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In this video from PBSLearningMedia, Craig Benzine teaches students about the U.S. government's separation of powers and the system of checks and balances. In theory, the legislative branch, the executive branch, and the judicial branch are designed to keep each other in check and to keep any branch from becoming too powerful. In reality, the system was designed to keep the president from becoming some kind of autocrat. For the most part, it has worked.

In this episode, Craig Benzine explores the leadership structure of congress. We'll break out the clone machine to examine the responsibilities of the speaker of the house, the majority, and minority leaders, as well as the majority and minority whips in both the Senate and the House. As the leadership heavily influences assignments to committees and acts as the primary point of contact with the media, they wield significant power in influencing the public dialog.

In this activity, second graders investigate American symbols and their value to the American people. Students learn the history of some American symbols and why American citizens hold these symbols so dear to their heart.

This article from Khan Academy gives an overview of the economic downturn of the 1970s and the OPEC oil embargo of 1973-1974. This article can be used when describing the changing social and cultural conditions in the US in the 1970s. Students can read the article and then answer the questions at the end as an assessment.  The article can be read in a whole group setting or individually.

In this Emmy Award-winning documentary film co-presented by HBO and The Museum of Jewish Heritage, a new generation of students is introduced to Holocaust history. When 10-year-old Elliott asks his 90-year-old great-grandfather, Jack, about the number tattooed on his arm, he sparks an intimate conversation about Jack’s life that spans happy memories of childhood in Poland, the loss of his family, surviving Auschwitz, and finding a new life in America. Their tender exchange is woven with historical footage and hand-painted animation to tell a heartbreaking story of Jewish life in Eastern Europe before and during the Holocaust. The video is approximately 19 minutes in length.

Adriene Hill and Jacob Clifford teach you about one of the fundamental economic ideas, supply and demand. What are supply and demand? Well, you’ll have to watch the video to really understand it, but it’s kind of important for everything economically. Supply and demand set prices, and indicate to manufacturers how much to produce.

In this lesson plan, students investigate the experiences of immigrants in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After reviewing evidence, they develop an argument to decide if the American Dream came true for the immigrants who came to New York. Click the Download PDF or DOC to access the following additional resources:

• Several photographs of immigrants at home and work.
• Emma Lazarus' poem, The New Colossus.
• A Scholastic video: Virtual Field trip to Ellis Island.
• A link to an interactive website exploring Ellis Island.
• A link to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum where students can construct an interactive immigrant character.

This article from Khan Academy provides an overview of Manifest Destiny. In the mid-nineteenth century, newspaper editor John O'Sullivan coined the term "manifest destiny" to describe the belief that God intended for the United States to occupy North America from Atlantic to Pacific. Students can read the article as an introduction to a lesson on expansionism prior to the Civil War and answer the questions at the end of the article as an assessment.  The article can be read in a whole group setting or individually. It can be assigned through Google Classroom.

English colonists, including John Smith and John Rolfe, arrive on new land via the Chesapeake Bay and are greeted by curious onlookers who are native to the land. This land will eventually become the Colony of Virginia. This scene foreshadows the end of the ancient civilization, the Powhatan.

Social psychologist Stanley Milgram conducts a series of radical experiments that test the willingness of individuals to obey authority. When the inflictor is interviewed as to why he continued to send electric shocks after each incorrect answer even when he was begged to stop, the inflictor implies that it wasn't that serious because it was the subject that made the request. This clip illustrates the conflict between personal conscience and obedience to authority. This clip can be used when teaching about types of methodology and strategies used by researchers in different psychological studies. 

This video from the Daily Dose provides a 3-minute micro-learning film on the Acropolis, which has been inhabited by Greeks and foreign invaders for thousands of years. The Acropolis is a city in Greece known for its splendorous architecture. 

In this lesson, students will analyze President John F. Kennedy's response to the buildup of Soviet nuclear missiles and weapons sites in Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Resources included in this learning activity are surveillance photographs of Cuban missile sites, the map prepared for President Kennedy showing the range of the ballistic missiles in Cuba, and President John F. Kennedy's October 22, 1962 address to the nation.

This classroom resource from Epic! is a book all about map types. It can be used to help students identify landforms and bodies of water on a map or globe. The age range is 8-11 years old. The AR level is 3.5.

This video is a short biography of Ernest Hemingway, an influential 20th-century author, and journalist who is best known for works such as The Sun Also Rises and The Old Man and the Sea. He is one of the most famous writers of the "Lost Generation," people who came of age during or shortly after the first World War and became disillusioned by the senseless death and destruction

This learning activity includes a biography of Amelia Earhart and several other fun activities for students to build their knowledge about the first woman to fly across the Atlantic. The activities can be printed or completed online. 

In this learning activity, students use Google Maps to find their school and to locate the closest body of water. The activity includes links to additional resources.

In this video from PBSLearningMedia, John Green teaches students about the American Revolution. John will teach you about the major battles of the war and discuss the strategies on both sides. Everyone is familiar with how this war played out for the Founding Fathers; they got to become the Founding Fathers. But what did the revolution mean to the common people in the United States? For white, property-owning males, it was pretty sweet. They gained rights that were a definite step up from being British Colonial citizens. For everyone else, the short-term gains were not clear. Women's rights were unaffected, and slaves remained in slavery. As for poor white folks, they remained poor and disenfranchised. The reality is it took a long time for this whole democracy thing to get underway, and the principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness weren't immediately available to all these newly minted Americans.

Yadina is excited when she’s chosen to be the leader of her Nature Troop, thinking this a great first step toward becoming President one day. The only problem is, she isn’t entirely sure how to be a good leader. To the Secret Museum! Our heroes are sent back in time to meet one of the greatest leaders in the history of the United States: George Washington. Yadina is awe-struck as she gets to meet her country’s very first president, who offers to take them on a fishing trip. As he leads them through the woods to the fishing hole, George is polite, helpful, and supportive, showing Yadina that a good leader takes care of his or her team.

In this lesson, students investigate a series of primary documents to address the question: Why did the United States government incarcerate Japanese Americans during World War II? Students will watch a newsreel from 1942 that the government made to explain the internment. Then, students will read four other primary documents about the internment to answer the essential question. 

The website includes lesson plans, PowerPoint presentations, primary source documents, and student graphic organizers. Teachers will need to create a free account to access the materials. 

In this lesson, students identify the purpose and goals of education in American society and explain why African Americans chose to challenge segregated education.

In this video from PBSLearningMedia, John Green teaches students about the Industrial Economy that arose in the United States after the Civil War. After the Civil War, many of the changes in technology and ideas gave rise to this new industrialism. You'll learn about the rise of Captains of Industry (or Robber Barons) like Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, John D Rockefeller, and JP Morgan. You'll learn about trusts, combinations, and how the government responded to these new business practices.

**Sensitive: This resource contains material that may be sensitive for some students. Teachers should exercise discretion in evaluating whether this resource is suitable for their class.

Join host John Green to learn about water. People cannot live without water, which means it's absolutely necessary for civilization. In this episode, John talks about water in the context of classical civilizations, but not those of Greece or Rome. Instead, we'll explore the Maya civilization in Central America and the Khmer civilization in what is now Cambodia.

**Sensitive: This resource contains material that may be sensitive for some students. Teachers should exercise discretion in evaluating whether this resource is suitable for their class.

In this passage, students learn about the "Race to Space." In 1961, President John F. Kennedy made a bold statement. He announced that the U.S. would put a man on the moon before the end of the decade. Americans were thrilled about this possibility. 

A vocabulary activity and question set is included with the passage. 

This collection includes photographs of jazz musicians Duke Ellington, George Wein, and Frank Sinatra.  

In this video from PBSLearningMedia, John Green teaches students about the early days of the Civil Rights movement. The 1950s are a deeply nostalgic period for many Americans, but there is more than a little idealizing going on here. The 1950s were a time of economic expansion, new technologies, and a growing middle class. America was becoming a suburban nation thanks to cookie-cutter housing developments like the Levittowns. While the white working-class saw their wages and status improve, the proverbial rising tide wasn't lifting all proverbial ships. A lot of people were excluded from the prosperity of the 1950s. Segregation in housing and education made for some serious inequality for African Americans. As a result, the Civil Rights movement was born. John will talk about the early careers of Martin Luther King, Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks, and even Earl Warren. He'll teach you about Brown v Board of Education, and the lesser-known Mendez vs Westminster, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and all kinds of other stuff.

**Sensitive: This resource contains material that may be sensitive for some students. Teachers should exercise discretion in evaluating whether this resource is suitable for their class.

This learning activity will examine social media’s influence on America’s Civil Rights movement and its role in democratizing the media. In this video from Eyes on the Prize: Then and Now, activists, including DeRay McKesson, use social media to support the work of social change protesters. Because communications are unmediated and occur in real-time, McKesson says, social media can help build community. Tamika Mallory calls social media a powerful asset, enabling people who have never met before to share information and support one another’s efforts. Bree Newsome points out that without social media, people might not even have heard of important cases—including those of Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, and Sandra Bland. This video comes with a facilitator guide and student handout that helps guide the discussion of this activity.

In this video from PBSLearningMedia, John Green teaches students about the rise of the conservative movement in United States politics. So, the sixties are often remembered for the liberal changes that the decade brought to America, but lest you forget, Richard Nixon was elected to the presidency during the sixties. The conservative movement didn't start with Nixon though. Modern conservatism really entered mainstream consciousness during the 1964 presidential contest between the incumbent president and Kennedy torch-bearer Lyndon B Johnson and Republican senator Barry Goldwater. While Goldwater never had a shot in the election, he used the campaign to talk about all kinds of conservative ideas. At the same time, several varying groups, including libertarian conservatives and moral conservatives, began to work together. Goldwater's trailblazing and coalition-building would pay off in 1968 when Richard Nixon was elected to the White House, and politics changed forever when Nixon resigned over the Watergate scandal. You'll also learn about the ERA, EPA, OSHA, the NTSB, and several other acronyms and initialisms.

Some professor and their lessons at Florida State College of Women were targeted as being subversive and amoral. Professor Raymond Bellamy taught a progressive curriculum in his sociology courses while rumors that he was teaching controversial and subversive topics spread among fundamentalist activists who wanted the teaching of Creationism introduced on campus.

In this lesson, students investigate a series of primary documents to address the question: What caused the Dust Bowl? The teacher will use a PowerPoint to establish background information and to introduce the Central Historical Question. Then, students will read and analyze five other primary documents about the Dust Bowl to answer the essential question. 

The website includes lesson plans, PowerPoint presentations, primary source documents, and student graphic organizers. Teachers will need to create a free account to access the materials.