For too many Americans, the history class in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (remember the teacher’s plaintive question, “anyone, anyone?”) is all too familiar. Our approach is meant to challenge this false and familiar image of history: understanding and reconstructing the past requires ways of thinking, reading, and questioning much more engaging and challenging than mere memorization.
Teaching in a way that differs from your own schooling experience is not necessarily easy to imagine, let alone execute. Especially given the many pressures and demands on teachers today. This part of the Historical Thinking Matters website is devoted to providing instructional resources for teacher educators who want to challenge these iconic pictures of history instruction and start preparing their students to teach for historical thinking.

The History Engine is an educational tool that gives students the opportunity to learn history by doing the work—researching, writing, and publishing—of an historian. The result is an ever-growing collection of historical articles or "episodes" that paint a wide-ranging portrait of life in the United States throughout its history, available in our online database to scholars, teachers, and the general public.The History Engine project aims to enhance historical education and research for teachers, students, and scholars alike. It allows undergraduate professors to introduce a more collaborative and creative approach to history into their classrooms, while maintaining rigorous academic standards. The History Engine gives students a more intimate experience with the process of history. Participants who work with the History Engine project learn the craft of an historian: they examine primary documents, place these documents in a larger historical context using secondary sources, and prepare cogent analysis of their sources for the public eye. Finally, the History Engine provides a way for professors to take advantage of digital technology in their classrooms while maintaining rigorous academic standards. The cumulative database provides all the easy-access and searchability of other websites, but also subjects its contents to a careful academic screening process on the part of library staff, archivists, professors, and teaching assistants.

How do we learn about the world of the ancient Romans and Greeks? This unit will provide you with an insight into the Classical world by introducing you to the various sources of information used by scholars to draw together an image of this fascinating period of history.

In the United States, the nineteenth century was a time of tremendous growth and change. The new nation experienced a shift from a farming economy to an industrial one, major westward expansion, displacement of native peoples, rapid advances in technology and transportation, and a civil war. In this lesson, works of art from the nineteenth century are paired with written documents, including literary selections, a letter, and a speech. As budding historians, students can use these primary sources from the nineteenth century to reconstruct the influence of technology, geography, economics, and politics on daily life.
In this lesson students will: Learn about daily life in the United States in the 1800s through visual art and literature; Understand some of the ways in which nineteenth-century life was affected by technology, geography, economics, and politics; Apply critical-thinking skills to consider the various choices artists and writers have made in depicting daily life around them; Make personal connections to the nineteenth century by placing themselves in the contexts of works of art and readings.

The general goal of the Reel American History project is to foster critical thinking about a matter of enduring cultural attention, especially where young people are concerned: the formation of our national identity.

Reel American History is designed to be a "Collaborative Shared Resource". It aims at being a large, ongoing, cumulative, collaborative project that involves many students and many faculty over a long period of time. We strive to engage students in authentic learning – making students partners, even leaders, in researching American culture. Not only do we want to host the "novice in the archive", but we want to be an archive built by novices. We value pedagogy that is active, hands-on, inquiry-driven, student-centered, dialogic, constructivist, and based on discovery.

Therefore, we invite high school, college, and university teachers to share ownership in the project by not only teaching from the archive but, especially and even more importantly, by adding student work to it.

Specifically, we encourage teachers to consider our suggestions for using our site in these five ways:

as a textbook for your classroom work
as a first-stop resource for research projects by your students on films in the archive
as a publisher of good work by your students
as a stimulant for the creation of other kinds of projects relating to film representation of American history
as a broker for projects that join students from different schools

That Jim Crow was a tremendously important period in United States history is undisputable. Less obvious is how to properly address the violence, politics, and complexities that mark the era. This site looks at the century of segregation following the Civil War (1863-1954). Jim Crow, a name taken from a popular 19th-century minstrel song, came to personify government-sanctioned racial oppression and segregation in the U.S. This website describes pivotal developments during that time дус the Emancipation Proclamation, the Compromise of 1877, the Brown v. Board of Education decision, and others.

The Virtual Jamestown Archive is a digital research, teaching and learning project that explores the legacies of the Jamestown settlement and "the Virginia experiment." As a work in progress, Virtual Jamestown aims to shape the national dialogue on the occasion of the four hundred-year anniversary observance in 2007 of the founding of the Jamestown colony.

The following document analysis worksheet was designed and developed by the Education Staff of the National Archives and Records Administration. You may find this worksheet useful as you introduce students to written documents.

The following document analysis worksheet was designed and developed by the Education Staff of the National Archives and Records Administration. You may find this worksheet useful as you introduce students to written documents.