Friday, January 11, 2013

Reading Like A Historian: Stanford University

You gotta love Stanford University. Their education group has created a site called "Reading like a Historian." They created lessons for U.S. and World History, each of which revolves around a central question, and uses primary documents to analyze the question. The US site has many more lessons than the world and is organized by period. They include colonial, expansion and slavery, civil war and reconstruction, the Gilded Age, imperialism, progressivism, World War 1, World War 2, and the Cold War.

The documents are usually short and manageable for students and include a graphic organizer or guiding questions. For example, the guiding question for the lesson on sedition and World War I is--were the critics of World War 1 anti-American. Here is a link where you can see the lesson. The best thing about the site is that everything is free. You do have to register with name and email and you need to create a password. I did all that this afternoon and downloaded a nice lesson for my World 9 students on Emperor Augustus. My thanks to Jeff Feinstein for finding and sending me the link. Check it out!

3 comments:

eugenia gatti said...

Such a great website! Thanks a lot!

Anonymous said...

I have used this a lot in my classroom when working with primary source documents. Also check out Beyond the Bubble which is created by the same group. A valuable way of assessing students and aligns wit the new Common Core standards.

sarashepard2808 said...
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