Thoughts on Making History Interdisciplinary: the Use of Poetry & Music to Teach about Civil Rights

It might be melodramatic to describe the intro to U.S. History class I took in college as life changing, but it was definitely major changing. I was headed down the path towards becoming an English major, taking a class on American literature at the same time. In both classes we read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I was surprised that it was the history teacher that made the book come alive. He provided the social context, the greater meaning. I became--not a history major--but a major in American Culture (more commonly known as American Studies).

Fast forward a few years to my first teaching job. I was teaching 7th grade geography as part of a interdisciplinary team, comprised of the Language Arts teacher, the math teacher, the science teacher and me. I was the rookie, and fortunate to work with such a rock star team of experienced teachers. Together we created some fantastic and truly interdisciplinary thematic units on rivers, prairies, Africa and other topics.

Both of these experiences forever convinced me of the value in making our teaching of history more interdisciplinary.

But like most things in education, things come in and out of vogue, and interdisciplinary study seems not to have so much fallen out of favor, but into a state of neglect. While many of the middle schools I visit still seem to organize themselves into teams with a math, science, social studies and language arts teacher, the purpose seems to have little to do with interdisciplinary teaching. The focus on Common Core has also had an unfortunate effect on interdisciplinary teaching. With the emphasis on English/Language Arts and Math, other subjects have been marginalized. This is due, I have argued previously, to a misreading and misunderstanding of the Common Core, rather than anything that is actually in the Common Core. If anything, the Common Core standards ought to increase attention to the complementary nature of history and language arts.

In a high school setting, there are other problems. In the Chicago area, where I am, most high schools are rather large places. And in the one where I taught, the English department was at the other end of the building from our department. We saw each other occasionally, but rarely deliberately. I knew that sometimes our content overlapped (e.g. in a lesson about the 1920s and the jazz age I might mention something about The Great Gatsby, and a student might pipe up, "Oh, we read that in English last quarter." And I'd think, what a missed opportunity to collaborate. But that collaboration would be a challenge given the organization of large high schools, dissimilar planning periods, and the fact that there was no way to guarantee that the students I had all had the same English teacher and vice versa.

Nonetheless, it used to drive me crazy that we couldn't at least get the English teachers to agree to teach Gatsby during the same quarter that we taught the 1920s. (I'm not blaming any English teachers here--I'm not sure that we even asked them, so the blame is equally distributed.) Given the chronological approach used by most history teachers, it makes the most sense for the English teachers to accommodate the history syllabus. This may not be true interdisciplinary teaching, but modifying one's syllabus so that there is at least the possibility for students to recognize the connections is at least something. And it's low-hanging fruit. Theoretically, this should be a little easier to coordinate in middle schools, which are smaller and, as I said, often organized into teams.

But what can you do in your classroom to at least attempt a bit of this on your own?

As suggested by the title of the post, I remind you that in most universities, the history department is found in the college of humanities. Or liberal arts. Or some similar name. And one of the ways to avoid only dwelling on the president-war-legislation-date approach to U.S. history is to remember that history is one of the humanities. So whenever possible, we should include things like ART and MUSIC and LITERATURE of all sorts within our history classes. At a minimum, this makes our study of history more interesting. After all, history is the study of human beings. And human beings do not live without Art. (Of course, we also need to include other "social science" disciplines such as geography, economics and political science. But this post is not about that.)

So for the rest of this post, I'd like to give you a few examples for doing this in your unit on Civil Rights Movement.

In an earlier post, I mentioned using the poetry of Langston Hughes. Though a poet of an earlier generation, so many of his poems are wonderfully fitting to use in the Civil Rights Movement. As I caution in that other post, "A Dream Deferred" would not be one of them, because it is so overused that it is likely your students have already studied it. But there are many others. Here are a few:

• "Colored Child at a Carnival"
• "Refugee in America"
• "Democracy"
• "I, Too"
• "Lunch in a Jim Crow Car"
• "Freedom Train"
• "Freedom's Plow" 

The last two are longer ones, that are probably more suitable for high school. The others are good for middle or high school. And two others that have an international focus (another thing often lacking in our U.S. history curriculum), discussing independence movements in Asia and Africa:

• "In Explanation of Our Time" - this is a youtube link to Hughes himself reading it; you'd probably want students to follow along with a text, but I couldn't find one handy.
• "Africa"

What to do with these poems? Lots of things. You could use one or two to introduce a lesson, such as a lesson on desegregation, the Montgomery bus boycotts or Brown v. Board. You could have an entire lesson in which students read the poems, to themselves or in small groups and then discuss them, using a literature circle approach. You could assign some to read for homework and have students pick one to read and analyze. Students could be asked to write about the meaning of the poem with specific reference to the Civil Rights Movement. Or--here's a half-baked idea that I think could be really cool if you thought it through a bit more--have students read a poem and then look at some famous photographs of the Civil Rights Movement. Then have a discussion about the impact of photography versus poetry.

Now let's shift to music.

Below is a kind of a "bridge" lesson to proceed the Civil Rights movement. I designed it with two thoughts in mind that are not the sort of pedagogical questions normally considered by educators, but important nonetheless:

1. what to teach on the Monday back after spring break that will engage my students and have them feeling good about being back at school.
2. how to expose kids to music, one of my personal passions, and connect it to history.

As educators, we sometimes forget questions like these. As an in-the-trenches-teacher it is hard to forget questions like the first. We face them all the time. But we tend to forget the second question, too. We are not just teachers. We are people. People with particular interests and passions. And I would argue that one of the things that makes a great teacher is one that is passionate about her subject matter and kind find ways to share that with students. I listen to a lot of music--at home and live--and of many different genres. Students love music, too, but are rarely educated about it, and often are not exposed to the variety of music out there: jazz, blues, bluegrass, Latin, folk, traditional country, and music from other parts of the world. So truth be told, this lesson was designed as much to share one of my passions as it was to meet a learning objective. But learn they did.

Below is the Google Presentation I created for "Rock 'n' Roll and the Civil Rights Movement." It is designed to show how changes in music influenced the coming Civil Rights movement. There are a few notes in the presentation to explain what to do with it, but it is pretty self-explanatory. Click here for the student handout that goes with it. If you are on a 1:1 model, you could have students work through the handout and the presentation on their own or in groups, but students would need earphones to listen to the music. I prefer the more communal approach of listening to the music together. I loved teaching this lesson. If you give it a try, PLEASE let me know what you think, and what worked/what didn't, by leaving a comment below. (You can leave a comment even if you don't try it.)




Below are a few additional resources for using music, not just during your Civil Rights unit. No need to wait until spring to start playing music.

• Activity Ideas for Song and Poetry from the Library of Congress - this page has ideas for what to do with music and poetry throughout a history class, as well as fantastic links to places to find songs and poetry.
• And you MUST check out this website: Voices Across Time: American History Through Music from the University of Pittsburgh Library System (Thank you to my friend and musicologist, Greg Reish for that!) It has lesson plans, links to music, and this page in particular, has a great chart that gives suggestions for music to go with different topics in American History. Bookmark this one so you can go back to you it all year long.
• The Library of Congress also maintains a "National Jukebox," which has a wide variety of musical sources.

One last point about music and the Civil Rights Movement...

A recent blogpost by Grant Wiggins centered on a history question on the recent NAEP Civics and History test. The question quoted a few lines from the spiritual, "We Shall Not Be Moved," and asked which of the following was best associated with the song:

a. pioneers moving west in the early nineteenth century
b. soldiers in the Second World War
c. the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s
d. the Women's Rights movement of the 1970s

Wiggins astutely points out that a student might know a lot about the Civil Rights movement and still get the question wrong, making the validity of the question questionable. Only 47% of students correctly answered "C." I agree that it is a poor question. But I do think connecting protest music to the Civil Rights movement is worthwhile, so below are some resources for that. (That way, if such a question shows up on a future test, at least your students will get one question right!)

• TheRoot.com, "African Americans and Freedom: The Soundtrack - this site has some of the most famous songs embedded in this page, so you can play them right from the site. It includes, "Oh, Freedom," "Go Tell It on the Mountain," "We'll Never Turn Back,""We Shall Not Be Moved," "This Little Light of Mine," Sam Cooke's, "A Change is Gonna Come," and others, including a song by Nina Simone called, "Mississippi Goddam" that she wrote in response to the church bombing in Birmingham.
• Songs and the Civil Rights Movement/Stanford University
• Full lesson on Civil Rights Songs from University of North Carolina

If you're interested in the depressing news about the NAEP results, you can read this article from the Wall Street Journal. (And keep reading my blog, so our students will do better in the future!)

To Lecture, or Not to Lecture: That is the Question

...along with Some Ideas for Teaching the Cold War

To lecture or not to lecture? That is at least one of the big questions out there for history teachers. And one that generated a lot of attention in a recent post titled, "Why do so many HS history teachers lecture so much?", by Grant Wiggins in which he presented research that says history teachers lecture significantly more than their counterparts in other subjects. In fact, there has been so much interest in the topic, that Wiggins had his colleague, Mark Williams, do a guest post published yesterday to follow up on the topic. (In it, Williams describes a gifted teacher not lecturing about Brown v. Board of Education. He also provides useful information about what teachers can do to increase the quantity and quality of "student" vs. teacher talk.)

There were quite a few comments on the initial post (including two from me). The most common explanations center around the content demands of history and the fact that kids don't read their textbooks.

Now, telling kids what is in the textbook that you assigned but assume they didn't read is probably the dumbest reason for a giving a lecture EVER. But yes, I will admit to having done this on occasion in my first years of teaching U.S. history (War of 1812, I'm talking about you). We likely tell ourselves that we are helping the students "synthesize" or "summarize" what they have already read about. And if we are truly doing that, WHILE adding enriching material that we have gleaned from other sources, and including a pertinent quotation or brief excerpt from a primary source, playing a brief piece of music or showing them some intriguing visuals that clarify the information--a photograph, a map, some charts--and stopping intermittently to ask thought-provoking questions....well, that is a different animal.

But still, there are better reasons for giving a lecture than just summing up a topic that is in your textbook. Here are a few:

• when you are presenting something that is not in the textbook, usually a complex topic, an issue of historiography, or something that is just left out (e.g. a lecture introducing the concept of realism and idealism as explained in my previous post). Sometimes I have lectured on complex topics on which I have read scholarly essays or a chapter in a book that I want to present to students. There is a lot of material that you can easily present to students--even middle schoolers-- in a brief lecture after you have read the 20-30 page essay or chapter. A lecture is not the only way to do this, but it is a way to do it that is sometimes useful. The idealism/realism concept I discuss in the post mentioned above is a good example. 
• when you are giving them some biographical background about an important historic figure (like Theodore Roosevelt).
• when you want to tell them an amazing story in some detail.
• when, in the interest of time, you want to give them some background on something so that you can move on to another activity in which they need background.

There are some equally good times when not give a lecture:

• every day
• the Friday before spring break (and other similar times)
• the period right after students have done PARCC testing
• if you are not a good lecturer
• when you are just spitting back info that can be easily gotten elsewhere (i.e. the textbook) or info that can be presented using a more interactive method
• the whole period (lots of research out there about student attention spans fading after 18 minutes, some says less)

As I said above, the other comments in Grant Wiggins' post centered around the significant content burdens in history classes compared to other subjects. I completely agree that the content burdens of history are more onerous than in math or English (not sure about science), but as I have said often throughout this blog, we are responsible for navigating that burden wisely, and not succumbing to it. That requires two key things:

1. judicious selection of what to keep and what to leave out. 
2. making connections so that students will see the forest through trees. (If you haven't yet read the chapter I keep mentioning from James Loewen's Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited about Doing History, now is the time. It's chapter 1, "The Tyranny of Coverage.") And see some of my earlier posts about this topic by searching on this page using the search terms, "syllabus" and "unit planning."

For me, questions of pedagogy--when to lecture, when not to--I find difficult to tease out from questions about content. So, as I promised at the end of yesterday's post on the Cold War, I want to further examine this question about lecturing by describing two additional resources on the Cold War. One is a lecture, one is not. (Do check out yesterday's post...I don't usually publish two posts so close together, so I'm worried that people will miss it.)

The one that is not, ironically, developed from a lecture I used to give. I know, because I found an old overhead (pre-PowerPoint days) that said "Causes of the Cold War" on it and then listed a few reasons. It appeared to be a rather dull lecture that would not be remotely engaging for 8th graders and so, last spring when I introduced the Cold War I took that as a starting point to create a non-lecture lesson. 

Here is the non-lecture Cold War intro lesson:

I described the technique in my recent post about the U.S. and the Holocaust. Click here for an overview of the technique and here for the cards to use on the Cold War. As I deconstruct what went into the creation of this lesson, I took what could be a pretty long and intense college-level or advanced high school level lecture on causes of the cold war and turned it into an outline, and then turned all the pieces of that outline into information that was put onto cards. And then the students have to put it together.  (This sounds odd, but when you take information off of a screen or 8 1/2 X 11" pieces of papers and put them onto cards, preferably laminated and in color, that students can physically manipulate, somehow, students are more engaged in the material. I have no scientific evidence of this, just my observations that it seems to work.)

A few things to note about this. First, if you actually try the lesson, please note that it was designed for fairly high-achieving 8th graders, making it easily adaptable for high schoolers. In retrospect, I think I would edit the cards more for middle schoolers, or at least be aware that they need a lot of help. The lesson took two days. So another point to bring up about lecture and not lecturing is that lecturing is "faster." You could probably "cover" this material in a 30 minute lecture. Or a 1 or 2 day lesson. But we should all note that --as a professor I had once used to say--anything worth doing is worth doing slowly. And how much would our students retain from that 30 minute lecture vs. what they would retain from the non-lecture version I have presented?

Here is an example of a lecture on the Korean War:

As I mentioned earlier, regarding content demands, you have to be judicious. So the point of this lecture was to explain the Korean War in the context of the Cold War. The point was to get students to understand how a civil war in Greece that no one in America knew much about, led to a war in Korea and later in Vietnam and eventually an "interventionist" U.S. foreign policy that we still have today. The point was not to memorize a bunch of facts about the Korean War itself (which is mostly what their textbook did), but to undertand it in the context of the Cold War. I hope that this is a useful example both about better lectures (I'm not saying this is an awesome one), and about handling the related problem of content overload.

So here is the PowerPoint I created. Here is the handout I gave to students that we worked through together during the lecture. Here is a key for the teacher.

A few other things to note...

• While I don't remember how long the lecture was exactly, I do know that it was interrupted often by having students writing, and asking questions that nudged students to "predict" information that would come on the next slide of the accompanying PowerPoint and the worksheet that I gave them to accompany the lecture.

• Be wary of overusing custom animation on PowerPoint. I suspect I am guilty of this on this particular PowerPoint (I've got a few sound effects, including the explosion of an atomic bomb--not sure what came over me. As if I didn't have better ways to spend my time--grading papers, planning the next lesson, etc. instead of obsessing over cutesy special effects that are hardly impressive to the younger generation!) On the other hand, having one point come up at a time on a slide can be effective.

About PowerPoints or Google Presentations or Prezis...

I constantly harp on my methods students and student teachers to remember a few key things about using such presentation tools:

1. think about what you are going to put on the slide (avoid too much text)
2. think about what words are going to come out of your mouth
3. think about if you are going to include a notetaking guide to accompany it, and if so, what you are going to include on that
4. think about whether or not to give students access (through something like Canvas, Edline, Blackboard, or other platform) to the presentation. Or you could print out slides.
5. think about what you want students to write down on paper or on your handout

To conclude, I just want to remind all of us that the point of good teaching is quality student learning. We need to be self-reflective: was our lecture as exciting as we thought it was? Were students really paying attention? And is paying attention enough? Did they engage in the material? Will they retain any of it? And if so, for how long? 'Til the test? Or longer? 

I will end with a favorite quotation of mine by Virginia Woolf, from A Room of One's Own. She writes,

[T]he first duty of a lecturer is to hand you after an hour’s discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece for ever. 

I hope this doesn't leave you thinking I am holding up the lecture as the paragon of exemplary teaching. But substitute the word "lecturer" above for "teacher." And substitute "hour's discourse" for "class period" and you've got yourself a standard worth striving for.

(Oh dear, ending with a hanging preposition!)

The Cold War Today: Connecting Past and Present

Conveniently, Vladimir Putin invaded Crimea just as I began my unit on the Cold War last spring. While no history teacher wishes for disaster just to make her lessons more meaningful, it does remind me how often the present can be better understood in light of the past. This week's unrest in Baltimore compared to the  1960s, anyone? (More on that in an upcoming post on teaching the Civil Rights movement).

The Cold War "ended" with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dramatic events of 1989 and the early nineties, but....well, the more things change...

And now I'm not just talking about Putin. 

Essentially, the Cold War was a period of friction between two world "systems," the Communist East and the Capitalist/Democratic West. Today, we can clearly see conflict between the West and a different East--the East of Islamism/Islamic Fundamentalism. Since the events of 9/11, I'd argue that the U.S. has been involved in a different Cold War, with a different enemy. But we can see some striking similarities: 

The interplay of religion. Then it was the Judeo-Christian West vs the "Godless" atheism of the Soviets. Today we are described as the infidels by Islamic fundamentalists. The occasional outbreaks of hot war: our involvement in Afghanistan and Iran today, Korea and Vietnam then. The conflicts over resources. And there are others. 

I bring this up as something to keep in mind as you teach about the Cold War. It is easy--alas, I find myself saying this over and over again in this blog--to get bogged down in too much detail. The goal should not be to have students learn facts about the Truman Doctrine, the Berlin airlift, NATO, the Marshall Plan, the fall of China, the Warsaw Pact, containment, McCarthyism, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, HUAC, the U-2 incident, Cuba, Krushchev, Korea, and on and on....oh my! The goal should be

1. to make connections among (some of) the items above 
2. to understand how our values and assumptions about the Soviet Union turned into policy
3. get a sense of how the U.S. acted as one of two major powers in the world and and 
4. understand how the foreign policy of the United States was forever changed in ways that still have an impact today. (See cartoon at right!)
5. and of course we should connect all of this to our past study of foreign policy, especially the concepts of realism and idealism. (See this previous post and this one).

This means that we have to make choices about what we teach and what we leave out. I would encourage you NOT to cut out McCarthyism, though, as this is a way to connect what was going on abroad to the fear and paranoia at home. And it raises important issues about the first amendment which ought to be a recurring topic in U.S. history classes, I think. Why? Two simple reasons: it is one of our fundamental rights as citizens and students like talking about it.

To engage students in that topic, I like to show the first 20 minutes or so (I stop right before the Rosenbergs) of the documentary, Cold War Reds, 1947-1953, by CNN Perspectives. For more info on the video, including some of the criticisms of it, check out this site. I have mixed thoughts about giving students worksheets to go along with films (more on that in another post, I think), but I did choose to use one with this film. The clip is about 20 minutes, so if you devote a class period to it, you have plenty of time to stop it often so students have a chance to take notes and/or you can discuss the question as you go, or afterwards or a little of both. Find that worksheet here. Note that the last question I have on there says, "for tomorrow." That is because I the following day I like to spend on McCarthyism and connecting it to the present.

Years ago, when I taught about McCarthyism, I asked students to think of a more contemporary equivalent to accusing someone of being a communist. Often, they came up with the term, "racist." Their argument was that if a politician or other public figure was accused of saying something racist, that figure was often considered "guilty" immediately and had to "prove" that they weren't really racist, or that the comment was taken out of context. Just like those accused of being communists in the 1950s. I would argue that this is still a great example. But last spring, as I taught in a community that had a significant Muslim population, I was delighted when one of my students brought up the effect 9/11 had on Muslims in the United States. As the only student at the school who wore a headscarf, she had had personal experience with how others viewed her suspiciously and negatively simply because of the headscarf.

McCarthyism also presents the opportunity to make connections to the social conformity of the 1950s (see some of the videos and the interview in the bagtheweb lesson described in my last post), as well as racism, anti-semitism, and today's prejudice against Muslims.

For a nice "hands-on" sort of activity, check out this handout that was given to me years ago from deep in the history department's files (so I have no idea who first created it). I had students edit it directly from Google docs last year, but of course, the old-fashioned paper and pencil method works too. Following the activity, I had students write an ID, defining McCarthyism. I like to teach students early in the year how to do this, as it is a simple writing activity that can be used in class, for homework, or on tests. You can use this handout to do that.

Considering recent changes in our policy toward Cuba, it also makes sense to keep that in your Cold War curriculum. I found some really interesting resources on that last spring. Check 'em out:

• my handy google presentation that lays out the basic facts for background information
• these 3 short video clips about Castro, Krushchev and Kennedy from The Armageddon Letters are engaging for students, short (about 5 min. each) and help humanize this international crisis. I really liked them a lot. So did the students.
• I found the above videos from the Choices Program lesson on the Cuban Missile Crisis. This site has the links to the videos above, as well as suggestions for how to use them.
• I adapted this graphic organizer from the lesson above to add my own touch at the end. Check out my discussion question about the role of personality in shaping history.
• The Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) also has a good lesson on the Cuban Missile Crisis. I used the documents they suggested. Check that out here.
• Found some good stuff, too, at the New York Times Learning Blog site. 
• You can put students in groups and assign each one of the following choices outlined to President Kennedy: 1. do nothing, 2. invade Cuba 3. airstrike against the missiles 4. naval blockade around Cuba 5. negotiate. And then they have to come up with reasons to support this choice. Then you can discuss what Kennedy actually did do.
• Analyze the effect the Cuban missile crisis had on JFK and our foreign policy in general using these two speeches of Kennedy's. You can use it at the end of your lesson, or use the first at the beginning and the latter at the end. Very Common Core.

If you're looking for more Cold War materials, check out my next post.

Spring, Social History and Suburbia: Teaching about Social Change in the 1950s

After finishing a unit on World War II and the depressing topics of the Holocaust, Japanese Internment and the dropping of the atomic bomb, I like to spend a day or two on some of the social changes of the post-war period.

The emphasis in most U.S. history classes is on political history: wars, legislation, presidencies and other "major events" dominated by white men at the expense of social history and what life was like for regular people. University history departments saw the growth of what became the "new social history" beginning in the 1960s and 1970s. I once read that K-12 education is roughly 20 years behind academia, which sounds about right to me (but sad, isn't it?). In the 1990s, this social history began to creep into secondary education, with things like sidebars or quotations and sometimes even whole chapters on the history of women, slaves, working class people and other groups.

Much as been gained from this impact of social history. But the problem--as always--for U.S. history teachers of survey courses, whether it is in middle school, high school, or even college, is how to fit it all in without overwhelming students with too much of everything. Looking over my posts over the course of this school year, I can see that I still emphasize political history. African American history has some representation, but I have very little on women's history (I'll have to work on that over the summer!). Mind you, my posts don't = everything I would teach students, but are just a selection. But still, it is hard to fit it all in.

This post is my way of reminding all of us that whenever we can, we should make an effort to help students get to know something about life during a particular time and place. It also occurs to me that one of the ways we can differentiate what we teach in middle school from what we teach in high school is in this emphasis. What should be the difference between U.S. history in 8th grade and U.S. history in 11th? Should we just repeat everything, but go into more depth? Or should we actually teach different topics? Or should we teach the same "big" topics (like the Revolution, the Civil War, the New Deal) but emphasize different things about it?

These are important questions that I wish to ignore for now in order to go back to the topic of this post: incorporating more social history into our classes, whether we teach middle school or high school. And after you are done teaching World War II, and when it is starting to get warm out and your students are getting antsy, there is no better time for the lesson I'm about to describe (hence the word "spring" in this post's title). It's fun, it's light-hearted, and there's cool stuff to check out that still manages to address "big questions" about topics you will get to when you study the Cold War and Civil Rights. On a Thursday or Friday as the weather warms up, this lesson will help keep your students focused and their attention from wandering towards the window.

The lesson also helps describe the rise of a major phenomenon that shapes where many of our students currently live: the suburbs. The year 2000 was the first year that the suburban population of the United States hit 50 percent. The number is even higher today (but annoyingly, I could not find a number--if you can, do comment below!) So the chances are that a majority of you are teaching in a suburban community. Shouldn't our students know how that happened?

• See here for information about the growth of suburbs from a 2002 U.S. Census report. That link is to page 38 of the entire report which you can find here.
• Scroll to the bottom of this page for 2 additional useful charts you can show students about the shift from rural to urban to suburban populations.

I begin the lesson by explaining that the period I refer to as "the fifites" doesn't correspond neatly to the years 1950-1959, but really is more 1954-1963. The Korean War and the most tense period of the Cold War (until the Cuban Missile Crisis) ends in 1953. And Kennedy is assassinated in 1963, ending some of the optimism of the period. I also caution them that what they will be looking at is mainstream, middle-class white culture. A few of the links refer to that fact, but most do not.

Then I hand out a worksheet and direct them to a webquest-type activity in which they will figure out some of the major trends and the overall "mood" of the 1950s. You can certainly find your own websites, but are welcome to use mine. You can find it on a handy website called bagtheweb.com. To find the "bag" that has my 1950s stuff you can link here, or if for some reason that doesn't work, type "Mrs. Brown" or "mrs brown" or "1950s" in the search box and you should find it. (And go ahead and "like it," while you're there! My students last spring certainly liked it,  but they didn't "like it." Sigh.) In this activity, students will get to check out 1950s tv shows, car design, Disneyland and other fun things that will also teach them about the changing roles of women and life in the suburbs.

(Fyi, there are a lot of web-curating websites out there that are useful for compiling resources for students. If you want more information on those, you will find no better source than the blog freetech4teachers.) And of course, you can also use the lower-tech method of just putting together a Word document or Google Doc that has the links on there.)

This is the worksheet for students which accompanies the 1950s websites. Note that you would want to revise it a bit and make it your own. For example, question #3 is about Chicago. The trend of rising suburbs is true across the country, but you can probably find data for a city closer to you if you aren't in Chicago.  Also, question #5 and the accompanying link on bagtheweb is about the specific suburb in which my students were living. If you teach in a rural or urban area, you should delete that question. If you teach in a suburb, undoubtedly, there is information out there somewhere about your community. Also, question #15 is just a private joke with my students: it refers to the fact that whenever I refer to the essential or major question of a topic, I always say "the $64,000 question," which is what my dad used to say, referencing the #1 TV show of 1955 that I've never seen. So you might want to come up with a different question about television.

If you want to the extend the lesson (and this might be more appropriate for high school, rather than middle school) read this article from TIME, "The End of the Suburbs" or this one from The Atlantic,
"Suburbs and the New American Poor" to give you information that will bring the topic up to the present.

Common Core Standards for this lesson: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RH.6-8.7 or CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RH.9-10.7 or CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RH.11-12.7.

Could the U.S. Government Have Done Something to Stop, or at Least Minimize, the Holocaust?

The topic for today's blogpost dates way back to one of the first lessons I did as a student teacher. It was in a unit on the Holocaust in a World History class. My cooperating teacher had given me a worksheet passed down to him in which students ascribed responsibility to different individuals. I decided to put my own twist on it and added a few individuals, namely President Roosevelt. I had recently read something about how F.D.R. could have bombed the train tracks leading to Auschwitz and in my simplistic understanding of history, I thought wow, he could have saved so many and didn't! Guilty!

There were a few students in the class who agreed with me (though I didn't share my personal views) but most were either baffled or appalled that anyone would suggest the U.S. bore ANY responsibility for what had happened to the Jews of Europe.

I have taught this lesson many times since. And as my understanding of the nuances of history have developed, so has the lesson, as well as my personal understanding of what Roosevelt could and could not have done. Here is the most current version of the handout I give students. It never fails to generate heated discussions (unless they all agree with each other, which would be highly unusual). I don't--for the record--usually use this in a U.S. history class. I feel it belongs in a more complete unit on the Holocaust. (But if you want to use it--in whatever class you teach--the second page has some discussion questions you can use. And the US Holocaust Museum has a similar lesson but on Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur.)

If you are teaching U.S. history in high school, it is likely that your colleagues in world history are teaching the Holocaust, and I think the lesson above and the topic overall fits better in that curriculum than in U.S. history. But many middle schools add the Holocaust into their curriculum even if world history is not taught. (So if you are looking for more materials for teaching the Holocaust in general, scroll down to the end of the post; keep reading for the U.S. history idea).

But I don't like to ignore the Holocaust in the U.S. history curriculum, and I think the lesson I will describe below is a good way to incorporate it.

After years of using the above lesson, I finally decided that it was high time that I put a little more research into the question of whether F.D.R. really could have done more to save the Jews. And if not, what were the obstacles? It seemed kind of irresponsible for me to imply they were responsible without knowing more about it. And my students really wanted to know more. There are a number of books on the subject. I will list a few at the end of this post.

During the war and depression years,  Roosevelt was enormously popular among American Jews. It was joked by some that there were three worlds or "velts" (the Yiddish word for world): this velt, the velt to come, and Roosevelt. So worshiped was Roosevelt by Jewish Americans for all he did during the depression and the visibility of Jews in his administration. But he and Eleanor also grew up with some of the anti-semitism that was common to their time and their social class. As president, he appointed many Jews to positions of power, most notably Henry Morgenthau, Jr. as his Secretary of the Treasury. But the U.S. State Department--which oversaw immigration to the U.S.--was noted for anti-semitism. And this would play a significant role in events to come.

So the lesson that I developed on this topic is described below, and you can find the whole thing here. Essentially, it takes the complex "answer" to the question implied in this post's title and turns it into an inquiry-style activity for students. They read the info on a bunch of cards and put them into categories that help answer the question. (Note: I have used presented this technique in some of my teaching presentations. You can find another application of the technique applied to the topic of the Cold War under the tab at the top, "Teacher Presentations"). It is an approach that can be applied to many topics, though I warn you it requires a significant investment of time, and is best done for a topic that you know a lot about or are willing to put in some research time. On the positive side, depending on the topic, it can serve as a lesson that lasts several days up to a week, so the time would be well spent. To see the technique in a nutshell, click here. It will meet at least a few Common Core Standards, too.)

One of the key essential questions or "big ideas" that the Holocaust lesson addresses is the problem of presentism: we know today that 6 million Jews and 5 million others will die under Hitler's reign, but at the time, that was not known. (And by "known" I don't mean that people didn't know anything, as is sometimes claimed, but they certainly didn't know all that we know.) Also, a concept described well by Bruce Lesh is the problem of "historical empathy." If we look at the decisions Roosevelt and Congress made regarding the Jews in Europe in isolation, it may strike us, "Hey, why couldn't they have at least let Jewish refugees into the country?" But we have to balance that with everything else at the time: opposition to other legislation, the lingering depression, anti-immigrant sentiment in general and anti-semitism in particular. and--after Pearl Harbor--the larger U.S. war effort.

Jewish refugees on board the St. Louis, docked at Cuba.
More info about the voyage of the St. Louis here.

If you want to extend this lesson, you can show a clip from the PBS film, America and the Holocaust. The film goes over some historical overview about the St. Louis, the immigration crisis and U.S. policy while juxtaposing it with the story of one particular family: the story of Kurt Klein who manages to leave Nazi Germany with his brother, but his parents are left behind. I don't show the whole thing. I use the first 20-30 minutes or so, up until the narrator Kurt Klein stops hearing from his parents. The students always want to know what happened to them, so I fill that in for them. As well as the great story about his personal life--he goes on to fight as a U.S. soldier and at the end of the war, meets a survivor of the Holocaust, Gerda Weissman, who he eventually marries. There is a highly regarded HBO documentary about her experiences called One Survivor Remembers.

And for more info on the topic of the U.S. and its role in the Holocaust, the US Holocaust Museum has a whole section on the United States, as does the David S. Wyman Institute. These are both excellent sources which you can use for background or to create or find additional lessons.

The books about U.S. and the Holocaust: 

Rather than include the links to Amazon like I usually do, I'm linking to reviews about the books so you can get the gist of them. I warn you, though, reading some of these books or even just the reviews (maybe especially the reviews!) will make you realize how difficult it is to find "the answer" in history. Perhaps that is exactly the point we want students to learn.

• Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman, FDR and the Jews or here
• Robert N. Rosen, Saving the Jews: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Holocaust
• David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews
• Rafael Medoff, FDR and the Holocaust: A Breach of Faith

Additional More Comprehensive Holocaust Resources for Planning an Entire Unit:

While this post is mostly limited to how to teach one aspect of the Holocaust as it applies to U.S. history classes, I can recommend a few other sources if you are teaching a larger unit on the Holocaust. The most obvious is the one you probably all know: the United States Holocaust Museum. It is one of the most comprehensive museum websites I have ever seen, and you can probably find everything you need to create a full unit. Start with the resources for educators. And do check out their guidelines for teaching about the Holocaust which are also very useful suggestions for teaching about other sensitive or disturbing topics. Another outstanding resource, less known among American teachers is Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial and museum in Jerusalem. They also have substantial online resources for teachers. And if you are in the Chicago area--but also has online resources--do check out the Illinois Holocaust Museum in Skokie.

I also highly recommend this Teaching the Holocaust, an outstanding resource for teachers by Simone Schweber and Debbie Findling.  It has fantastic lesson ideas, and excellent suggestions for resources such as film clips and readings. The only downside is that not widely available and on the pricey side. ($33 on Amazon, but if you devote any significant time to the teaching of the Holocaust, I can vouch that it is money well spent.) You can read a sample of it here.

There are also SO many films about the Holocaust it can be hard to know what to choose.  One of my all-time favorites is I'm Still Here, produced by MTV. It has famous actors and actresses reading diary entries of young people. I have used it with 9th graders with great success. I think it would be good for 8th graders, too. Seventh grade, maybe a few clips. And it definitely works well up through 12th grade. What I love about it is that it describes the Holocaust from the perspective of teenagers and therefore it really resonates with kids. I have cut the excerpt from the anonymous diarist when I show it because one, that way you can better fit it into a class period and have time for discussion and two, that scene has especially graphic footage which I find inappropriate for younger students. If your school cannot borrow it from another library or purchase it (it's available for $15 on Amazon), then try your public library. I have also seen it fully downloaded on youtube, but I have some copyright issues with that, not to mention you may run into streaming problems. Facing History has a study guide for teachers (as well as lots of other Holocaust resources) you can use, too.

Some Thoughts on Class Participation, Role Play and How to Approach World War II in a U.S. History Class

At this point in the school year, it can be an uphill climb to impact any significant change in the culture of your classroom. You and your students have likely long settled into your roles. But there is still a good month and a half or more of school left to go, and it is our responsibility as the grownup in the room to keep fighting the good fight.

I am thinking specifically about classroom participation. We all would like a classroom environment in which every student's hand is waving in the air, every kid eager to participate. But the sad truth is that many classes have a handful of students who regularly participate and....well, and that can often be it. In my work evaluating student teachers, and currently I am teaching pre-student teachers in the methods class, I often harp about the need to pay attention to the kids. It is hard for beginning teachers to do that, I understand. They are so busy trying to figure out what they are going to do, that it is hard to really see what the students are doing. And they are so grateful when a student raises his or her hand, that they rarely use the power of "wait time" to see if anyone else is going to throw a hat in the ring.

I think about this often while looking back on my own middle school self: I was that quiet kid who NEVER wanted to raise her hand. There was a boy named Warren in lots of my classes who was an active class participant. For alphabetical reasons, I was often right behind him. And sometimes when the teacher would call, "Warren," I got a pit in my stomach feeling because "Warren" rhymes with "Lauren" and I was terrified thinking that the teacher had called on me.

So how do you get the Laurens to participate?

There has been a ton of research on this topic, which I'm not going to get into here. Suffice it to say that there are techniques that involve using classroom blogs, polls, or online discussions (See Edutopia's guide to online discussion) which allow students to participate without the "scariness" of having to speak out loud. Or techniques like the ones described by Doug Lemov (check out this excerpt about "cold-calling, wait time and other ideas) that can boost participation. (See also this interesting article about a university professor's success with small group discussions, fyi.)

In today's post, I'm going to offer another technique: role play. One of the advantages of a role play activity is that students are somewhat freed from having to be themselves. Sometimes the self is a tough role to play for adolescents. If you assign them the role of a historic figure, they don't have to worry as much about what other kids (or you) will think of their own ideas, as they are playing the role of someone else.

Hence my idea about role play. In a lesson on the U.S. and the world in the 1930s, what if students were each assigned a role, some fictional, some real, and then I had a list, so instead of calling on Lauren who is shy or Warren who may monopolize class discussions, I could call on Eleanor Roosevelt? Or an American World War I veteran? Or an Italian immigrant?

What I also like about this technique is that it forces students to grapple with the Problem of Presentism. We know there will be a World War II. We know the U.S. will join and that Nazi Germany will be defeated. But in 1933 or 1936 or 1939, nobody knew that. What they did know, our students forget because it was on the test from the last unit or two: World War I was terrible, with mixed results and the U.S. was in the midst of a terrible depression. So we need to remind students to think about the events of the 1930s from the perspective of those who lived through it.

One of the problems posed by World War II for U.S. history teachers is that the period 1935-1941 is an enormously complex time filled with lots of important and intersecting events. Take a look at this list of "vocab terms" from the end of a chapter of a typical U.S. history book:

Neutrality Acts of 1935, 1937 and 1939
cash and carry
Arsenal of Democracy
Lend-Lease
Ludlow Amendment
Panay incident
Selective Service Act

If you add to that key events from abroad...rise of Hitler and Nazi Germany, Mussolini and the invasion of Ethiopia, the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, the Spanish Civil War, the remilitarization of the Rhineland, the Sudetenland, the policy of appeasement, the Anschluss, Kristallnacht, Stalin and the Nazi-Soviet pact, etc., etc., etc....You will overwhelm your students and they will learn nothing.

There are two issues as I see it. First, is what should be covered in a United States history class vs. a world history class. And once we made the decision to focus on the war from an American perspective and save the rest for the world history teachers, how do we tame the content beast that remains?

My answer, as has hopefully become familiar to regular readers of this blog, is to focus on Essential Questions and recurring themes. If you read my earlier post on idealism and realism in U.S. foreign policy and the U.S. annexation of the Philippines, you probably already know where this lesson is going. That is my intention with my students as well. I want them to see the connections between the Spanish American War and World War I and World War II. Those connections center around these essential questions:

In what circumstances should the U.S. intervene in world affairs? When should we be isolationist? When should we intervene? And what are the criteria for deciding?  

So I begin my unit on World War II by setting the stage: the U.S. is still in the midst of the Great Depression, and FDR has key legislation he is trying to get through Congress. He will be up for reelection in 1936, and again in 1940. The infamous "Court Packing Plan" of 1937 has exposed Roosevelt to significant criticism. And meanwhile, there is very troubling news coming from Europe and Asia.

I then assign students each a role. I have created 25 different roles for students here. At the beginning of this document is your "cheat sheet." This is what you use to call on #16, Eleanor Roosevelt or the fictional #23, Raymond Hewitt. If you have more than 25 in a class, you can either double up or come up with a few more. You will note that some are fictional and some are real and I have noted that for the students. If you are on a 1:1 model, you can assign students roles through Google Doc or something like that. Otherwise, you will have to cut and paste the role from the previous handout onto this one for each student in your class, which is more of a pain, but certainly doable.

Class begins with my favorite Theodor Geisl (aka Dr. Seuss) political cartoon so we can review the concepts of "isolationism" and "interventionism" they learned when studying World War I. (Though point out that the cartoon is from 1941 and you are going to backtrack).

I handle the "troubling news from Europe and Asia" with this brief PowerPoint. Part of my reason for keeping it brief is to tame the content beast, but part of it is also deliberate: not all Americans are paying super close attention to what's going on abroad. Some are, some less so. Many would be familiar with at least the headlines. (And I am de-emphasizing European and World history in order to focus on U.S.). But again, they don't know as we do know what is going to happen and therefore how significant it is some of these events will be in hindsight.

Throughout class, you can conduct discussions, short or longer, where students discuss their role. Ask them how their character would feel about supporting various pieces of legislation (e.g. Neutrality Acts, Lend-Lease). They don't need to memorize all this legislation for the test; but they will get a sense of what kinds of things FDR is proposing to "bring the country" along with him. Ask students how they might react to the news from abroad, based on their character. Ask them how they would react to FDR's speeches such as the Quarantine speech in 1937. (Especially if you live in the Chicago area, check out the occasion for the speech as described in this Tribune article.) By the end of these discussions, students should have a better sense of the diversity of American public opinion, the importance of it and the need to respect it if you are president running for re-election and trying to pass your New Deal legislation. Take polls, either through a show of hands (low-tech) or on polldaddy.com or surveymonkey.com, where you can sign up for free as a teacher. For more details, and links to additional primary sources, see my write up of this lesson.

And you can end your lesson with this quotation:

History never looks like history when you are living through it. It is always looks confusing and messy, and it always feels uncomfortable.

— John W. Gardner

One last point, I've been neglecting lately to explicitly connect my blogposts to specific Common Core standards. (I confess, I keep hoping that my motto of "high standards that meet any standards" will suffice, as I get tired of navigating the poorly designed CCSS website.) But my newest interest is the overlooked Common Core Speaking and Listening standards. Until the time when I can post my own ideas on these standards, check out this great blogpost about them from Erik Palmer, whose webpage pvlegs.com is on my new must-read list and this one from Dave Stuart's blog, teachingthecore.com, and note that the above lesson ideas would meet the Speaking & Listening standards #1C. See here for more info on the 8th grade version of those standards.) Also, if students spend time looking at Roosevelt's speeches, they are meeting CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RH.6-8.2 or CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RH.9-10.2 or CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RH.11-12.2, depending on the grade level you teach.

Do's and Don'ts for Teaching the Great Depression and the New Deal: Lesson Suggestions

If I made a list of the things I would hope well-educated adult citizens of the U.S. should know about the New Deal off the top of their heads, the Glass-Steagall Act would not be one of them. Nor would I quiz someone about whether the Act was an example of Relief, Recovery or Reform.

So what I want to do first off in this blog post is mention a few "please don'ts" about the Great Depression and the New Deal.

1. Don't make students fill out a chart listing all the examples of New Deal legislation. They will not learn anything except how to copy information from a textbook or from a friend. In the Age of Google, they can find the answer in a sec if they really need to know what the Glass Steagall Act was. And I would argue that they probably should know about it. When I say "know" I don't mean memorize the provisions, but they should learn something about the banking crisis and how the Glass Steagall Act attempted to solve it and the FDIC that we still have today. (For a good summary of the Glass-Steagall Act, check out federalreservehistory.org. Also, I have had good success with playing an excerpt from F.D.R.'s first fireside chat about the banking crisis. Find that here. Even middle schoolers will find it easy to understand. And it's worthwhile, I think, to have students get to hear the man himself, as did millions of Americans at the time.

2. A second thing I think can be frustrating is trying to categorize everything in the New Deal as "Relief," "Recovery," or "Reform." The reality is that many programs fit more than one category. Giving students a list of New Deal legislation and making them label it as one of the 3 Rs is just an exercise in frustration. (But describing the New Deal as a whole as a set of policies and programs that aimed to provide the 3 Rs is fine.)

3. When you ask our fictional well-educated adult citizen of the U.S. what caused the Great Depression in the first place, you are likely to get "the stock market crash" as an answer. The reality is much more complicated. Economic history is not my strong suit, so I'm not going to get into any details here. John Green's Crash Course on the Great Depression will provide good background for you. (Not so good, though, for students. Definitely not appropriate for middle schoolers, and like most Green Crash Courses, it goes awfully fast even for high schoolers and crams in too much. But good for the teacher. Or for students to review on their own at home, if they have internet access.) This video is also useful for dispelling another myth about the Depression and my 4th "please don't"...

4. Don't give Hoover too hard of a time. It is too simplistic to say that he didn't do anything about the Depression and that's why he lost so dramatically to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932. Certainly, he wasn't able to fix the economic collapse in American, and so naturally, voters looked elsewhere. But he was not the do-nothing loser that I remember learning about in school. I think students deserve a fuller picture. This article offers a helpful overview for teachers about Hoover. Presidential library websites are great resources for teachers. The Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum is no exception. Check out this page for teacher resources.

So what about the "Do's"? 

1. For one thing, I mentioned in an earlier post that one way to conceptualize the 20th century (and therefore organizing your course) is to consider the New Deal as the second wave of domestic reform/liberalism, with the Progressive Era as being the first. Both periods accept the notion of a larger role for the federal government and taking responsibility for helping the people. Both address problems related to the economy. Both periods are distrustful of socialism on the left, as well as laissez-faire on the right. Both are periods that seek to avert social upheaval when capitalism seems in crisis.

But there are differences. One way to get students to see this is with this handout--I've provided you the key. You could use it in one of two ways. If kids have computers, you could mix up the contents of the chart and they can cut and paste the answers under the correct column. Alternatively--and a good way to have students literally manipulate the material--you can photocopy this and cut it up into cards. In pairs, students can put them into the correct piles.

2. Connect the Depression and the New Deal to the present. Younger students probably don't remember much about it, and even high schoolers may not really remember 2008 so well (or understand it), but it's still worth pointing out some of the similarities. Here are a few resources to help you do that:

• Forbes.com
• Foundation for Economic Education
• Ben Bernanke reflects on cnn.com
• Also, try doing an image search on google, using terms like, "2008 financial crisis compared great depression" and see what you find.  

3. Do find simple ways to explain the economics of the Depression, such as the chart below. You can also link to it here to see it more clearly (sorry about the blurriness--tech troubles). One activity you can do in class is give students a blank version of the flowchart with the text separate. See if they can put them in the correct order.

4. Do consider an entire lesson about F.D.R. and his disability. I have several reasons for this. First, it is a great way to study disability in the United States and how our attitudes have changed over time. Ironically, while our attitudes towards disability may be considered more progressive today, it is only because so much of FDR's struggles were kept hidden from the public that he was able to win the presidency--and that would likely still be true today. As Ken Burns points out in the TIME article I link to below, today's television cameras would have prevented FDR from making it out of the Iowa caucuses because he just would not have been seen as strong enough to be president. Second, it is such a fundamental part of who F.D.R. was, and as some historians have argued, Roosevelt's polio was a major part of his character. Check out the recent book by James Tobin, The Man He Became: How FDR Defied Polio to Win the Presidency. Of course, you probably don't have time to read the book before you teach the New Deal, but you can read a review of it here or listen to the interview with the author on NPR's Fresh Air. (Note: Fresh Air's Terry Gross does lots of interviews with many authors of history books. It's a great way to get some insight from recent books when you don't have time to read them!)

• This excerpt from Ken Burn's The Roosevelt was apparently cut out of the final version but made exclusively available to Time Magazine. The link is to the article in Time. From there, you can watch the 3 1/2 minute clip. 
• see this article from Social Education as either background for you, or readable for students (middle or high school). It describes how FDR's disability was widely known among the press and Washington, but minimized to the public. In the same issue (Social Education, September 1996) there is an article about the not-then-built F.D.R. memorial with lesson ideas for discussing it. There are some interesting questions raised: Why do we build memorials? Who are they for? Would FDR be upset if the disability he concealed was depicted in the memorial? Is it "rewriting history" to depict his disability in the memorial? Does it matter what FDR would think? What his family would want? What do you think?

5. Do devote time to Eleanor Roosevelt. She is influential in so many ways, both during the Depression and World War II. First off, if you do teach about FDR's disability, you have to explain the role Eleanor played in his recovery and in serving as his "eyes and ears" on the road as travelled places he could not. Depending on the ages of your students and whether or not they bring it up, you may or may not want to go into anything about Lucy Mercer. But this New York Times article does point out some interesting correlations between Eleanor and Hillary Clinton.

Students also like to know how FDR is related to Theodore and to Eleanor. This link helps explain that, plus has all kinds of additional links to all things Eleanor.

6. Connect the Depression and the New Deal to world history and to what comes next: World War II. Especially in today's highly partisan era, it is easy to focus on how the New Deal changed our federal government for the better or the worse, depending on one's point of view. But it is worth considering how other world leaders handled the world's financial crisis: Stalin and Hitler. Especially when you get to the later New Deal and the criticisms of it from both right and left, this is a point well worth making.

7. Connect the Dust Bowl to other recent environmental disasters. I'm especially thinking here about Louisiana and the Gulf Oil spill of 2010 and Hurricane Katrina. All of these involve environmental disasters that led to financial disaster. And all of them involve some level of human agency. (i.e. There is plenty that wasn't done to insure the effectiveness of the levees prior to Katrina.) And don't forget to show students some of the incredible images of the Dust Bowl. 

This blogpost just barely scratches the surface, I know, of these major topics. But in the interest of GettingToTheGulfWarByJune, I am going to press on...

A few final places to look for good Depression/New Deal resources:

• The New Deal Network
• FDR Library
• New Deal Lessons from Stanford History Education Group (SHEG)
• Depression and New Deal materials from Gilder Lehrman
• Library of Congress and the Great Depression
• Library of Congress and the New Deal
• Current Issue of Social Education - this link will not always be the right issue: the issue is March/April 2015, which focuses on Money and the Fed, and thus has a few articles relevant to teaching about the Depression. You have to be a member of NCSS to get access to the articles.
• livingnewdeal.org - So cool! Has an interactive map where you can enter in your city and state and find projects from the New Deal. Check it out!