# data[].attributes.body
These are pbs lesson plans for US history and cultural and ethnic awareness for immigration. They are very interesting but some may take a while.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
America’s home for independent documentary film

# data[].attributes.body
This website gives blank deeper level thinking questions. Good for asking students these things.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Los Angeles Community College District does not discriminate in the educational programs or activities it conducts on the basis of any status protected by applicable state or federal law, including, but not limited to race, color, ethnicity, national origin, sex/gender, gender identity/expression, pregnancy, sexual orientation, age, religion, mental or physical disability, medical condition, or veteran status.

# data[].attributes.body
Talks about pop culture in Hollywood vs America which I think could be a cool article for a DBQ.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A sad measure of the 1992 presidential campaign is that the one line, the one contribution to political rhetoric likely to live on was, "It's the economy, stupid" by the Clinton team. While not exactly Reaganesque in its simple sagacity, or Kennedyesque in its music, it was noteworthy at least for its adaptability, as any number of people have substituted any number of things for "economy." Some have been fiscally sounder, as in: "It's the spending, stupid." Or Rushed, as in: "It's socialism, stupid."
I'm partial to, "It's the culture, stupid," as shorthand for: We can double productivity, triple Gross Domestic Product, and quadruple take-home pay, all by Christmas, but unless we do something about the violent and numskull media messages we constantly send, see and hear, all the economic progress in the world won't suffice.
Which brings me quickly to this very important paper by against-the-grain film critic Michael Medved, "Hollywood vs. America: Popular Culture and the War on Traditional Values." Read it and grow in confidence that your instincts and impressions are right:

That we are, in fact, submerged in movies, music and television shows which distort the deepest values of the American people.

That popular entertainment is routinely fouler and filthier than any fair portrayal of our country warrants.

That the perpetual barrage of such ideas and images is damaging to real people, especially children.

And that one need not betray the First Amendment, or be stuck in old mud, to fear the inescapable prices being paid.

Which isn't to say that Mr. Medved is exclusively dour in bringing bad news. "There are people," he writes, "who love to see heads blown up and limbs chopped off. That exists in America. That audience is composed primarily of drooling, sub-literate, hormone-addled, violence-prone, adolescent boys. And you know who you are." This oral essay is based on Mr. Medved's unusually entertaining, impassioned and empirically grounded remarks to an American Experiment Breakfast Forum on May 4 of this year, in which he focused on "three basic lies." What he calls the "big frauds that Hollywood perpetuates in order to justify its own stupidities and excesses and irresponsibilities." First: is, "Hey, lighten up. It's just entertainment; it has no impact on the real world." Second, "Don't blame us; blame society. If what we have up there on the screen is ugly and disgusting and nauseating and horrific, it's because that's the kind of horrible country we live in." And third, "Well, if you don't like this stuff, who's forcing you to watch it? Just turn it off and, meanwhile, please shut up." Mr. Medved is perhaps best known as cohost, since 1985, of "Sneak Previews," on PBS. A former screenwriter, he has written seven non-fiction books, of which this paper's namesake is the most recent. He is a graduate of Yale University and lives in Santa Monica, California with his wife Diane and their two children. It was a pleasure meeting and hosting him this past spring, and I thank him for this big-picture contribution. American Experiment members receive free copies of all Center publications, including this one. Additional copies are $4 for members and $5 for non-members. Bulk discounts are available for schools, civic groups and other organizations. Please note our phone and address on the previous page for membership and other information, including a list of other Center publications and audio tapes. As always, I welcome your comments. Mitchell B. Pearlstein
President
August 1993 Introduction
Sitting down at breakfast this morning, I was asked one of the questions that I'm fairly regularly asked when people recognize me from television, which is, "Have you become persona non grata in Hollywood? Have you been frozen out of the industry in some way?" The answer is, I still manage to do my job, but I have been surprised by the intensity of the reaction that my book has provoked. ¹

After all, I'm not unique in saying that popular culture today is in a miserable state. How many people do you know who think that television is wonderful at the moment? That it enriches our lives? That movies are better than ever?

Do you know how many people in America think that movies today are better than ever? One. His name is Jack Valenti. He gets paid to draw that conclusion. He's head of the Motion Picture Association of America, and as Variety reveals, he gets paid $850,000 a year to think publicly that movies are better than ever.

Given the general acceptance of the notion that things aren't great with our popular culture, what was it about my book that provoked such, shall we say, an enthusiastic response? I'll give you a little bit of an idea of some of the flavor of that response. Michael Winner, who is the creator of such worthwhile contributions to Western civilization as the movies Death Wish, Death Wish 2, Death Wish 3 and, yes, Death Wish 4, said in his review of my book that, "The decade is still young, but I think it's safe to say that Michael Medved's Hollywood vs. America will emerge as the worst book of the decade."

I was also thrilled that Paul Verhoeven - who has given the world such films as Robo Cop, Total Recall, and Basic Instinct, which I had previously reviewed under the title Basically It Stinks - called me a Nazi on television. I took particular umbrage to that, since my mother and her parents fled Nazi Germany in 1935.

And then my favorite of all the responses to my book was the front-page editorial in Variety by its editor, Peter Bart, denouncing me under the headline, "The Hills are Alive with the Sound of Medved." And there was a little caricature of me - not a flattering one, I should tell you. Peter Bart in his review said Hollywood vs. America is "not so much a book as it is a nervous breakdown set in type." At the very end of his review he said, "As much as I detest blacklists, a good case can now be made that Medved should be banned from all future screenings." This is in print. It exists.

What's astonishing about this is that these people are such stalwart defenders of the First Amendment, who believe in absolute freedom of speech - just so long as you don't use that freedom of speech to criticize them.

The question remains: What is it that's so different in my work from general, everyday complaints about Hollywood that arouses people to this degree? Thinking about it, I've realized that the most sensitive thing about this book is the fact that it strips away the three basic lies - the big frauds that Hollywood perpetrates in order to justify its own stupidities and excesses and irresponsibilities. What I want to do with you this morning is actually look at those three lies, and to prepare you for rebutting them whenever these subjects come up.

They are three lies you hear all the time. Lie Number One: "It's just entertainment. It never really hurt anybody." Lie Number Two: "We're just great capitalists. We give the public what it wants. Don't blame us; blame yourselves." And lie Number Three: "If you don't like this material, it's always easy to just turn it off."
Lie Number One
The first point - the common line that, "Hey, lighten up, it's just entertainment; it has no impact on the real world" - is a fundamental contradiction that is at the very core of Hollywood's view of reality. That contradiction emerged recently from a major studio head, who made the rather remarkable claim that the film Lethal Weapon 3 deserved credit and praise because it had saved thousands of lives. Now, I wasn't immediately able to discern the life-giving messages in Lethal Weapon 3. But eventually it was explained that there's a crucial scene in which Danny Glover and Mel Gibson are preparing to zoom off on a high-speed chase, but before they do, they fasten their seat belts.

Now think about the logic here. There's an assumption that when people see two popular stars up there on the screen fastening seatbelts, everybody's going to imitate what they see. But when they see the other 99.9 percent of the movie - which is eye gouging, eviscerations, falling from high buildings, shootings and dismemberment of all kinds - nobody will imitate that.

This is very typical of Hollywood's approach. They want you to believe that they are capable of all kinds of positive influence. But when it comes to any influence that might be questionable - oh, that never happens, of course.

This is an industry that breaks its elbow patting itself on the back whenever it sends out messages about designated drivers, or recycling or condom consciousness. (Condoms, of course, are the talisman of the moment. It's absolutely magical. All you have to do is use the word condom in a film and you're going to get some kind of an award, some kind of praise for the responsibility of your message.) The idea is that people can be influenced by this rather subtle material, but the rest of the movie or TV show is not going to influence them. No, not at all.

Do you know where you see this? The practice of product placement. That's where in a motion picture a large corporation has paid very good money in order to display its corporate logo, whether it be Pepsi or Budweiser or Nike. That logo is sort of flashed on the screen, as in those moments when somebody hoists a beer can and holds it up to the screen. Businesses pay for that. The average film today is taking in just under a million dollars per film in product placement costs.

Now, why do the corporations do it? Are they eleemosynary institutions? Are they trying to offer some charitable support for Hollywood? Nonsense. There are studies - abundant studies - that show that even a few seconds of a corporate logo associated with a glamorous star can have a measurable impact on sales and the way the public responds to that product and to that brand name. Yet, the industry wants you to believe that everybody's focused on that corporate logo, that nobody is looking at what's going on in the rest of the screen. It's insanity.

Imagine that there's a little bottle of Scope on the bed stand in a bedroom scene. And there's a bed with two beautiful, nude, writhing bodies in ecstasy. And the only thing the public is watching is the bottle of Scope? This is nonsense, ladies and gentlemen. This is complete and utter nonsense.

And you see the same sort of illogic regarding television. I'm always struck by the fact that otherwise well-educated people say, "Well you know this idea that televised imagery impacts real life, it's scientifically unproven. There are studies that say different things." This is garbage. The only major studies that deny a link between prolonged exposure to televised violence and more hostile and aggressive attitudes in real life are those studies which were paid for by the networks. And there are many of them, which should be accorded the same kind of moral dignity as all those studies by the tobacco industry which show that smoking is good for you.

In 1982, the Surgeon General of the United States released a report about the role of TV violence in creating a more violent society around us. It was a report accompanied by five full volumes of documentation and hundreds of studies. ABC-TV turned around and issued a statement that said, and I quote, "There is no conclusive proof that televised imagery impacts real-world behavior in any way." To which my response is: Oh yeah? If ABC-TV really believes that, then it should start refunding several billion dollars in advertising revenues, because if televised imagery doesn't impact real world behavior, what is it doing charging for ad time? The idea is that people are going to be sold on everything from canned goods to candidates with 30 seconds of a commercial, but that the surrounding 30 minutes have no impact. Isn't that absurd?

And the advertising model is very important to keep in mind, because it not only demonstrates that there is impact from the mass media on real world behavior, but it shows the way that impact works. For instance, people always say, "Well, if you believe that Hollywood has an impact on America and that televised or motion picture violence helps make people and society more violent in real life - encourages irresponsible behavior - then why is it that film critics, people like yourself who see five and six movies a week, aren't especially well represented among ax murderers?"

Now, I can't speak for all of my colleagues, but I will say that the answer to that is very simple. Let me just try a little show of hands. How many people here have ever seen an ad for the Lexus automobile on television? Virtually all of us, right? How many people here have gone out and bought a Lexus? OK, a few of us. Now, we've just proved that Lexus ads have no impact, right, because lots of people see them and they don't go out and buy the car? That's the same logic that people use to deny television's influence.

Of course it's absurd. Lexus is not a dumb company. It's part of Toyota - they know what they're doing. Their ads don't have to change behavior on the part of everyone who sees them in order to have an impact. They need to only change behavior on the part of a relatively small number of people to have a profound effect on the corporation and its sales.

By the same token, violent material on TV doesn't need to impact everyone who sees it. If it impacts only a small proportion of vulnerable viewers, then that in itself will have a profound effect on society. And the impact on the rest of us is also significant, just as it is with the Lexus ad. Because for all those people who see the Lexus ad, even those who don't run out and buy the car and don't have the money to buy it, the ad redefines our attitude toward this particular product. If it weren't for advertising campaigns - if we saw just a Lexus driving by on the street - most people probably wouldn't associate it as a status symbol of any kind. We'd be unaware of it. But what television advertising does is make us aware of something as a desirable goal. "Maybe I can't buy the car, but maybe someday it would be nice. Maybe this car is hip, it's chic, it's glamorous, it's desirable."

That's exactly the long-term impact of television portrayals of sexual behavior and violence. Those portrayals redefine normal behavior. They redefine what is chic, glamorous and desirable. And even for those people who don't immediately run out and imitate that behavior - who don't go out and buy the car - it changes our evaluation of not only what is accepted in our society but what is expected.

So, the argument that "It's just TV, it's just movies, it has no impact on anybody, it's just entertainment" is nonsense. It shows Hollywood's fundamental contradiction in its approach to the world: "We can influence people when we want to, when we want to take credit for it, for the purpose of selling advertising or anything else. But other than that, we deny all influence.
Lie Number Two
That brings me to the second line of denial - the second big lie - that people in the entertainment industry love to promulgate: "Don't blame us; blame society. If what we have up there on screen is ugly and disgusting and nauseating and horrific, it's because that's the kind of horrible country we live in. That's what people want. After all, we're good capitalists. We just give the public what it wants. We're just like a big capitalist candy machine. You put in the money and then you get the brand that you choose."

One of the fundamentals of the idea that they're just giving the public what it wants is the fact that over 60 percent of all movies released in the United States are rated R - are drenched in violence, graphic sexuality and rather unpleasant language - and that that's the only kind of movie that does business. Hollywood has been saying for years that you have to put this material into even innocuous movies, otherwise you're dead in the water at the box office.

This was conventional wisdom in Hollywood for a long time. It was such strongly held conventional wisdom that it was almost in passing that I decided to do something which I don't think anyone had ever done before, which was check it out, to see if was true. What I was hoping to find was that the bias in favor of R-rated films in terms of box office performance wouldn't be that great - that PG films might do almost as well as R films, showing that Hollywood wasn't simply following the market. I did my initial computer study, based on every movie released in 1991 - and 600 of them were released that year - and their domestic box office gross.

When the statistics came back, my jaw dropped. I couldn't believe what I had found. According to my numbers, in 1991, when 61 percent of all movies were rated R, PG movies, which are aimed at family audiences, did three times better at the box office then R-rated films.

I was so stunned by this that I needed to check myself. I actually submitted this entire project to the research director for the Screen Actors Guild, who is a very skilled Hollywood researcher. I said, "Will you check this, because it doesn't sound right?" He came back and said "It's exactly right. I'm fascinated with this right now. Do you mind if I work with you and we go ahead and check it out in previous years to see what has happened?" So we went back 10 years and analyzed movies released in the United States.

Do you know what's incredible? What's incredible is that there isn't a single year - not one - since 1983 in which PG movies haven't done substantially better on average than R-rated films. In fact, they averaged more than 2-to-1 larger domestic box office grosses. And during that time period the percentage of R-rated films, which were doing worse at the box office during the whole 10-year period, went up from 46 percent of all films released to 61 percent in 1991 and, by some estimates, to 65 percent last year, 1992.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is nuts. It suggests not that Hollywood is evil, but that it's radically dysfunctional. And I must tell you that since my book came out, all of a sudden, there have been a bunch of different studies that have confirmed exactly what I found. And the conventional wisdom seems to have shifted.

Mark Canton, the president of Sony Columbia Studios, gave a speech at ShoWest to all motion picture exhibitors in which he said, "We must now do what any smart business person knows we must do, make more PG movies." Now, this is March 9, 1993 that he made that speech. What took him so long? It's been so obvious for a long time. If anyone doubts that Hollywood is motivated by it's own dark obsessions, rather than some kind of intelligent response to the public, all you need to do is look at these statistics and then you need to break the statistics down.

Why are most movies rated R? Is it because of violence? No, it's because of language. I will acknowledge that there is an audience, and always will be an audience, for hyper-violent films. There are people who love to see heads blown up and limbs chopped off. That exists in America. That audience is composed primarily of drooling, sub-literate, hormone-addled, violence-prone, adolescent boys. And you know who you are.

So there may be an audience for violence. But what's the audience for language? Who says, "Let's go spend $15 at the local Bijou or Multiplex in order to hear our favorite stars talking dirty"? Have you ever heard of anyone who left a theater complaining - feeling cheated - because the language in the movie he just saw was too clean? Who thinks like that, except people in Hollywood?

Recently, one of the more unpleasant films I saw was a film called "Hoffa," which is about everybody's favorite dead labor leader. In this particular film, they used the F-word 268 times. I don't count these words. I'm too busy trying to watch the film. I subscribe to a service that I think is manned by little gnomes who go out with little counters to the theater and count them.

They counted 268 F-words in Hoffa. It's so extraordinary. Do you know how easy that makes it for the screen writer? You just have to hit the same key on the word processor again and again and again. I recently was on a flight, and I was astonished that they were offering an airline version of Hoffa. It must be about 10 minutes long.

The fact is it's not just movies like Hoffa. If you're going to see a movie about Jimmy Hoffa and Bobby Kennedy, you've got to expect to hear certain amount of harsh language, especially between the two of them. But the fact is, it has crept into children's movies. Unbelievably, 46 percent of PG movies - PG movies - now contain the F- or the S-word at least once. Seventy-three percent of PG-13 movies contain those words. Who would miss them if they were taken out?

This is not a response to the market place. There is not a single market study that suggests that the American people respond better to foul language in movies. In fact there was a major opinion survey, with 1,604 respondents, that was about motion pictures. That study found that 82 percent felt that there was too much foul language in movies. Do you know how many of the 1,604 respondents felt there was too little foul language in movies? Not one. They couldn't find one out of 1,604 people.

This obsession with foul language is not a market-driven phenomenon. This is not an industry responding to America.

Look at the portrayal of religious believers. This is a profoundly religious country - something Hollywood doesn't seem to understand. One of the points I love to make is that on Super Bowl Sundays, when we seem to celebrate our big national religion and everybody watches the

Super Bowl, what do more people do on those Sundays together than watch the Super Bowl? Do you know? They go to the church. About 100 million people watch the Super Bowl, and around 110 million go to church. Forty to 45 percent of Americans go to church or synagogue every single week.

It's a reality you don't see on screen and, moreover, when you do see anyone religious, he's invariably portrayed as a crook or a crazy or very often both. Is that a response to market forces? Every single one of these movies about crooked clergy has failed at the box office. You can't find one in the last 20 years that's made a dime, and yet they keep getting made. Is that a question of giving America what it wants?

Finally and most dramatically, look at the portrayal of this country - of our past, of our future, of our institutions. They did three major bio films this year. They were about Hoffa, Malcolm X and Charlie Chaplin. Each of these films was hugely expensive, and each of them lost very big money. Very big money. Malcolm X lost less money than the other two, but still lost. Chaplin was such a big money loser, it put Carolco into Chapter 11. Chaplin was such a flop with the public they had to subpoena people to go to see it.

But what do all these three figures have in common? What they have in common is that they all lived the American nightmare. They all had fundamentally unhappy, embittered experiences with American life and American society. That is not the experience of most people who live here, who still believe in the American Dream, who are profoundly grateful for this country, who are instinctively patriotic. Yet, Hollywood doesn't get it, and doesn't respond.

Right now they are simultaneously developing five different films about the Black Panther Party. When those five films are in production at the same time, they will probably employ more people than were ever members of the Black Panther Party. But I would submit to you that there's no market study that says, "Let's do Black Panther films right now," especially after the performance at the box office of Malcolm X, which was certainly well-made.

The point is, nobody thinks, "We're going to make a movie about Black Panthers and it's going to be a sweet little money machine." That's not the thinking. These people are consumed with the desire to make some serious statement, to be taken seriously as artists. They've bought into the absurd idea that the only kind of artistic statement worth making is one that shakes people up, that assaults convention, that shows the creator is some kind of alienated artist.

They don't want to be known as a member of the establishment, even though they may ride in a chauffeur-driven limousine and get $5 million per picture. They think of themselves as some kind of sensitive spirit, just like they were in the old days in Greenwich Village, when they were struggling actors, wearing black turtlenecks and drinking espresso and talking about existentialism. That's all these people want to keep faith with.

Just a few weeks ago, we were celebrating the anniversary of Lexington and Concord, the beginning of the American Revolution. Hollywood took a swipe at the American Revolution six years ago. It was a movie called Revolution, which cost $37 million for Warner Brothers to make. It starred Al Pacino as a member of the Continental Army. He apparently was the only member of the Continental Army with a Bronx accent.

Aside from its ludicrous aesthetic quality, what was really notable about it was that they made a decision to do a revisionist view of the American Revolution. They took this inspiring struggle for American independence and made the colonists into the bad guys. It's unbelievable. You know what? Not only did this $37 million movie fall on its face here - it earned less than $3 million at the box office - it was even a flop in England.

So I would submit to you, when people say that Hollywood is just following the famous bottom line - "It's the fault of the capitalist system; it's the fault of the profit motive" - they're not telling the truth. That's the second of Hollywoods big lies. These are terrible businessmen, who are not responding intelligently to the public.
Lie Number Three
That brings me to the third and final lie, which is, "Well, if you don't like this stuff, who's forcing you to watch it? Just turn it off and, meanwhile, please shut up." Let me give you a personal account of why that is such an utterly misleading and irresponsible lie.

My wife is a clinical psychologist. One afternoon while I was home, she had patients and I was supposed to watch my older daughter, Sarah, who is now 6 years old. Sarah was home with one of her little friends from first grade, and they were playing. They were basically self-sufficient, so it was not a very big job to watch them. So, I was at the word processor, and all of a sudden I hear from downstairs these rather blood curdling screams. It's my daughter. I think, "Oh my God, this little boy she brought home from school has chopped her head off or done something horrible."

I ran downstairs and my daughter had tears running down her chubby little cheeks. She was very upset. I asked, "Sarah, baby, what's wrong? What's upsetting you so much." She just pointed and said, "It's that, Daddy, it's that." And then I looked over to see what "that" was. And "that" was something that this little boy had taken out of his book bag and brought home with him from school. You know what it was? It was a Terminator doll.

Have any of you seen a Terminator doll? It's a big seller for Mattel Toys. It obviously is in the image of Arnold Schwarzenegger. It has various arms that you can take off. You can actually take out its heart and remove its head. It has bombs and grenades and buzz saws and submachine guns. Most strikingly, it has a little ring behind the neck that you pull so that the thing talks. And it says things like, "I vill blow you avay" and "I vill kill you now," and "Husta la vista, baby." Actually I think it speaks more clearly than the real life Mr. Schwarzenegger.

I think it was the talking that scared my daughter, who is, admittedly, an incurable and terrible wimp, which I'm glad for, actually. She recovered from having seen the Terminator doll. I'm not saying that this was a wound on her soul. By no means. But it did bring home to me one very important point. I would no more take my daughter to see the "Terminator," or have her watch the "Terminator" on TV, or on video than I would drag her over broken glass. It's just not something I want to do. I would have been perfectly happy if my six year old had been able to lead a Terminator-free childhood. But that option is not available today. It's not available because the popular culture is so ubiquitous. It is everywhere. You cannot escape it.

Let me try a little demonstration here. How many people in this room have been to a Madonna concert? Don't be ashamed. OK, I think we had one. How many people here, when you go home this evening, are going to find Madonna CDs or tapes in your personal collection? Two or

three. How many people here know who Madonna is? Absolutely everyone!

Ladies and gentlemen, you never made a conscious choice to place Madonna into your imagination. They tell us we lose 10,000 or so brain cells every day that we're alive after the age of 30. Who would want to use precious brain cells for focusing on Madonna? If I had a choice, I'd just assume that this lady weren't in my imagination, weren't in my consciousness. I never chose to put her there. But there she is. She is inescapable. It doesn't matter whether you choose to buy her product or to watch her on MTV. She's there. I guarantee you there are Amish kids in Pennsylvania, there are Hasidic kids in Brooklyn who know who Madonna is.

That illustrates the fundamental truth: Saying, "If you don't like the popular culture, you can just turn it off" is like saying, "If you don't like the smog, you can always stop breathing." The fact is, as the late, great Joe Louis said, "You can run, but you can't hide." This stuff is everywhere.

Maybe it doesn't impact you, or through some super-human effort you protect your children. But it's the other children in school who come home with the Ninja Turtles material or the Terminator material. It's everybody else's kids and your neighbors, and it's everywhere around you. It's part of the very environment that we all breathe, and this is why this is such a passionate, cutting-edge issue for so many people. The most fundamental thing that we all want is to be able to pass on values to our own children, to be able to transmit our approaches to the world to the next generation.

People today increasingly - and I think appropriately - view Hollywood, view the popular culture, view the entertainment industry as a force that interferes with, undermines, and works against precisely those values that we want most to pass on to our own kids. That's why people are so upset. That's why they should be upset. That's why what we need in this country is what could be described as a cultural environmental movement. It would be a movement in the same sense that we are asking big corporations to take more responsibility for their pollution of our air and water. These gigantic entertainment conglomerates have to be held more accountable for their pollution of the cultural atmosphere that we all breathe.

We have to be able to be more discerning consumers, to recognize that entertainment isn't necessarily harmless, to cut down our own TV consumption. Everybody in this room can watch less TV. That would send a powerful message. But beyond our own consumption decisions and our own willingness to take charge of this issue in our own lives, we need to work together with some of the established organizations that are trying to address this issue.

For example, we need to write letters, which is easy. It's like writing a letter to Santa Claus in care of the North Pole. All you have to do is write "The President, Warner Brothers Pictures, Hollywood California." It gets delivered.

Ultimately - particularly at this time, when the business is in crisis, when their profits are so low, when audiences have been declining, when they recognize they have a problem - there is a possibility of making a difference.

I believe that we're at a very, very interesting moment in this struggle. There are people in the entertainment industry who are hearing the dissatisfaction in a way they have never heard it in the past. It's going to be a long-term effort, and I will conclude by saying that it is an effort that could be described in the same way that Winston Churchill described a rather more serious, more heroic situation many years ago, when he said, "This is not the end, nor is it even the beginning of the end, but it is perhaps the end of the beginning."
Audience Questions
Arlen Whitrock: Do you have some comments on children's cartoons, their influence, and how they've evolved in the last decade or so?

Medved: The National Coalition on TV Violence is an organization I strongly support. It is not a conservative organization. It's very liberal. But it's very responsible on this issue of TV violence.

It's interesting to me, by the way, that so many people want to make this a conservative-liberal issue. It's not. The leading opponent of televised violence in the United States Senate is Paul Simon of Illinois, who by no stretch of the imagination is a conservative. He's a liberal Democrat. Senator Simon has done remarkable work in getting all three networks to at least sign a letter of intent regarding the levels of violence that they will have. We'll see if it has any impact. The National Coalition on TV Violence, which has close ties to Senator Simon, claims that the most violent block of programming in terms of number of violent episodes and incidents per hour is Saturday morning kids' cartoons.

People ask me all the time for an example of some movie I find particularly offensive. I'm always reluctant to do that, because it's not one movie, it's not one TV show, it's not one popular song. It's the sheer accumulation of material. But if I'm pushed I will say this: I am more bothered by the violence in Home Alone 2 or Huck Finn than I'm bothered by the violence in Reservoir Dogs. That's because in Reservoir Dogs, everyone expects what you're going to get. But what was the need in these other family movies to put in such levels of violence and brutality and, really, of horror?

I took my daughter to see "Huck Finn." Do you know that Huck Finn gets shot in this movie? That's not in the novel, I can assure you. It's insanity. It's precisely the inclusion of these totally unwelcome elements everywhere, not just in blood-bath films, but in films that are intended for family audiences, in things like Saturday morning cartoons, which are intended primarily for children. It's the ubiquity of this material that makes it so worrisome to me.

Greg Morris: In the '50s, didn't the federal government have some kind of way to censor what went on, and has that fallen aside? Second, how do G-rated movies play out against R- and PG-rated movies?

Medved: First of all, the G-rated movies are very hard to measure because there are so few of them. Last year, 1.6 percent of all releases were rated G. Those included the top-rated movie in terms of box office dollars of any film released in 1992. "Aladdin," by over $50 million, made more money than any other movie released in 1992. For the last three years, G-rated movies appear to do best of all. They do even better than PG. Yet, there are so few of them. It's extraordinary. It virtually doesn't matter how bad they are, they seem to make money.

There was a terrible movie named Rock-A-Doodle. I saw Rock-A-Doodle with my kids, and my kids were bored. My 4-year-old thought it was an insult to her intelligence. Yet, even though the film wasn't a smash hit, it played out. So, it's hard to lose money with a G.

On your other question: What they used to have in motion pictures was what they called the Hays Office. They had the Motion Picture Production Code, which established that there were certain things that could simply not be shown. It's interesting what couldn't be shown. Some of it looks ludicrous today. For instance, you couldn't have two people embracing together on a bed. You also couldn't have a negative portrayal of the minister or rabbi of any recognized religion, which of course has definitely fallen by the wayside.

The code was suspended in 1967 and replaced by the current rating system. What's interesting is that at that time it was considered a big victory for artistic free expression. Jack Valenti, who initiated the change, said, "Most of our movies will continue to be family movies. They'll continue to be rated G. These adult-rated movies that we're now permitting are always going to be the tiny minority." He predicted they would never be more than 10 percent of the total. It was 65 percent last year. So, basically the code was held in abeyance. By the time it was put in abeyance, it was considered unworkable.

I want you to know that I am opposed to any efforts to reintroduce a film production code. It couldn't work today. I'm opposed to censorship of all kinds. In fact, I am not saying that they should make no R-rated films. I'm glad they make R-rated films. It is a response to a market niche. What I am saying, however, is that they make too many of them. I'm not saying they should make all G-rated movies. That would make life very boring for me as a film critic. But I am saying that 1.6 percent is too few.

They need to readjust the movie mix, but not to vary the admirable sense of freedom of expression that we have right now. However, freedom of expression - having the right to say something - doesn't mean that you don't have a responsibility to strike a more careful balance or take a more sociably responsible approach to the kind of material you're making.

Robert White: I have a question about giving the public what the public wants. It strikes me that a lot of great authors of Western culture, aside from Madonna, have dealt with themes of violence and tragedy, such as Shakespeare and Grimm with his fairy tales and so on. There seems to be a public attraction to that sort of portrayal. What is different between those kinds of works and television and movies now? Is it the vividness of the media?

Medved: Again, I am not at all opposed to violence per se. I think it's appropriate that violence should be treated in motion pictures and on television. It is a part of life. It's been a part of story telling since Sophocles and the Bible and through Shakespeare. You'd have to be an idiot to suggest that violence should never be portrayed.

What concerns me about the levels of violence today is, one, the context. Violence can either be portrayed in a responsible context or it can be included in a gratuitous and exploitive way. It's very much like violence in real life. Violence in real life isn't always immoral. Violence that someone would use to protect one's family against some intruder could be highly moral. Violence used against Adolf Hitler in 1938 would have been highly moral. The quest ion is context, and too often today, particularly on television, the context is gratuitous. There's no need for it. It's not an integral part of the story telling. It's simply thrown in as titillation.

Second, it's exploitive. It's there to make the violence look glamorous, to define violence as the solution to all our problems, and to portray brutality as the essence of manliness. One of the crazy messages we're sending to our teenage boys is that you can't be a real man unless you're some kind of a brute. It surprises me that feminists are not more strident about this particular issue, because much of the violence is directed against women.

The depiction of violence today is very, very different from Shakespeare in another way. You have to keep in mind the fact that at the time of the Globe Theater, it would be a very lucky Elizabethan who would be able to go two or three times a year to see a Shakespearean production. Then look at the way violence was portrayed. What's the most famous murder scene in all of world literature? It's probably the murder of Duncan in "Macbeth," right? What do you see? Nothing. It happens off stage. Macbeth comes in with bloody hands. He does it off stage, and it lives in the imagination.

Today there is a clinical obsession with showing blood and guts and details, with dehumanizing violence - the opposite of what Shakespeare did. Every violent incident in Shakespeare is profoundly human and painful and you feel it.

It's also the ubiquity of all this material. You didn't find the Globe Theater broadcast into every home in England 28 hours a week. That's what the average American watches of TV. The average home has the TV on 47 hours a week! It's precisely the ceaseless drumming in of this material, the ceaseless repetition of these messages that make it such a concern.

If it was only a question of somebody seeing one violent movie, one violent TV show, I would have no worries at all. No worries at all, because I don't think that there's one film that's a threat to Western civilization as we know it. I don't believe that. But I do believe that the sheer weight of this material, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, drummed ceaselessly into our minds and our consciousness and our souls, has a profound impact.

Jeff Hagen: When my son, who is 9 years old, watches some kind of violence, including cartoons on Saturday morning, he will go to his GI Joes and play violently with them for sometimes an hour and a half to two hours at a time. Do you have any comments on that?

Medved: That's exactly true. That's what all of the studies show. What's amazing is that there is such a volume of scientific data on this connection between violence in the media and violence in real life.

I would refer all of you to an absolutely essential article that appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association in June of 1992. The author is Dr. Brandon Centerwall, the former chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Washington Medical School. He's a very reputable, respected psychiatrist. He analyzed over a thousand studies that had been conducted since 1962, and came to the conclusion that the connection between violence in TV and violence in real life is inescapable. It's real. It exists. He estimates, and this has been very controversial, that there are at least 10,000 murders every year in the United States - and this is his phrase - "in which television is a causal connection." Now that's amazing.

The American Medical Association has even declared that we have a public health emergency regarding violence on TV. At the press conference announcing it, one of the spokesmen for the association said it's a public health emergency comparable in severity to smoking. But, of course, this story was not heavily covered in the media, was it? I wonder why?

I think everybody here knows instinctively that TV isn't good for you. It doesn't enrich our lives. Most movies aren't really good for you. They may divert you for a little while, but they don't improve the quality of our lives.

The basic point I want to leave you with is this: Everybody talks about this stuff but feels they can't do anything about it. I'm going to tell you something to do, and please do it. Go home today with the resolution that you and every member of your family are going to cut down your TV viewing by one hour a day. And you know what, if you're typical American, that still leaves three hours a day that you're watching the stuff. One hour a day. Do you know what a profound message that would send to the networks if enough people actually cut down their TV watching an hour a day?

The amazing thing is that there are all these surveys and information showing that the American people are sick of TV. Only 3 percent describe TV as reflecting positive values. I don't know where they found the 3 percent! But the fact is that even while the number of people attending motion pictures has gone down, we still watch just as much TV as ever. We switch more. There's more channel grazing, and we're more dissatisfied. But we still watch it.

Stop watching it. There are more things in life than flickering images on a cathode ray tube. If you cut down one hour a day, it will give you seven extra hours a week to be with people you love, to have intriguing conversations, to read a book, to read a paper by Center of the American Experiment, to do some work for your community, maybe even to enjoy this glorious world that God has given to us.

The average American, by the time we reach our life expectancy of 76 years, will have spent 13 uninterrupted years of life, 24-hours-a-day, watching TV. Do you want that on your tombstone? Do you want to explain that to God? What are people thinking about? Cut it down. If there's one thing you can do that will both improve the quality of your life and improve our society it's to reduce the levels of TV watching, even if it means not watching "Sneak Previews."

¹ Michael Medved, Hollywood vs. America: Popular Culture and the War on Traditional Values (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Hollywood vs. America: Popular Culture and the War on Traditional Values - American Experiment

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A sad measure of the 1992 presidential campaign is that the one line, the one contribution to political rhetoric likely to live on was, "It's the economy, stupid" by the Clinton team. While not exactly Reaganesque in its simple sagacity, or Kennedyesque in its music, it was noteworthy at least for its adaptability, as any number of people have substituted any number of things for "economy."

# data[].attributes.body
Some interactive brain breaks for long periods for students.

# data[].attributes.body
This was talked about in our geography lecture. Lesson plan idea for teaching scarcity.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This lesson illustrates the principal of water abundance versus water scarcity, both physical and economic, by having students move through three stations in which they must fill a water bottle using different rules at each station.

# data[].attributes.body
This is a Pinterest board with US History memes. I think these are hilarious so I'd add these around the room or to powerpoint lecture slides, something along those lines.

# data[].attributes.body
This is school house rocks song "The Shot Heard Around the World". School house rock was my favorite to listen to as a student and I would want to use this to make it the beginning of the American Revolution more interesting.

# data[].attributes.body
This is a quick video that does a great job of explaining the basics of economics. I would play this at the beginning of class to explain basic concepts of Econ because they make it more entertaining than I could.

# data[].attributes.body
This is the national archives and while it would be good for US History I could use it in a government class also. This is a way for students to read good primary sources that would help them get a bigger picture of what was happening at the time we were talking about in class.

# data[].attributes.body
It is important make sure I teach my students stuff that could also be helpful to them later in life so familiarizing them with the IRS website would not only be beneficial to a government class but also to their real life.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Internal Revenue Service | An official website of the United States government

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Internal Revenue Service is the nation's tax collection agency and administers the Internal Revenue Code enacted by Congress.

# data[].attributes.body
This is the CIA's World Factbook, when needing to find information about other countries this website would be where I would send kids. I could also use it as a good way to find accurate information to tell them during class.

# data[].attributes.body
This website will give you the latest news from the White House. Which would be helpful when studying recent political events in government.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
President Biden and Vice President Harris promised to move quickly to deliver results for working families. That's what they've done.

# data[].attributes.body
This is an interactive website with Ben Franklin as the tour guide. It makes learning about government a little bit more interesting and hopefully engages students more.

# data[].attributes.body
This is the website for Congress and it has everything that goes into a piece legislation. There are bills, hearing videos, debates, etc.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Copy and paste the Ray ID when you contact the site owner.

# data[].attributes.body
This website would be helpful because it gives students all the resources they need. If I were to give students a research project in a government classroom this is one of the websites they would definitely need to look at.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Official Guide to Government Information and Services | USAGov

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
USA.gov can help you start your search for government information by topic and agency.

# data[].attributes.body
Dr. B gave us this website when we were talking about civics and how to make it interactive with our students. I could use this in a government classroom when we talk about what it means to be a good student.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I came across your site while researching to update and improve my U.S. History classes. I was amazed at the quality of the lessons present here and will use them frequently in my classes.

# data[].attributes.body
This website would be good for teaching in a governmentclassroom because it has awesome resources for teaching and for students. There are programs that teachers could implement in their classroom and there are resources for students to just get on the website and look through.

# data[].attributes.body
This website has any and every supreme court case that a governmentstudent would need to know. I would set my kids loose on this website and do a project over a supreme court case they picked off of here.

# data[].attributes.body
This website is mainly a teacher resources because it shows you how to set up the classroom letting the students’ role play this trial scenario. This website is for a US or government classroom also because it shows how the American judicial system works.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The movie, Titanic, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, has created great interest in the story of the Titanic. This site gives teachers a way to use the interest generated by the movie to illustrate how the American judicial system works.

# data[].attributes.body
This website is strictly a teacher resource. It’s run by the Kansas Council for Social Studies and it will help me stay up to date on new things happening in education that could help me give back to my students.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Doing Social Studies is maintained by the Kansas Council for the Social Studies and is designed to provide resources and materials to improve the teaching and learning of social studies throughout the state of Kansas.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Doing Social Studies is maintained by the Kansas Council for the Social Studies and is designed to provide resources and materials to improve the teaching and learning of social studies throughout the state of Kansas.

# data[].attributes.body
This website is a teacher resource for US History. Though I also found they you can search by time period, topic, or object type and they have different collections of resources for students that could also be helpful.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

# data[].attributes.body
This website is specifically for us as colloquium students and I love Jean Garvey for making it for us. It has awesome resources related to US and World History and what I’ve come to find is most of the resources I find for US and World can really be used interchangeably.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Garvey, Jean - Social Studies Colloquium

# data[].attributes.body
This website is a resource for teaching economics! It provides lesson plans, worksheets, extra things needed to be used in an Econ classroom.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
FTE provides a variety of resources for educators, including curriculum outlines and accompanying lesson plans, Hot Topic inquiries into current issues, and an Economic Barometer for easy access to the U.S. federal government's latest quarterly economic data. All FTE curriculum resources may be viewed online or downloaded. Lessons include background information, source citations (linked when possible), readings, and handouts. Activities include teacher guides, materials masters, and video demonstrations. Copyright permission is given for educational use of all FTE resources. Download files are editable and the FTE encourages teachers to modify and adapt the materials as appropriate to their specific goals and classrooms.

All FTE lessons are correlated to the National Voluntary Content Standards in economics, the Common Core, and when possible, to the individual state standards. Our searchable interface facilitates alignment of lesson content and activities for standards- and mastery-based instruction.

The Professional Teacher Association (PTA) is open to all alumni of FTE teacher programs, both online and face-to-face. There is no charge for registration or membership. Benefits include a newsletter, advance notice of upcoming courses and programs, and eligibility to apply for annual PTA conferences.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Teacher Resources - Foundation For Teaching Economics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
FTE provides a variety of resources for educators, including curriculum outlines and accompanying lesson plans, Hot Topic inquiries into current issues, and an Economic Barometer for easy access to the U.S. federal government's latest quarterly economic data. All FTE curriculum resources may be viewed online or downloaded.

# data[].attributes.body
Teacher Vision is a website that allows teachers to go and brainstorm ideas for lesson plans. There are remade ones but it really gives teachers the resources to make their own and be creative with their lessons.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Thanks for creating your account

You now have access to 999 free download credits. You do not need to select a plan or take a free trial in order to use your credits.

Simply search for and open the item that you want. A counter will appear when you view an individual item. Note: the counter will only appear on premium resources, not resources that were already free.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
You now have access to 999 free download credits. You do not need to select a plan or take a free trial in order to use your credits. Simply search for and open the item that you want. A counter will appear when you view an individual item.

# data[].attributes.body
This is the national council for the social studies website. This is made to help teachers with resources/articles for any social studies classroom.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The mission of National Council for the Social Studies is to advocate and build capacity for high-quality social studies by providing leadership, services, and support to educators.

# data[].attributes.body
This is a website with links to all other websites you would ever need as a teacher ever. This is a one-stop shop to look for different ideas and ways to teach students.

# data[].attributes.body
This website is worksheets galore. If I ever needed any worksheets or rubrics, anything along those lines I would find it on this website.

# data[].attributes.body
This website gives instructional materials needed for any social studies classroom. This helps me to be able to, no matter what I teach, always have materials for students to print off and use.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Instructional Materials in Social Studies

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The primary focus of the Community Learning Network (CLN) is to help K-12 teachers integrate Information Technology into their classrooms. This CLN subject page provides access to curricular and instructional materials in the broad subject area of Business Education as well as in many of its specific themes/topics.

# data[].attributes.body
This is a website with teaching resources for having hands on learning in anthropology. I would use this to have students explore career paths within anthropology so they realize it isn't just about bones.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Discover Anthropology website is operated by the Royal Anthropological Institute's Education Outreach Programme. The website aims to encourage a wider appreciation and understanding of anthropology by functioning as a hub for communication, gathering information, and accessing events, activities and resources for people interested in learning more about the subject.

# data[].attributes.body
This website is almost like an anthropology database. I would have students use these for resources during research days.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
education initiatives and resources information

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Anthropology Resources on the Internet - Learn and Teach

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This resource area is meant to be used as a tool for finding information on anthropology that is available on the web.

# data[].attributes.body
This website has recent news in anthropology. I think it could be fun to use this as a resource to start off the day.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The year 2018 promises to bring turbulent times to higher education. Just over a year after the inauguration of President Donald Trump, we find More...

As an instructor, you may have a strict policy on the use of laptops, tablets, and mobile phones in class. Perhaps you ask students to keep their More...

Academics have recently called for renewed activism in the face of anti-intellectualism, classism, racism, anti-Semitism, ableism, and misogyny of the More...

The August 2016 issue of Cultural Anthropology featured an Openings and Retrospectives collection on "Theorizing Refusal," edited by More...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The year 2018 promises to bring turbulent times to higher education. Just over a year after the inauguration of President Donald Trump, we find More... As an instructor, you may have a strict policy on the use of laptops, tablets, and mobile phones in class. Perhaps you ask students to keep their More...

# data[].attributes.body
This website has quite a few scientific journals on here. In the classroom I could use these as documents for students to analyze.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Our friends at Cultural Anthropology also host an amazing set of Teaching Tools,
One year on from the inauguration of Donald Trump, the following resource provides an thoughtful and well-informed starting point for exploring questions of tolerance not only in the teaching of anthropology but in the project of teaching and learning more generally. Click here to explore how anthropologists of education are addressing questions about teaching and tolerance.

PhD Ana Gretel Echazú Böschemeier, PPGSCol/UFRN (Brazil)[i]

PhD Izis Morais Lopes dos Reis, MPDFT/DF (Brazil)[ii]

PhD Natalia Cabanillas, PPGS, FAFICH/UFMG (Brazil)[iii]

PhD Olga Rodríguez-Sierra, ICe/UFRN (Brazil)[iv]

MgSc Maria José Villares Barral Villas Boas, UnB (Brazil)[v]

PhD Lucrecia Greco, UBA/ICS (Argentina)[vi]

What is a classic? Have we ever questioned the grounds to consider a text a 'classic'? As young anthropologists in Brazil, we present this syllabus departing from this very simple question. We have inherited astonishing obedience to the "founding fathers" of the discipline, by reading their monographs, discussing their theories, and memorizing their disputes and polemics (Eriksen & Nielsen, 2001). Often, women appear as subjects of the research only in the background or mentioned in the acknowledgments as wonderful colleagues and partners of their male counterparts. However, female anthropologists have existed, they have written a variety of texts and ethnographies. Where are these female authors represented in the canon? Is it possible that none of their contributions deserve a place in the list of the so-called 'classics'? Hence, we insist in the question, what is, precisely, a classic?

The literature professor Ankhi Mukherjee wrote about this question and started from a very problematic statement: "the classic is the one who survives critical questioning" (Mukherjee, 2010: 1028). She proposes that the "classics" are a sociological category defined as the "aristocracy of texts" and that the power of canonicity in the formation of a corpus is "to congeal the literary art of memory" (idem, 2010: 1029). We believe there has been a theoretical and experiential alienation from several generations of anthropologists who have been educated by reading, memorizing, discussing and quoting theoretical and ethnographic texts in which the subject that writes is primarily a man.

In Brazilian academy the situation acquires particular contours. Except for the outstanding contributions of the European anthropologist Mary Douglas (1966), the North American anthropologists Margaret Mead (1928) and Ruth Benedict (1934), the Brazilian anthropologists Mariza Peirano (1981) and Mariza Corrêa (1990); the anthropological corpus of classic texts in Brazilian universities has been dominantly masculine. The remarkable research from Miriam Grossi and Carmen Rial (2002) points towards the important contributions of three French women ethnologists and Marcel Mauss' students: Denise Paulme, Germaine Dieterlain, and Germaine de Tillion. The ethnologist Marcel Mauss is one of the so-called "founding fathers" of anthropology; however, his female students appear more like the living memory of an extraordinary man than as singular contributors to anthropology themselves. The downplay of women contributions has been a frequent situation in our discipline. In this line, Mariza Corrêa states the difficulty of recovering the imprint of women as contributors to anthropology, who appear as "minor characters, people passing through the halls" (2003, p. 17).

Driven by a vigorous interest in diversifying the canon, we propose a course syllabus that gives substance, vitality, and a new light on concerns of past and present female authors. We organized the proposal by geographical locations, intending to decenter knowledge production from the Eurocentric pattern. Our proposal is more provocative than exhaustive: the aim is to socialize our discomfort. We are convinced that bringing female authors into basic anthropological discussions will disrupt opressing disciplinary pedagogies and help grow our discipline towards a more diverse discussion.

Our course addresses the following questions: Who are those women anthropologists? What did they write about? What were their concerns and interests? Which concepts and methodologies they brought to our field? How can we build a timeline made from fragments of a story that has yet to be unified? Further, our general framework includes other systems of power intersecting with the variable gender, such as race and class (Crenshaw, 1995). To this end, our course is not only grounded in feminist theory but also in a postcolonial approach. To say it explicitly, the authors regarded as classics of the discipline were not only men; they were white men writing from the position of privilege where social relations of modernity, capitalism, and patriarchy favored them. We put particular emphasis in searching for those perspectives that have been silenced or given less importance due to their symbolic place of writing.

From a methodological standpoint, the genderization - as well as the racialization - of women during fieldwork is precious to the very constitution of politics of a situated knowledge (Haraway, 2009). The interlocutors in the field, the research focus, and the links between problematic nodes (Oldfield & Salo, 2009) allow the emergence of a differentiated perspective. Our purpose is to start a discussion that brings the theoretical and methodological diversity of women's voices; for instance, the indigenous, the Afro-descendants, and the mestizas. Also, the voices from collectivities that struggle for their right to representation and proportionality in the scientific field as well as in other domains of society (e.g. the LGBTT community). Facing this era of "post-humanism" haranguing masses all over the world, the deconstruction of the anthropological canon emerges as a platform for diversity and defense of human rights. The history and contributions of female authors deserve to be acknowledged as a precious legacy to be remembered and expanded by new generations of world anthropologists.

About us

This initiative stems from postgraduate students and alumni of the Programa de Pós-Graduação em Antropologia Social at the University of Brasília (PPGAS/UnB), and has been complemented by researchers linked to South African, Mexican and Argentinian universities that spent different academic periods at Brazilian universities. We are authors of monographs and articles that have learned to face the unconscious gender biases that permeate through the practice of science. Silence is the most common survival strategy, silence about gender inequality and violence in our classrooms, syllabus, committees, publications, and congresses. To identify those pitfalls, we have decided to socialize the deconstruction process of the 'classics' as a sociological category through discussions and insights happening inside and outside the classrooms. Our hope is to cherish the style, concerns, and positions of all those women who write anthropology.
Find the syllabus below: [embeddoc url="https://www.teachinganthropology.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Feminising-the-Canon-Syllabus.docx" download="all" viewer="microsoft"] References
Benedict, Ruth (1934), Patterns of Culture, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Corrêa, Mariza (2003), Antropólogas e antropologia [Female anthropologists and anthropology], Belo Horizonte: Editora da UFMG.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé (1995), Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement, New York: The New Press.

Douglas, Mary (1966), Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, London & New York: Routledge.

Eriksen, Thomas & Finn Nielsen (2001), A history of anthropology, Chicago: Pluto Press.

Haraway, Donna (2009), 'Situated Knowledges. The science question and the privilege of partial perspective', Cadernos Pagu, (5): 7-41. Available at: http://www.clam.org.br/bibliotecadigital/uploads/publicacoes/1065_926_hARAWAY.pdf

Mead, Margaret (1928), Coming of age in Samoa: a psychological study of primitive youth for western civilisation, New York: William Morrow and Company.

Mukherjee, Ankhi (2013), What Is a Classic? Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon, Standford: Stanford University Press.

Oldfield, Sophie; Salo, Elaine (2009), 'Nurturing researchers, building local knowledge, the body politics project', Feminist Africa, (13) 87-94.

Rial, Carmen; Grossi, Miriam (2002), Mauss Segundo Suas Alunas [Mauss from the view of his female students]. [Documentary] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_bsGMv1Ns8

[ii] izis.mlopes@gmail.com

[iii] nataliacabanillas@gmail.com

[iv] rodriguezsierra.olga@gmail.com

[vi] lucreciagreco@gmail.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Feel free to browse the extensive resources available on the Discover Anthropology page, here Our friends at Cultural Anthropology also host an amazing set of Teaching Tools, here Teaching Tolerance One year on from the inauguration of Donald Trump, the following resource provides an thoug

# data[].attributes.body
This is a website solely for linguistic anthropology. I could use this in any unit and allow students to realize it's more than bones also.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Welcome to Linguistic Anthropology Teaching Resources, a site for educators and students to share information that may be useful for learning or teaching about language and culture, particularly linguistic anthropology. The site is currently under construction, but you can find information on reading selections, videos, syllabi, and other material. You can browse the main menu at the top of the page, or search for key words using the search feature. If you would like to add information or make a suggestion, contact SLA Online or email soclinganth@gmail.com.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Welcome to Linguistic Anthropology Teaching Resources, a site for educators and students to share information that may be useful for learning or teaching about language and culture, particularly linguistic anthropology. The site is currently under construction, but you can find information on reading selections, videos, syllabi, and other material.

# data[].attributes.body
This is a blog post that has materials for the classroom linked in it. This would be easy for me to let the students do research using this website, they could have a project or something and they would use this website as a one-stop shop for resources.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
At the most recent annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) in Denver, I presented on and attended several panels focused on teaching-related issues, and at multiple events, colleagues mentioned that it's difficult to find any "go-to" resources for teaching in anthropology. For this post, I've gathered some of my favorite materials. I focus mostly on web resources-this is not an exhaustive review, but these are the blogs I follow, sites I visit regularly, and venues for sharing resources with other anthropologists that I've found to be especially useful. I include some general resources on teaching and learning in higher education, some discipline-specific resources for teaching (especially cultural) anthropology, and a couple of my favorite resources for everyday lecture and discussion materials.

General Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) is a cross-disciplinary effort to research, reflect on, and promote teaching strategies and techniques that effectively support student learning. While there is often an overlap with work on K-12 pedagogy, a significant focus is on higher education and adult learning. Helpful overviews of the field are available from Michigan State University or Illinois State University's SoTL site. The blog Teaching and Learning in Higher Ed also offers good introductory reading lists. If you're not up for additional reading at the moment, check out Bonni Stachowiak's podcast Teaching in Higher Ed, where you can hear interviews with central SoTL figures (for example, Ken Bain, author of What the Best College Professors Do) as well as discussions of significant issues like course development, universal design, grading, course evaluations, and insights from cognitive science on how we learn.

Several online journals and websites share teaching strategies and reflections from college instructors in many disciplines. These include Faculty Focus (check out Maryellen Weimer's list of articles for becoming a better teacher); Hybrid Pedagogy (Kris Shaffer's open letter to students is one notable post); Pedagogy Unbound (not sure what to do on the first day of class?); and the Chronicle of Higher Education (see James Lang's recommendations for the top 10 books on teaching).

Anthropology Resources

Anthropology-specific teaching resources include a number of significant books and journals. Strategies in Teaching Anthropology was published in six volumes between 2000 and 2010 and is now available online through Pearson. Most of the nearly 200 strategies focus on in-class activities for introductory courses across the four main subfields. The peer-reviewed Teaching Anthropology journal is published twice a year by the Royal Anthropological Institute and includes reflections on and evaluations of anthropological pedagogies and the ways in which teaching can contribute to disciplinary knowledge. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, published by the Council on Anthropology and Education, is less focused on the teaching of anthropology, but is concerned with research that promotes social justice in all areas of education.

Many anthropology professional organizations also focus on teaching issues. In addition to the Society for Cultural Anthropology's Teaching Tools, both the General Anthropology Division (GAD) and the Society for Anthropology in Community Colleges (SACC) host teaching-related websites and blogs. GAD's Teaching Anthropology Interest Group (TAIG) launched the Teaching Anthropology Blog two years ago and continues to seek posts from guest bloggers. Be on the lookout, also, for TAIG-sponsored teaching-related panels and workshops at the 2016 AAA meeting. SACC is engaged in several activities of interest to anthropology instructors at all levels of higher ed. They are currently in the process of relaunching their journal, Teaching Anthropology, as an online publication and are finalizing the publication of an open access Cultural Anthropology textbook that will be free for students. Chapters include "What is Anthropology" (Laura Nader), "Culture and Sustainability" (Christian Palmer), "Performance" (Lauren Miller Griffith and Jonathan Marion), and "Public Anthropology" (Robert Borofsky), among other classic themes. Look for this book to be available online in early 2017. Outside of the AAA, the European Association of Social Anthropology's Teaching Anthropology Network organizes events and publicizes resources that may be of particular interest to teachers of anthropology in Europe.

Additional notable teaching-focused sites include the following: Jason Antrosio's Living Anthropologically, which began as a supplement to introductory anthropology courses, addresses a variety of issues of anthropological and public concern, and many of his posts are designed to be integrated with popular textbooks. The Anthropology Teaching Forum (ATF) is organized by faculty and graduate students in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas at San Antonio; the forum hosts monthly meetings and workshops on anthropology pedagogy. ATF meeting recaps are posted on their site and included in the University of Toronto Press's Teaching Culture blog, which is a significant contributor to pedagogical conversations in its own right. General and sub-field specific anthropology blogs like Savage Minds or Somatosphere (I'm a medical anthropologist, so this is one I read regularly) often share syllabuses, pedagogical materials, and teaching-related reflections, and although the Wenner-Gren Foundation's Sapiens just launched, I've already bookmarked several articles for possible use in future classes.

But What Will I Do in Class Tomorrow?

On a day-to-day basis, one of the greatest challenges of either teaching or research is managing the materials, notes, and thoughts that we want to keep for further consideration. If you haven't already, it's a good idea to start a repository of articles, books, news stories, videos, sample syllabuses, or teaching ideas that relate to courses you are either currently teaching or may teach in the future. (There are many digital data management tools available, but I currently use Evernote for this purpose.) Whenever I sit down to plan or update individual lectures, discussions, or class activities, this collection is one of the first resources I turn to.

Finally, Sociological Images, started by Lisa Wade, is one of the most frequent sources of the images or videos I've saved in my teaching files. The site has a sociological (and often US-focused) bent, but features original blog posts, cross-posted content, commentaries, and teaching essays that can be helpful in classes across the social sciences. (They also have great Pinterest collections. Just this week I was looking for examples of pointlessly gendered products for a lecture.)

Are there other favorite resources that you've found to be useful? Please share in the comments!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Teaching Resources Round-Up - Cultural Anthropology

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
At the most recent annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) in Denver, I presented on and attended several panels focused on teaching-related issues, and at multiple events, colleagues mentioned that it's difficult to find any "go-to" resources for teaching in anthropology. For this post, I've gathered some of my favorite materials.

# data[].attributes.body
This website is helpful for teaching students about archaeology. This is a nation education program that will help students understand citizenship of anthology and archaeology

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Project Archaeology | Discover the past ~ Shape the future

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Project Archaeology uses archaeological inquiry to foster understanding of past and present cultures; social studies and science education; and citizenship education to help preserve our archaeological legacy.

# data[].attributes.body
This website is chalk full of teaching resources to teach anthropology! I would use this for my own personal use when trying to add anthropology to my classroom.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Get forensic anthropology teaching resources for the webcast with Kari Bruwelheide. Use the resources to teach how anthropologists study human remains.

# data[].attributes.body
This is a blog post about teaching anthropology through games. I would use the games listed in class.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In part one of this two-part series, Krista Harper (UMass Amherst) provides insight into her successful Fall 2014 course, "Anthropology of/through Games." There is so much here that is useful for instructors (as well as gamers). Enjoy!
I teach in rural New England, where we have long winters. When the snow piles up, we stay inside and make our own fun. So perhaps it's no accident that the top three American board game companies started here, or that there is a flourishing community of independent game designers hidden in the hill towns of western Massachusetts. Growing up in California, I always enjoyed playing games, but when I moved east, games became a part of my winter survival strategy.

Society-and social science-is starting to take games seriously. Game designer Eric Zimmerman recently proclaimed the twenty-first century to be the "Ludic Century." Jane McGonigal argues that "reality is broken" and games may be the solution for social problems. New journals such as Game Studies and Games and Culture have gained footing, and MIT, NYU, and many other universities now offer degree programs in Game Studies and Design. In education, the shift to active classroom pedagogies is renewing interest in games for learning. Can students learn complex anthropological theories through playing, studying, discussing, and designing games?

I first developed my idea for a course on "Anthropology of/through Games" when I joined a workshop on "Designing Low-Tech Games for the Classroom" offered by Sam Anderson of the University of Massachusetts Amherst Information Technologies. I was intrigued, but I also worried that teaching through games could lead students into the kinds of reductionistic thinking that anthropologists deplore. Sam presented theories of learning design and walked us through the process of taking a specific teaching goal and working it into a game activity for students to play in the classroom. He invited UMass librarian and historian Kate Freedman to present her experiences teaching the Reacting to the Past curriculum in which students play a role-playing game that requires them to use primary documents to inform their game-play. We also heard from game designer Meguey Baker, who shared her work as part of a participatory design team that developed a suite of social justice youth development games in collaboration with the Yegna initiative for girls in Ethiopia. After hearing their stories, I was inspired to bring games into my anthropology teaching, too.

I developed a 1-credit experimental course on "Anthropology of/through Games" which was offered in Fall 2014 through Commonwealth Honors College. In my course, we used tabletop, card, and computer games to explore themes in social, behavioral, and cultural theory such as play, gender, language, symbols, economic exchange, and power. As homework, students read texts, played games, and posted questions and comments to our #anthgamef14 Twitter stream. We learned about the basic elements of game design by inviting local game designers as guest speakers. As a culminating project, the ten students were divided into small teams to develop a game based on a social theory to be playtested at our own "AnthroCon" game night at the Du Bois Library.

The course material was presented in three major units: 1) "Theorizing Games," 2) "Ethnography of Games," and 3) "Cultural Anthropology through Game Design." I attempted to integrate simple, low-tech games (requiring no more than ink and paper) into each weekly class session, taking up Anastasia Salter's challenge to design a game a week. In the first part of the class, we read cultural theories of games. Drawing from the work of anthropologist Roger Callois, we attempted to develop a working definition of games that could be applied across different cultural settings. We read Audrey Anable's feminist analysis of gender and "affective labor" in casual games like Diner Dash, at the same moment when the #Gamergate polemic was raging and media critic Anita Sarkeesian was subjected to violent threats for speaking and writing about the endemic harassment of women in video games. I presented further analytic lenses for game design, referring back to Salen and Zimmerman's book, The Game Design Reader (2006, MIT). These discussions helped us understand how games work at the micro-level, in terms of narrative and mechanics (what game scholar Ian Bogost calls the "procedural rhetoric of games"), as well as the broader social significance of playing games. Students capped off the unit by writing a critical review of a game of their choice.

In the second part of the class, students applied cultural anthropology's core method, ethnography, to study people playing games. We discussed biocultural approaches to game behavior through Jeff Snodgrass' research on World of Warcraft players, as well as Adrienne Shaw's work on gender, race, and sexual identities among gamers. Tom Boellstorff's essay, "A Ludicrous Discipline?" provided a framework for students to reflect on the relationships between games and "real life." In their mini-ethnographies, students tackled status symbols among Magic the Gathering card-game players, Pokemon characters as objects of memory and emotional attachment, and social dynamics between players in a massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG).

The last part of the class was an experimental mash-up of anthropological theories and hands-on game design. We launched this unit by playing Jesse Harasta's fabulous economic anthropology game, Yams!, a card game based on Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific and Coral Gardens and their Magic.

Small teams of students then selected an anthropological article from a list I compiled of "game-ready" texts and developed game concepts linked to the theoretical and ethnographic content. Sam Anderson visited my class for an afternoon of low-tech "gamestorming" when students sketched their basic game ideas using markers, stickers, post-its, and pennies as game tokens. Sam helped students match concepts to potential game mechanics or goals. I invited art professor Copper Giloth to present her tablet game Labyrinth of Fables, in which players navigate a reconstruction of a garden at Versailles that was destroyed over 200 years ago. Giloth used historical documents and archaeological evidence to recreate a maze with riddles based on Aesops' fables-an example of how digital humanities are intertwining art, literature, computer science, and history in exciting new ways.

I also brought in local designer Joshua A.C. Newman to talk about the specific challenges of representing cultural diversity in his anthropological sci-fi role-playing game Human Contact. Newman started developing the game as a critique of Star Trek's militarized colonial and cultural engagements. In Human Contact, players construct imaginary space cultures, fraught with their own issues and fracture lines, and then have them meet, confront shocks, and try to understand each other. Newman explained how he avoids having predetermined "bad guys" or inherently heroic protagonists who are destined for greatness: "Nobody is good or bad because of inherent attributes...make an interesting problem, and whether you're looking at abstract or imaginary cultures or real ones from history, make sure they are treated as people." The student teams workshopped drafts of their game designs with Newman.

Instead of a final exam, we held "AnthroGame Con" in the university library during finals week. Library patrons were invited to take a study break by playtesting the teams' games. One team developed a game about consumption and climate change, inspired by anthropologist Susan Crate's work. Another team ambitiously tackled one of Thomas Turino's articles on Peircean semiotics in ethnomusicology-developing a creative Pictionary-like game where players compete to compose short songs on a computer to illustrate a theme ("climbing up a steep hill" or "doing a physics problem set").

In Tyler Caldwell's and Caleb Miller's card game Garage Sailing, another team took on Mauss' theories of gifts and exchange via Gretchen Hermann's ethnography of garage sales. Each player has a secret identity ("parent," "nerd," "antique collector," "fashionista") that shapes the value they attribute to other people's junk as they bargain hunt, haggle, and dump. At AnthroGame Con, players flocked to the game's kitschy aesthetic and frenzy-inducing "Shiny Objects" cards.

Jasmine Skye Gulick's and Cassie Schau's game Sign (based on C.S. Pierce's article "What is a Sign?") was another runaway hit at AnthroGame Con. Using three types of cards-likeness, index, and signifier-players cooperatively create a mini system of symbols. To end the game, the group creates a new sentence or story using the symbols. One playtester exclaimed, "It's like Mad Libs on steroids!" (Who knew C.S. Peirce could be so fun?)

Teaching cultural anthropology of and through games was a transformative experience for me as a social scientist and educator. Before teaching the class, I worried that our focus on games might descend into "edutainment." Instead, analyzing, playing, and designing games opened up creative ways to do what anthropologists do: to unpack theories, to try on other people's perspectives, and to understand both stated norms and improvised, embodied practice. In Part 2 of this blog post, I reflect on the pedagogy, current constraints, and possibilities for game-based teaching in the university classroom.
About the Author
When not playing tabletop games, Krista Harper is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Center for Public Policy and Administration at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Harper has conducted fieldwork in Hungary, Portugal, and the United States, and she writes about urban environmental mobilizations, shared public spaces, and participatory visual and digital research methods. Her blog is blogs.umass.edu/harper, and she is on Twitter @kristamharper.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Teaching Anthropology of/through Games, Part 1

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In part one of this two-part series, Krista Harper (UMass Amherst) provides insight into her successful Fall 2014 course, "Anthropology of/through Games." There is so much here that is useful for instructors (as well as gamers). Enjoy! I teach in rural New England, where we have long winters.

# data[].attributes.body
This is a website that is just for cards against anthropology and other games. I would also use this for games in class!

# data[].attributes.body
This is any and all teacher resources for teaching Econ. I would use this to help me write lesson plans.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
FTE provides a variety of resources for educators, including curriculum outlines and accompanying lesson plans, Hot Topic inquiries into current issues, and an Economic Barometer for easy access to the U.S. federal government's latest quarterly economic data. All FTE curriculum resources may be viewed online or downloaded. Lessons include background information, source citations (linked when possible), readings, and handouts. Activities include teacher guides, materials masters, and video demonstrations. Copyright permission is given for educational use of all FTE resources. Download files are editable and the FTE encourages teachers to modify and adapt the materials as appropriate to their specific goals and classrooms.

All FTE lessons are correlated to the National Voluntary Content Standards in economics, the Common Core, and when possible, to the individual state standards. Our searchable interface facilitates alignment of lesson content and activities for standards- and mastery-based instruction.

The Professional Teacher Association (PTA) is open to all alumni of FTE teacher programs, both online and face-to-face. There is no charge for registration or membership. Benefits include a newsletter, advance notice of upcoming courses and programs, and eligibility to apply for annual PTA conferences.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Teacher Resources - Foundation For Teaching Economics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
FTE provides a variety of resources for educators, including curriculum outlines and accompanying lesson plans, Hot Topic inquiries into current issues, and an Economic Barometer for easy access to the U.S. federal government's latest quarterly economic data. All FTE curriculum resources may be viewed online or downloaded.

# data[].attributes.body
This website has clips that can describe Econ through the office. I'd play these clips in class to entertain and also teach Econ.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Video clips from the television show the office that illustrate economics concepts.

# data[].attributes.body
This is a website that comes up with experiments in Econ. I would use this to help me facilitate those experiments.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
EconPort is an economics digital library specializing in content that emphasizes the use of experiments in teaching and research. Content includes teaching modules, a handbook of economic and game theoretic principles and concepts, a glossary of economics terms, and an extensive collection of educational material, as well as software for running experiments.

# data[].attributes.body
There are interactive games on this website for Econ. I think you have to pay for them for a small fee but they could be really helpful.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
MobLab-Games for Economics and Business Management

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Transform the routine social science lecture into an interactive lab with our economics, business & decision-making games used in universities & high schools around the world.

# data[].attributes.body
This is full of economics memes. I think it would be fun to add them to my powerpoint if I'm lecturing or add them around the room.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
How to Use Memes to Teach and Learn Economics

# data[].attributes.body
This website has clips from a lot of different TV shows to help teach Econ. I could show these to help them understand Econ better.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We are a group of economics instructors who actively try to demonstrate the relevance of economic concepts to our students' daily lives. One of the ways that we do this is to use contemporary media in our classrooms. Pursuant to that goal, we have compiled a list of clips from TV shows that we use to emphasize applications of the economic concepts that we teach.

# data[].attributes.body
This is a tool to help students draw graphs. I would give it to them so they can draw graphs digitally.

# data[].attributes.body
This is the latest news in economics. This would be good to have students check at the beginning of the class.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why a Nobel laureate in economics thinks bitcoin is toast

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
www.pbs.org The price of bitcoin has been ticking back up after a precipitous drop from $6,500 at the beginning of the month to $3,600 this week. That low marked an almost 40 percent decline over the past month,...

# data[].attributes.body
This website is teacher resources for economics. I would use this to help make lesson plans for my classes.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Cengage leads affordable learning: digital learning platforms, college textbooks, ebooks, and an unlimited subscription to over 22,000 digital products for one price.

# data[].attributes.body
This website has every and any printable thing I would need. I could look through these for some in class activities.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Foster global awareness in your class with U.S. and world geography printables, lessons and references. Teach students about oceans and landforms with science activities and mapping resources. There are plenty of crossword puzzles and quizzes to test your students' knowledge of the earth's surface. Map and geography skills may be used in many subject areas including language arts, math, and history. These social studies resources can enhance any curriculum for kindergarten through twelfth grade.

Printables for Grades K-5

Build your students map reading and identification skills with these various activities that cover maps of the entire world. These visual representations of parts of the world will help your students discover without having to leave the classroom! These resources are geared toward grades K-5.

Printables for Grades 6-8

Go deeper with your study with these printable maps of different parts of the world. Whether you are completing a comprehensive study of the United States or another country, or you just want to focus on a particular subsection, these worksheets will help students in the moment during your lessons as well as a resource to study for their quizzes as well.

Printables for Grades 9-12

Use these resources for a general study of different countries or modify them to target a specific historical period or political movement that you want to focus on with your students. These maps can be a useful resource or study guide as students move toward learning more higher order concepts and retaining more historical information throughout the upper grades.

Lesson Plans

Use these comprehensive lesson plans to fully develop an individual, geographical concepts, or historical periods of time that you want to focus on with your students. Within each lesson, you will be guided on how to complete the lesson with students as well as provided different questions, discussions, or activities to help students deeply understand the topic under study.

Printable Geography Quizzes

Tired of making your own geography quizzes? Who says you have to? Review the different quizzes in this section to use as the perfect complement to your lessons and activities. You can use these quizzes as is or can modify them to better meet your teaching style or the needs of your classroom.

Maps and Globes Resources

Use these printable map outlines or review the Practicing Map Skills activity to help your students learn about the different geographic features of various places around the world. These maps can be used again and again and are great resources to help student keep track of the constantly changing world.

Geography Games & Puzzles

Need an interactive game to help reinforce your students' understanding of a geographical unit? This section is the one for you. Whether you want to teach students initial map skills by creating your own map of your classroom, or help them remember the different features that can be used when viewing a map, these printable games will make learning fun for your students.

Technology Resources for Geography

Build your students inquiry, research, and discussion skills with these geographical technology resources. In this section, students will be responsible for investigating the world's wonders and reporting on their findings.

U.S. Geography Resources

Use these printable maps to teach a comprehensive study of the geographical makeup of the United States. Students can keep these maps as study tools when looking back on a full year's study of the U.S. or just as a quick reference during a topic or concept.

World Geography Resources

Use these printable maps to teach a comprehensive study of the geographical makeup of the the world. Students can keep these maps as study tools when looking back on a full year's study of the world. or just as a quick reference during a topic or concept.

Political Geography Resources

Help your students keep track of all the political affiliations during different historical periods with these resources. In this section, you can use printable maps, interactive books and slideshows, or just reinforce their understanding of geographical topic with various quizzes.

References

Looking to build your geographical resource library? This section can provide you a wealth of resources ranging from lesson plans, various charts and maps, or just some fun information or facts on the different parts of the world.

Geography Skill Builders

Uses these Skill Builder guides to help students learn research skills and discover fun facts about geography. Each guide divides into different activities according to your individual classrooms grade level so it can be a resource that you use for any classroom. It also is completed weekly so this be a great compliment to your daily lessons, review sessions, or even as homework activities for your students.

Geography Resources for History Class

Use these resources to help students learn about the geography from different historical periods or important events. In this section, you have access to different lesson plans, printable maps, interactive activities, and classroom guides for discussions. These resources can be kept as is or can be modified to be better for your individual teaching style or classroom needs.

Earth Science & Geography Connected

Planning a cross-curricular study with your fellow teachers? Or just trying to help students understand how geography is formed? This section will provide you for a little bit of both! In this section, you have access to different comprehension resources that outline the causes and effects of natural disasters and how that has developed the geography from the past to today.

Math & Geography Connected

Planning a cross-curricular study with the other teachers in various content areas? Or just trying to help students understand map reading and geography skills? This section will help you prepare for any objective or goal you have for your students. Use the different printable maps, lesson plans, or graphic organizers to build students comprehension and map-reading skills by focusing on topics such as time zones and latitude and longitude.

Language Arts & Geography Connected

Build your students reading comprehension and map reading skills with these different activities. In this section, students connect their understanding of different geographic features with their own previous knowledge and experiences. Each resource is a perfect complement to any part of your lesson, as a resource for students to use to remember key concepts, or as supplemental work to assess student understanding.

Art Activities for Geography

Use these activities to add an artistic spin to learning geography. Students can create their own geographical tools, create cultural artifacts of individuals from a different country, or design different geographic maps of countries around the world. These activities can be used as is or modified to better suit the needs of students in your classroom.

Earth Day Activities

Build your students understanding of this important day with different resources that highlights the importance of taking care of our Earth. In this section, students can review the different economic resources that are pivotal to human survival, the different ways we take care of resources, and much more!

Wildlife Week Resources

Use these literature/teacher guides to review with students the different types of wildlife that live in various places around the world. These guides can compliment any content area and will help your students improve their reading comprehension and geography skills. Use them as is or adapt them to best fit your classroom.

Columbus Day Activities

Use these lessons or activities in this section to help students learn about Christopher Columbus's voyage and exploration of America. These activities can be kept as is or modified to fit your individual teaching style or the needs of your students.

Native American Resources

Help students understand that studying geography means studying the individuals that live in those different regions as well. By reviewing the lives and culture of Native Americans, students can connect their geographical skills to deeper higher order thinking ones

Voyages & Travels Resources

Use these different resources with your students to discuss the concepts of voyages and traveling. In this section are different visual maps, lesson plans, reading comprehension activities, and much more! These activities can be used in their current form or modified to better serve the needs of your classroom.

Ocean Resources

Need some inspiration for teaching your students about the Earth's oceans? Well look no further! Whether it's full comprehensive lesson plans, printable map activities, game worksheets, or resource guides for geographical features, this is the section for you. These activities are great as they are or can be adapted to the characteristics of your classroom.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Geography Printables, Lessons, & Quizzes for Teachers (K-12) - TeacherVision

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Foster global awareness in your class with U.S. and world geography printables, lessons and references. Teach students about oceans and landforms with science activities and mapping resources. There are plenty of crossword puzzles and quizzes to test your students' knowledge of the earth's surface.

# data[].attributes.body
This is the national geography website which will help me to find resources for lessons. I would use this to make my lessons just a little bit more interesting.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Education Resources | National Geographic Society

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Inspire learners to explore National Geographic through interactive lesson plans, maps, storytelling and a wide variety of resources to illuminate their world.

# data[].attributes.body
This is the "maps are wrong" clip. I'd use this to show students what they think they know is wrong.

# data[].attributes.body
This is the library of congress website. It has all of the maps of the United States which I could use in class to teach about how maps have changed.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Lesson Plans - Geography and Maps - Themed Resources | Teacher Resources - Library of Congress

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A compilation of Geography and Maps related lesson plans from across the Library's Web site.

# data[].attributes.body
This is a website full of animated maps. I would use this to help make maps more interesting for students.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This unique interactive website works with maps and globes to transform learners' understanding of the world. Winner of a Geographical Association Gold award and a BAFTA award for primary learning, Mapping Our World allows learners to

# data[].attributes.body
This is a website that allows you to have interactive games! I would use this to connect different places in the world.

# data[].attributes.body
This website allows students to take virtual tours. I would have students do this while we talk about a place so they have a better idea of that place.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
10 Websites For Virtual Sightseeing With Travel Videos

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
There are many kinds of travelers. There are the ones who simply want to go from Point A to Point B without much bustle. There are the regulars on the trav

# data[].attributes.body
This website helps give students a better view of different countries of the world. I would use it to let them explore at the beginning of a unit to get familiar with different countries.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Each Country Profile provides information on: Geography · Maps · Flag · History · Current ruler · Area · Population · Capital · Largest cities · Languages · Ethnicity/race · Religion · Literacy rate · Economy · Government

# data[].attributes.body
These are free printable maps of the world. I would use these maps in the classroom to just write on do whatever they need.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What is Map | Definition of Map | Types of Map

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
World Maps - Know what does map stand for with its history , uses, types of maps and how maps are made.

# data[].attributes.body
These are maps that give information that aren't normally in schools. I think this is a "fun" maps for students to look out.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
By the time we graduate high school, we learn that they never taught us the most exciting things there. Sure, you might be able to name the European countries or point New York on the map, but does that give you a real understanding of how the world functions? To fill this gap, we have gathered a tremendous and informative selection of infographic maps that they should've shown us at school: every single one of these cool maps reveals different fun and interesting facts, which can actually help you draw some pretty interesting conclusions.

What makes infographic world maps so engaging is how easy it becomes to conceive graphically presented information. The best part, there are brilliant services like Target Map that "allow everyone (from individuals to large organizations) to represent their data on maps of any country in the world and to share their knowledge with the whole Internet Community." Just choose a country and a way to create your interesting map by color, type values or by uploading your excel files (you can even use your zip / postal code column to get the best and most accurate maps.

Without further ado, we invite you to learn things like most popular sports in different countries, who has the biggest breasts, red hair map of Europe, world's most consumed alcoholic beverages, or which brands dominate in various states of the USA in these funny world maps.

Trust us, these funny maps are way better than the ones they taught you at school!

The Most Famous Brand From Each State In The US

Image credits: steve-lovelace.com

Red Hair Map of Europe

Image credits: imgur.com

Most Popular Sports in the World

Image credits: imgur.com

Breast Sizes Relating to Countries

Image credits: targetmap.com

Political World Map as Pangea 200-300 Million Years Ago

Image credits: imgur.com

The World According to Americans

Image credits: alphadesigner.com

Most Used Web Browser World Map (2012)

Image credits: saint-tepes.deviantart.com

Map of Countries Officially Not Using the Metric System

Image credits: wikimedia.org

The Penis Size Worldwide

Image credits: targetmap.com

Map of the Most Common Surnames in Europe

Image credits: imgur.com

Map of Countries Most and Least Welcoming to Foreigners

Image credits: imgur.com

World Map of National IQ Scores

Image credits: targetmap.com

Beer Names in Different European Languages

Image credits: imgur.com

Freedom of Press

Image credits: imgur.com

Most Consumed Alcoholic Beverage by Country

Image credits: chartsbin.com

A World Map that Inverts Land and Sea

Image credits: imgur.com

Worldwide Driving Orientation

Image credits: chartsbin.com

Prevalence of Obesity

Image credits: hsph.harvard.edu

Map Of Most Attractive Citizens in Europe

Image credits: imgur.com

European Citizens Who Drink the Most

Image credits: imgur.com

United States According to Autocomplete

Image credits: flipcollective.com

Every Country England Has Ever Invaded (all but 22 countries in the world)

Image credits: telegraph.co.uk

7 Deadly Sins Map

Image credits: wired.com

World Map of Social Networks 2009 vs 2012

Image credits: visual.ly

Total Fertility Rate Map

Image credits: en.wikipedia.org

Map of the World in Proportion to Population

Image credits: imgur.com

Different Alphabets Around the World

Image credits: globa-lingua.org

World's Population Concentrated in One City

Image credits: persquaremile.com

Countries with McDonald's

Image credits: imgur.com

Map of the Most Popular Surnames in the United States

Image credits: nationalgeographic.com

Lightning Intensity Map

Image credits: imgur.com

Map of the Earth With Mercator Projection Using a Different Centerpoint

Image credits: imgur.com

Time Zones in Antarctica

Image credits: wikipedia.org

Image credits: alphadesigner.com

If US Cities Had Kept Their Original Names

Image credits: crasstalk.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
By the time we graduate high school, we learn that they never taught us the most interesting things in there. Sure, you might be able to name the European countries or point New York on the map, but does that give a you real understanding of how the world functions?

# data[].attributes.body
Project Gutenberg has so many free digital books that I could use in a US or World Historyclassroom. I would use this website as a way to make my classroom more literature focused for a unit and have them read important texts during a specific time period.

# data[].attributes.body
Dr. B also gave us this website when we were trying to find sources to give to students to explore. I would use this website to find sources for a US or World history classroom. I think this would be beneficial to use these to use these sources to talk more about big concepts that we would be covering in class, such as Nationalism, Enlightenment, Absolutism, etc.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Internet Modern History Sourcebook

The Modern History Sourcebook works as follows:

Additional Study/Research Aids

In addition to the above structure the following may be of interest to educators and students.

1. This project is both very large and fairly old in Internet terms. At the time it was begun (1996), it was not clear that web sites [and the documents made available there] would often turn out to be transient. As a result there is a process called "link rot" - which means that a "broken link" is a result of someone having taken down a web page. Efforts are made to remove all dead links, but new link problems do come up.

2. All links to documents marked [At this Site] should be working. 3. Users may attempt to locate texts not currently available, or where the links have changed via The Internet Archive/Way Back Machine. Alternately, a search via Google may locate another site where the document is available.

SECTIONS

Subjects covered by the source texts in each Section.
Studying History

Introduction: Using Primary Sources

Nature of Historiography

Writing History

Ancient Theories

19th Century Philosophies of History

Professional Theories

History and Epistemology

History and Anthropology

History and Identity Politics

Post-Modern Theories

Misc. Discussions

Other Sources of Information on Modern History

General Guides to Net Text [link to texts at other sites.]

General Etext Projects [sites with texts online.]

Economics

Law

Military

Religion

Philosophy

Literature

Music Lyrics

Western Civilization/Europe

United States History

Latin American History

The Early Modern World
Reformation

Protestant Reformation

Precursors and Papal Critics

Luther and Lutheranism

Calvin and Calvinism

Zwingli

Radical Reformers

English Reformation

Scottish Reformation

Protestant Culture

Conflict

Women and Reformation

Early Modern World
Everyday Life

Structures of Life in the West

Population

Climate

Geography

Food and Famine

Housing

Clothes and Fashion

Technology

Money

Towns and Cities

Everyday Life

Country Living

Urban Live

Trades

Criminal Justice

Social Welfare

Health and Disease

Women, Men and Children

Witchcraft

From Popular to Mass Culture

Absolutism

French Culture in the 16th and 17th Centuries

Constitutional States

The Restoration

The "Glorious Revolution"

English Culture in the 17th and 18th Centuries

The Netherlands

Philosophical Reflections on Constitutional Politics

Internationalist Ideas

Colonial North America

Colonial North America

Early Conquest and Exploitation

American Society

Colonial Latin America

The Transformation of the West
Scientific, Political, and Industrial Revolutions
Scientific Revolution Enlightenment
The Enlightenment

Precursors

The Enlightenment as a Propaganda Project

The Enlightenment and Political Analysis

The Enlightenment Evaluation of the Human Condition

The Enlightenment and Economics

Enlightenment and Philosophy

Enlightenment Attitudes

The Social Setting

Enlightenment Philosophy - Full Texts

Enlightenment Politics and Economics - Full Texts

Enlightened Despots
Government in the Age of Enlightenment
American Independence

The Establishment of the American State

Commentators on America

Native Americans

Slavery

French Revolution

Responses to Revolution

Napoleon

Napoleonic Wars

Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution

The Agricultural Revolution of the 17th-18th Centuries

The Revolution in the Manufacture of Textiles

The Revolution in Power

The Great Engineers

The Process of Industrialization

The Industrial Revolution and the Transformation of the World

Literary Response

Romanticism
Romanticism

Roots of Romanticism

Romantic Philosophy

Romanticism in Literature

Romanticism in Visual Arts

Romanticism in Music

The 19th Century and Western Hegemony
Conservative Order Nationalism

Cultural Nationalism: The Nation as Positive Focus of Identity

Liberal Nationalism: The Nation as a Basis for Liberal Democracy

Triumphal Nationalism: The Nation as a Claim to Superiority

Liberalism
1848: Europe in Revolt
19C Britain

Ireland

Victorian Sensibility

Victorian Literature

British Empire History

British Imperialism

Singapore and Malaya

19C Austria and Germany 19C West Europe
Other Western European Countries
19C East Europe
Eastern European Countries

Greece

Romania [Moldavia/Wallachia/Transylvania]

Bulgaria

Hungary

Poland

Bohemia

Russia

The United States Emerges

Political Institutions

Economic Development

Expansion and Manifest Destiny

The United States as a World Power

Early US Society

Early US Religion

US Civil War

The American Civil War

The Conflict over Slavery

Reconstruction, and Jim Crow

US Immigration

US Immigration and Its Effects

Asian Immigration

Latin American Immigration

Ellis Island and New York

Opposition to Immigration

The Maturation of American Culture

Legal Framework of American Life

The Gilded Age

The Emergence of Modern Politics

American Thought

American Literature

Canada: Another North American Society

Origins

Creation of the Canadian State

Canadian Society

Canadian Regions

Australia and New Zealand 19C Latin America

Responses to Economic Growth: Socialism and Marxism

Early Socialism

Marxism

Socialist Culture

Trade Unionism

Imperialism

China and the West

India Under the British

Africa

The Middle East

The Japanese Exception

American Imperialism

Industrial Revolution II Darwin, Freud, Einstein 19C Religion

Religion in the Face of Modernity

Protestantism: Activism, Rationalism, and Fideism

Biblical Criticism

Liberal Protestantism

Muscular Christianity

The Oxford Movement

Quakers

Fundamentalism

Missionary Expansion

Resistence to Roman Control

Old Catholics

"Modernism"

Eastern Orthodoxy: Christian Life Under Tsars and Sultans.

Judaism and Modernity

Eastern Religions in the West

Humanist Consideration of Religious Thought

World Wars and the End of Western Dominance

World War I

Resistence to War

Literary Responses

The Aftermath

Russian Revolution

The Tsarist State

Russian Revolution

The Development of the Opposition

Lenin

1905

1917

Bolshevik Rule to 1924

Stalinism

Age of Anxiety

Age of Anxiety: The Interwar Years

European Culture

The United States

Inter-War International Relations

The Depression

Economic Problems and the Depression

Economic Problems in Europe

The Depression in the US

Fascism in Europe

The Holocaust

The "Final Solution": The Murder of European Jewry

Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust

The Handicapped

The Roma [Gypsies]

Serbs

Jehovah's Witnesses

Homosexuals

"Revisionism"

Lead Up to War

War In Europe

War In Asia

After the War

The World Since 1945 Bipolar World: The Cold War 1945-1991 US Power 1945-1990

America as World Leader: External Power

American Foreign Relations
Realpolitik or Human Rights

Relations with the Soviet Union [also see above "Cold War]

Relations with China

The Korean War

The "Vietnam War"

US Society 1945-1990

America as World Leader: Internal Change

US Domestic Politics: The State

American Conservatism

American Liberalism

Democrats

American Radicalism

American Society: Immigration

Post-War W Europe Post-War E Europe

Eastern Europe Since 1945

1989: What Happened and Why?

After 1989

Decolonization
Globalization: New Hegemonies?
Asia since 1900 Africa Since 1945 Middle East Since 1914 20C Latin America Modern Social Movements

Modern Social Movements

Other Ethnic/Minority Movements

Lesbian and Gay Rights

Post-War Thought
Post-War Western Thought
Post-War Religion

Religion since 1945

Roman Catholicism

Protestantism

Eastern Orthodoxy

Judaism

Islam

Buddhism

Humanist-Religious Debate

Modern Science

Science, Technology and the Transformation in the Means of Production

Biology: The DNA Revolution

Physics

Space Exploration

Computers

Knowledge Based Production

The Internet

The World Environment: Cornucopeian Plenty or a Crisis Situation

Pop Culture
Sports: The Opium of the People?

The Twenty-First Century
21st Century
Introduction

The Internet Modern History Sourcebook is one of series of history primary sourcebooks. It is intended to serve the needs of teachers and students in college survey courses in modern European history and American history, as well as in modern Western Civilization and World Cultures. Although this part of the Internet History Sourcebooks Project began as a way to access texts that were already available on the Internet, it now contains hundreds of texts made available locally.

The great diversity of available sources for use in modern history classes requires that selections be made with great care - since virtually unlimited material is available. The goals here are:

To present a diversity of source material in modern European, American, and Latin American history, as well as a significant amount of materal pertinent to world cultures and global studies. A number of other online source collections emphasize legal and political documents. Here efforts have been made to include contemporary narrative accounts, personal memoirs, songs, newspaper reports, as well as cultural, philosophical, religious and scientific documents. Although the history of social and cultural elite groups remains important to historians, the lives of non-elite women, people of color, lesbians and gays are also well represented here.

To present the material as cleanly as possible, without complicated hierarchies and subdirectories. What you get here is direct access to significant documents, not the efforts of some whizkid "website designer". In other words, we are interested here in the music, not the Hi-fi!.

Within the major sections, to indicate a few high quality web sites for further source material and research.

Sources of Material Here

The texts on these pages come from many sources:

Files posted to various places on the net. In some cases, the source URL no longer exists.

Shorter texts created for class purposes by extracting from much larger texts.

Texts scanned in from printed material. In some cases the printed book may be recent, but the material scanned is out of copyright.

Texts sent to me for inclusion.

Links to other online texts. External links sometimes cease to work. An effort has been made to provide a back-up link to an impression of such texts at the Internet Archive.

Efforts have been made to confirm to US Copyright Law. Any infringement is unintentional, and any file which infringes copyright, and about which the copyright claimant informs me, will be removed pending resolution.

NOTES:

The Internet Modern History Sourcebook is part of the Internet History Sourcebooks Project. The date of inception was 1998. Links to files at other site are indicated by [At some indication of the site name or location]. WEB indicates a link to one of small number of high quality web sites which provide either more texts or an especially valuable overview.

The Site Concept and Design: created 26 Jan 1996: latest revision 15 May 2023 [ Internet History Sourcebooks Project is located at the History Department of Fordham University, New York. The Internet Medieval Sourcebook, and other medieval components of the project, are located at the Fordham University Center for Medieval Studies.The IHSP recognizes the contribution of Fordham University, the Fordham University History Department, and the Fordham Center for Medieval Studies in providing web space and server support for the project. The IHSP is a project independent of Fordham University. Although the IHSP seeks to follow all applicable copyright law, Fordham University is not the institutional owner, and is not liable as the result of any legal action. Paul Halsall CV]

©

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Internet History Sourcebooks: Modern History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Internet Modern History Sourcebook The Modern History Sourcebook works as follows: Additional Study/Research Aids In addition to the above structure the following may be of interest to educators and students. 1.

# data[].attributes.body
This website is a collection of any art piece I could even this I would need. This seems more relevant to a World History classroom. I think that this was be a cool website to use if I did a stations day at the beginning of each new unit, this would be a good way to let students see what was art during which time periods.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Please consider one of these ways to support the Artchive:

# data[].attributes.body
This is a world history website that would help me with lesson plans. It has resources and links that I could use for lessons to make them more interesting for students.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Research Guides: Education: High School World History Resources

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Research Guides: Education: High School World History Resources

# data[].attributes.body
This is a crash course link explaining the Haitian revolution. I would use this to teach about Haiti during the age of revolutions.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Haitian Revolutions: Crash Course World History #30

# data[].attributes.body
This is a website about hieroglyphics. I could use this and let kids loose on it when teaching about ancient Egypt.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Ancient Egyptian History for Kids: Hieroglyphics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Kids learn about Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphics. Picture writing of this world civilization.

# data[].attributes.body
This is the beginning scene of Argo, explaining the history of Iran. I would use this to entertain students while explaining what the Iranian Hostage Crisis was.

# data[].attributes.body
This website would be great for any US or World History classroom. I can print out fake people/tanks/horses/whatever I would need to reenact a battle and let students use those things so that they have deeper learning by playing while learning about the battle.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Promoting the use of historical simulations as a tool for teaching history. Free resources anyone can use.

# data[].attributes.body
This website contains units and lessons for everything. I would use this as a resource when making my own lessons.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
World History for Us All is a comprehensive model curriculum for teaching world history in middle and high schools

# data[].attributes.body
These are lesson plans and activities for every era of world history. I would use this as a resource when making my own lessons also.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Share My Lesson is a destination for educators who dedicate their time and professional expertise to provide the best education for students everywhere. Share My Lesson members contribute content, share ideas, get educated on the topics that matter, online, 24/7. We issue Creative Commons licenses, and we do not share our members' private data with anyone.

# data[].attributes.body
These are exhibits on American History that I could show students. In the classroom I would make a project out of it and let them explore whatever interests them.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Exhibits on American History

Religion in America - Religion has played a vital and controversial role in American life since the founding of the nation. The separation of church and state in a sense defined America; the exact meaning of that separation in law and practice has been a subject of ongoing debate. Religion has affected the outcome of elections since 1800 and helped determine long-term voting patterns. It has motivated great social and political movements, such as abolition and prohibition, and helps explain the often missionary zeal of American foreign policy. America changed old religions and spawned new ones, and these religions have changed America and the world.

From Bullets to Ballots: The Election of 1800 - The Ashbrook Center, with the permission of The Claremont Institute, is pleased to bring John Zvesper's monograph From Bullets to Ballots to TeachingAmericanHistory.org. The American founding did not end with the ratification of the Constitution. The experience of political party making in the 1790s set into motion the regime created by the constitution-making of the 1770s and 1780s. Americans can learn important things about their politics today by reflecting on the experience of the 1790s. And if American political experience has lessons for other democracies, some of the most important of those lessons can be found here. For Zvesper's own view of how his book differs from other works on the 1790s, see this book review.

Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial -- February 12, 2009 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln. Born to poor farmers in a humble backwater, Lincoln lacked the distinguished pedigree of many of his presidential predecessors. This product of a border state caught between the free North and the slave South, however, represented the last, best chance to ensure, "that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." We present here a collection of resources on Abraham Lincoln. Included are many of Lincoln's most notable speeches and letters, commentary and lectures by leading historians and political scientists, original lesson plans developed by history professors and master classroom teachers, and links to addition web resources.

The Civil War Sesquicentennial -- The Civil War began on April 12, 1861 at 4:30am when Confederate troops opened fire on Fort Sumter in South Carolina. Those shots marked the beginning of a nearly four-year struggle that ultimately determined whether our nation would honor the principles upon which it was founded or be ripped asunder by the conflicts that had existed between principle and practice since the founding. We present here a collection of resources on the Civil War. Included are many of the era's most notable speeches and letters, commentary and lectures by leading historians and political scientists, original lesson plans developed by history professors and master classroom teachers, and links to additional web resources.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Exhibits on American History | Teaching American History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Religion in America - Religion has played a vital and controversial role in American life since the founding of the nation. The separation of church and state in a sense defined America; the exact meaning of that separation in law and practice has been a subject of ongoing debate.

# data[].attributes.body
This is a clip about 1950's culture from Father Knows Best. I would use this when teaching about the 1950s and the Cold War.

# data[].attributes.body
I like using "This Day in History" clips to give my students some perspective of that day. This one is for the day Dr. King is assassinated.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Just after 6 p.m. on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. is fatally shot while standing on the balcony outside his second-story room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. The civil rights leader was in Memphis to support a sanitation workers' strike and was on his way to dinner when a bullet struck him in the jaw and severed his spinal cord. King was pronounced dead after his arrival at a Memphis hospital. He was 39 years old.

In the months before his assassination, Martin Luther King became increasingly concerned with the problem of economic inequality in America. He organized a Poor People's Campaign to focus on the issue, including a march on Washington, and in March 1968 traveled to Memphis in support of poorly treated African-American sanitation workers. On March 28, a workers' protest march led by King ended in violence and the death of an African American teenager. King left the city but vowed to return in early April to lead another demonstration.

On April 3, back in Memphis, King gave his last sermon, saying, "We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop ... And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over, and I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land."

One day after speaking those words, Dr. King was shot and killed by a sniper. As word of the assassination spread, riots broke out in cities all across the United States and National Guard troops were deployed in Memphis and Washington, D.C. On April 9, King was laid to rest in his hometown of Atlanta, Georgia. Tens of thousands of people lined the streets to pay tribute to King's casket as it passed by in a wooden farm cart drawn by two mules.

The evening of King's murder, a Remington .30-06 hunting rifle was found on the sidewalk beside a rooming house one block from the Lorraine Motel. During the next several weeks, the rifle, eyewitness reports, and fingerprints on the weapon all implicated a single suspect: escaped convict James Earl Ray. A two-bit criminal, Ray escaped a Missouri prison in April 1967 while serving a sentence for a holdup. In May 1968, a massive manhunt for Ray began. The FBI eventually determined that he had obtained a Canadian passport under a false identity, which at the time was relatively easy.

On June 8, Scotland Yard investigators arrested Ray at a London airport. He was trying to fly to Belgium, with the eventual goal, he later admitted, of reaching Rhodesia. Rhodesia, now called Zimbabwe, was at the time ruled by an oppressive and internationally condemned white minority government. Extradited to the United States, Ray stood before a Memphis judge in March 1969 and pleaded guilty to King's murder in order to avoid the electric chair. He was sentenced to 99 years in prison.

Three days later, he attempted to withdraw his guilty plea, claiming he was innocent of King's assassination and had been set up as a patsy in a larger conspiracy. He claimed that in 1967, a mysterious man named "Raoul" had approached him and recruited him into a gunrunning enterprise. On April 4, 1968, he said, he realized that he was to be the fall guy for the King assassination and fled to Canada. Ray's motion was denied, as were his dozens of other requests for a trial during the next 29 years.

During the 1990s, the widow and children of Martin Luther King Jr. spoke publicly in support of Ray and his claims, calling him innocent and speculating about an assassination conspiracy involving the U.S. government and military. U.S. authorities were, in conspiracists' minds, implicated circumstantially. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover obsessed over King, who he thought was under communist influence. For the last six years of his life, King underwent constant wiretapping and harassment by the FBI. Before his death, Dr. King was also monitored by U.S. military intelligence, which may have been asked to watch King after he publicly denounced the Vietnam War in 1967. Furthermore, by calling for radical economic reforms in 1968, including guaranteed annual incomes for all, King was making few new friends in the Cold War-era U.S. government.

Over the years, the assassination has been reexamined by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, the Shelby County, Tennessee, district attorney's office, and three times by the U.S. Justice Department. The investigations all ended with the same conclusion: James Earl Ray killed Martin Luther King. The House committee acknowledged that a low-level conspiracy might have existed, involving one or more accomplices to Ray, but uncovered no evidence to definitively prove this theory. In addition to the mountain of evidence against him-such as his fingerprints on the murder weapon and his admitted presence at the rooming house on April 4-Ray had a definite motive in assassinating King: hatred. According to his family and friends, he was an outspoken racist who informed them of his intent to kill Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He died in 1998.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Just after 6 p.m. on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. is fatally shot while standing on the balcony outside his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. The civil rights leader was 39 years old.

# data[].attributes.body
This is Elizabeth Eckfords first hand account of the day she went to Little Rock High. I would use this in a civil rights unit.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
After the Federal Judge ordered integration in Little Rock, Arkansas, the “Little Rock Nine” prepared for their first day at Central High School. Governor Orval Faubus, in defiance of the order, called out the Arkansas National Guard. One of the students, Elizabeth Eckford, could not be reached and was therefore not informed of the plan. This is her story.

# data[].attributes.body
This is the constitution. I would need this to allow students to become familiar with this important document in American history.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Constitution of the United States - We the People

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A highly accessible, easy to use online version of the U. S. Constitution with the full text including the Bill of Rights and the rest of the Amendments includes both sequential and subject indexes.

# data[].attributes.body
This is Eisenhowers' executive order to send the national guard into Little Rock. This would help me teach the Little Rock Nine in US.

# data[].attributes.body
This is an annotated version of American Pie. Dr. B showed us this in class and this is a great way to talk about history of rock and roll.

# data[].attributes.body
This is the Kansas Historical Society which would be helpful when teaching US History. I want to teach in a different state so I didn’t know if I could use this website and then I thought, man that would be so helpful to give students a different states perceptive of an event they might know about.

# data[].attributes.body
This is Jean Garvey website for US History. This version of her website is geared towards teachers not students but this allows me as a teacher to go and hand pick what exactly I would want to use in my classroom which I really like.