Students will learn the causes and effects of gerrymandering, and how court decisions authorizing race-based gerrymandering have reshaped American politics and created complex legacies.
Andrew McGill
Posted inU.S. History
Lesson Plan: Hexagonal Thinking – Latin America and the Cold War
Students will connect terms, ideas and images as a means for presenting Cold War tensions in Latin America visually. The activity is designed for students to complete in small groups and can be used as a review or as a final assessment.
Posted inU.S. History
Lesson Plan: Massacre in El Salvador
Students will learn about the Cold War in Latin America, with a focus on the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador.
Posted inCivics and Government
Lesson Plan: Immigration in the 1990s – Proposition 187
Students will learn about the anti-immigration movement in California in the 1990s, and why it is relevant today.
Posted inCivics and Government
Lesson Plan: Presidents v. Press – How the Pentagon Papers Leak Set Up First Amendment Showdowns
Students will learn about the Pentagon Papers during Nixon’s presidency, the long history of U.S. presidents battling national security leaks and the role of a free press in America’s democracy.
Posted inCivics and Government
Lesson Plan: American Reckoning
Students will learn about a little-known story of the civil rights movement told using excerpts from “American Reckoning,” a Retro Report and PBS Frontline collaboration.
Posted inU.S. History
Lesson Plan: Dictators and Civil Wars
Students will learn how driven by fears of the rise of Communism, the United States adopted a policy of containment, intervening in the politics of countries across the globe, including many countries in Latin America.
Posted inCivics and Government
Lesson Plan: Why Supreme Court Confirmations Have Become So Bitter (Mini Lesson)
As President Biden makes his first Supreme Court nomination, he is hoping for bipartisan support for nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. Recent history of Supreme Court nominations have yielded bitter battles and guarded answers from nominees on their views of important legal issues.
Posted inCivics and Government
Lesson Plan: Supreme Court Nominations an Confirmations
Students will examine the nomination and confirmation process for Supreme Court Justices and learn why the judges often reveal so little.
Posted inCivics and Government
Lesson Plan: Refugees and the Power of Words – Using Their Stories to Create Found Poems
This video asks what obligation countries have to refugees. It’s a question as important today as it was in 1975, when the United States evacuated 130,000 South Vietnamese allies during the fall of Saigon and brought them to this country to start new lives. But some Vietnamese refugees, like Carolee Tran, faced significant hardship and racism, despite the fact that then-President Ford said the U.S. had a “profound moral obligation” to families like hers. Today, as Afghan and Ukrainian migrants settle in the United States, this video asks whether refugee resettlement is better now than it was for the Vietnamese 50 years ago. As Kenneth Quinn, a former ambassador and foreign service officer told us, “All societies are determined by answering that question: To whom do I have an obligation?”
