Stanford History Education Group: This educational group provides educators and students with invaluable resources regarding both U.S. and World History. The designers, coordinators, and staff are highly qualified individuals with significant experience in the field of history and education. Within each sub group, the eras and historical periods are categorized in order so that lesson plans and primary sources are easy to find. For the purposes of this class, the sections under U.S. history are titled Cold War and Cold War Culture. The lesson plans and primary source documents that accompany the plans will provide this unit with rich and critical components to build on our learning of Postwar America.
DocsTeach: DocsTeach provides educators and students a wonderful treasure trove of primary source documents and activities that enrich learning using primary sources. This site is is powered by the National Archives (another great primary source archive!) and provides pre-made tools and activities that can engage students in historical evaluation, critical analysis, and synthesis. The activities and documents are categorized by historical periods. We will be focusing on the Postwar United States sections for this unit. The flexibility of this site allows educators and students to use a variety of historical tools, activities, and sources in gaining historical perspective, knowledge, and learning. Simply click documents or activities and then click Postwar United States. From this point, you can continue to search more specifically or browse the images, documents, photos, posters, and so forth.
Library of Congress: The Library of Congress is an extensive digital library that covers a variety of topics in history, particularly U.S. history. This specific link will take you to the teachers resource site in which you can search for activities, sources, and resources by state, grade, and content standard. This is a great way to find lesson plans, primary sources, and activities for the classroom in the content area you are teaching and the specific time period your students are studying. In addition to photos, images, written documents, and other primary source materials, there are audio clips and short films as well. For our class, we will be looking at CA content standards, grade 11, in social studies.
Avalon Project: The Avalon Project provides digital documents in law, history, economics, politics, diplomacy, and government. The site is funded and supported by Yale Law School and the Lillian Goldman Law Library. It provides a number of primary sources for not only the Cold War but for ancient civilizations to the 21st century. This resource provides students and educators with a variety of sources beyond U.S. history. For our unit, we will focus on the Cold War documents and sources. The link will take you directly to the appropriate site.
Digital History: This digital archive focuses on providing primary source documents and lessons for K-12 teaching and is supported by the University of Houston. The archive provides U.S. history text, primary sources on various topics in U.S. history, images, photos, and secondary sources. There are also modules for students and teachers to practice "doing" history with the use of primary sources. For our unit, simply drag the timeline to 1950 and click on media, documents, and any other link related to postwar America.
Analysis Tools
Weighing the Evidence: Download the file to begin watching a short tutorial on how to use primary source tools on DocsTeach. The recording will give you step by step instructions on how to complete the activity. Students will weigh primary source evidence in relation to the 1950s claim of being a prosperous, peaceful, progressive time period in U.S. history.
Mapping History: Download the file and watch the short tutorial. You will discover how to map the U.S. containment policy on communism. (I will embed these videos in the future)
In this lesson, students will analyze documents that demonstrate how Americans responded to President Truman's decision to fire General MacArthur. Students will read letters and a memorandum to weigh the evidence and determine the response of Americans towards the president's decision to fire General MacArthur.
. After students are given the necessary background information and historical context, they will analyze four primary source documents in order to determine whether the U.S. was planning on going to war with North Vietnam before the Golf of Tonkin Resolution. This lesson involves extensive close reading, sourcing, contextualizing, and evaluating primary source documents.