This lesson will examine Abraham Lincoln’s brief but insightful reflection on the importance of the ideal of individual liberty to the constitutional structure and operation of the American union.
Major Events of the Cold War
In this lesson, students will use short video clips to learn about major events occurring during the Cold War, the causes of these events, and their impact on the U.S., Soviet Union, and the world. Students will summarize this information by providing a written response that analyzes the legacy of the Cold War.
Landmark Supreme Court Cases
When the stories of We the People become cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, and when those cases result in the opinions of the Court, history turns. The ways we think about and live under the Constitution are reflected in the Court’s interpretations in both their historical contexts and their legacies. Some cases — and the Court’s opinions in them — so profoundly alter our constitutional understandings that they can only rightly be called Landmark Cases, markers of where we have traveled as a nation. In this way, the Landmark Cases show us what we have tried, where we have been, and where we are — leaving We the People and future sessions of the Supreme Court to determine how we move forward toward a more perfect union.
The Preamble to the Constitution: How Do You Make a More Perfect Union?
Help your students understand, by way of primary source documents from archival sources, why the Founders found it necessary to establish a more perfect Union and what goals guided them in accomplishing such a weighty task.
A More Perfect Union: George Washington and the Making of the Constitution
This animated video highlights the Constitutional Convention and George Washington’s role in the formation of the new government. Events covered in the video include the causes leading to the 1787 Constitutional Convention, the numerous compromises included in the document, and the challenges in ratifying the Constitution. The video has a run time of 23 minutes, and is broken into three chapters for easy navigation.
Constitutional Index – More Perfect Union Clause
The Constitutional Index breaks down the U.S. Constitution by Section, Amendment, and Clause and contains broader topics and themes. These are used to cross-reference Library resources in an effort to annotate constitutional history.
The Constitution: Drafting a More Perfect Union
Students will analyze an unidentified historical document and draw conclusions about what this document was for, who created it, and why. After the document is identified as George Washington’s annotated copy of the Committee of Style’s draft constitution, students will compare its text to that of an earlier draft by the Committee of Detail to understand its evolution.
Constitutional Index – State of the Union Clause
The Constitutional Index breaks down the U.S. Constitution by Section, Amendment, and Clause and contains broader topics and themes. These are used to cross-reference Library resources in an effort to annotate constitutional history.
The Red Scare and McCarthyism
This lesson provides an overview of events such as the Rosenberg trials, blacklisting in Hollywood and the rise and decline of McCarthyism. Students will use information gathered from short C-SPAN video clips to summarize the government’s actions during that time and evaluate the appropriateness of these actions.
America and Red Scare
The Cold War was sparked by the immediate aftermath of World War II. The Allied Forces were divided by ideology and quickly separated into two camps: the Western democracies, led by the United States, and the Communist nations, dominated by the Soviet Union. This alignment served as the basic framework of the Cold War over the next fifty years, from 1947-1991. As America positioned itself in opposition to totalitarian regimes, American citizens were forced to confront realities of what “freedom” meant, or should mean.