and redemption and ultimately, reconciliation.

And if there is anything we need in our political sphere these days, I think reconciliation is way up there.

Lesson Plan: National Poem in Your Pocket Day

There is so much to celebrate in April!  But I didn't want today to go by without recognizing that April 14, 2011 is National Poem in Your Pocket Day.

The idea behind Poem in Your Pocket Day is to carry a short poem in your pocket and to pull it out of your pocket and read it to people you come in contact with during the day.  I usually don't organize a formal event for this, but I do encourage my son to participate (and I do as well, of course) by picking out a poem relating to what we are studying and sharing it with the people we see that day.  Most years we have some class or coop he can read it to, but I almost always make sure we visit a library or our local independent bookstore that day so we know we will have at least one receptive audience.

Right now, we have been studying the American Civil War and Reconstruction, so our poetry choices this year have come from the man who is probably the most famous American poet--Walt Whitman.  Here is the poem that my son chose for today:

I Celebrate (an excerpt from Song of Myself)
by Walt Whitman

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loaf and invite my soul,
I lean and loaf at my ease observing a spear of summer grass

My tongue, every atom of my blood, formed from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.

And my poem for the day is:

Miracles
by Walt Whitman 

WHY! who makes much of a miracle? 
As to me, I know of nothing else but miracles, 
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan, 
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky, 
Or wade with naked feet along the beach, just in the edge of the water, 
Or stand under trees in the woods, 
Or talk by day with any one I love--or sleep in the bed at night with any one I love, 
Or sit at table at dinner with my mother, 
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car, 
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive, of a summer forenoon, 
Or animals feeding in the fields, 
Or birds--or the wonderfulness of insects in the air, 
Or the wonderfulness of the sun-down--or of stars shining so quiet and bright, 
Or the exquisite, delicate, thin curve of the new moon in spring; 
Or whether I go among those I like best, and that like me best--mechanics, boatmen,farmers, Or among the savans--or to the soiree--or to the opera,  

Or stand a long while looking at the movements of machinery,  

Or behold children at their sports,  

Or the admirable sight of the perfect old man, or the perfect old woman, 

Or the sick in hospitals, or the dead carried to burial,   
Or my own eyes and figure in the glass; 
These, with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles, 
The whole referring--yet each distinct, and in its place. 

To me, every hour of the light and dark is a miracle, 
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle, 
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same, 
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same; 
Every spear of grass--the frames, limbs, organs, of men and women, and all that concerns    them, 
All these to me are unspeakably perfect miracles. 

To me the sea is a continual miracle;  
The fishes that swim--the rocks--the motion of the waves--the ships, with men in them, 
What stranger miracles are there?

So mine is a recognition of the everyday miracles all around us, while my son chose his because he sees it as a paean to goofing off...which, if you read his blog, he claims to be inordinately fond of (although he exaggerates the extent to which he actually does that).  That actually tell you more about us than about Whitman, though...  Especially with the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, you hear more lately about his war poems ("Beat! Beat! Drum!",  "Ashes of Soldiers") or his Lincoln poems ("Oh Captain!  My Captain!"), but we are drawn to his earlier, more exuberant ones.

Anyway, today is our monthly trip for an activity with the elderly at an assisted living place we have been visiting for 11 years now, so we'll get to read our poems there.  He also has a book club at an area library, so that will be an excellent opportunity to share poems.  Another local library is having a Poem in the Pocket event, so we'll probably stop by there, and perhaps a third library to pick up a book we have on hold--and to read more poetry!

So grab a poem, stick it in your pocket, and start sharing it with people today.  Any excuse to get middle schoolers reading poetry aloud is a good thing, I think.

Curriculum Resource: The 150th Anniversary of the US Civil War

This weeks begins the official start of the American Civil War Sesquicentennial (150th Anniversary).  While academics debate when the war became inevitable, all agree that it definitely began with the Confederate takeover of the federal forces in command of Fort Sumter in South Carolina, which took place on April 12-13, 1861.

This is a sad, often touchy, but critical event in American history.  Fortunately, because of the sesquicentennial, there are even more resources to help you explain this pivotal time in US history to your middle schooler.

The following are some resources to add to your Civil War education:

The official website for the Civil War Sesquicentennial has a daily calendar, articles on major themes, and a compilation of sesquicentennial events in 20 eastern states.

The New York Times is running a blog entitled Disunion, which recounts the events leading up to and during the Civil War on a day by day basis.

The Washington Post is also running a great series on the Civil War, including an article about Five Myths About Why the South Seceded.

And, of course, I've already written in a previous post about the many Civil War re-enactments and special events taking place in our National Parks and Historical Places.

This week, however, the focus is on Fort Sumter.  If you can't make it there in person, get an idea about the place with this video by the National Park Service.

As I said earlier, this is a tough subject to cover with your children or students.  But I think it is a good time to take advantage of the extra activities being run by many federal and state organizations to help give our middle schoolers a better appreciation of this critical time in our national history.

UPDATE (4/11/11):
Today's Washington Post has an interesting article about how differently the Civil War is taught across the country.

Curriculum Resource: Civil War Sesquicentennial Events

One of the greatest things about homeschooling, in my opinion, is the homeschooler's ability to go and learn in all sorts of different places, rather than learning primarily by what can be brought into the class room.  I think this is particularly key in history.  I think students get such a better understanding of things, as well as developing an emotional connection to places or events, when they can go and see the interact with the location where significant historical activities took place.

A great opportunity for this "real life real place" learning takes place this year with the plethora of special events that have been planned around the sesquicentennial (means 150) anniversary of the US Civil War.  So many places are planning lectures, exhibits, re-enactments, and other special observations of this pivotal time in American history, and you don't have to be a homeschooler to take advantage of many of them.

The best central repository of such events that I've found is through the National Parks Service.  Their Civil War 150 page has links to 26 states (the ones in the mid-west through the east) that are planning special events for the sesquicentennial.  Many of these site will be offering activities for the next four years, so if you are interested, sign onto their email list to get announcement of events in future years.