Resource Library
Find compelling classroom resources, learn new teaching methods, meet standards, and make a difference in the lives of your students.
We are grateful to The Hammer Family Foundation for supporting the development of our on-demand learning and teaching resources.
Introducing Our US History Curriculum Collection
Draw from this flexible curriculum collection as you plan any middle or high school US history course. Featuring units, C3-style inquiries, and case studies, the collection will help you explore themes of democracy and freedom with your students throughout the year.
Glenn Ligon, Untitled - Four Etchings [C]
In this black-on-black etching, Glenn Ligon uses Ralph Ellison's quote from the prologue of his novel, Invisible Man (1952): "I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus side-shows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only themselves, or figments of their imagina-"
Big Paper Example
In a Big Paper activity, students respond silently to a text excerpt or image by writing their comments on a shared paper.
Pardon/Franchise Engravings by Thomas Nast
Wood engravings by Thomas Nast depict the tension between the demands of healing and justice during the Reconstruction era.
"Shall We Call Home Our Troops?" (1875)
Wood engraving by Thomas Nast from Harper's Weekly depicting the reaction of the radical South toward African Americans after the North does not follow up their promises.
South Carolina Legislature 1868
Photomontage of members of the first South Carolina legislature following the Civil War, mounted on card with each member identified.
"The Birth of a Nation" Summarizes Reconstruction
Title cards, or intertitles, from The Birth of a Nation, a 1915 film portraying D.W. Griffith's racist vision of life in the South during the Civil war era.
The Battle of Cable Street Mural
The Battle of Cable Street mural depicts details from the confrontation between anti-Fascist demonstrators and Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts in London's East End.
“Emancipation” (1865)
Thomas Nast's celebration of the emancipation of Southern slaves with the end of the Civil War. Nast envisions a somewhat optimistic picture of the future of free blacks in the United States.