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When we view paintings and other works of art our eyes usually move across the surface of the canvas, hitting on various points, objects, and figures in the picture. In this lesson students will…
The historian and literary critic Paul Fussell has noted in The Great War and Modern Memory that, "Dawn has never recovered from what the Great War did to it." With dawn as a common…
This lesson plan asks students to read To Kill A Mockingbird carefully with an eye for all instances and manifestations of courage, but particularly those of moral courage.
The story of the Ramayana has been passed from generation to generation by numerous methods and media. Initially it was passed on orally as an epic poem that was sung to audiences by a…
Using primary documents, this lesson explores how religion aided and hindered the American war effort; specifically, it explores how Anglican loyalists and Quaker pacifists responded to the…
How shall we judge the contributions to American society of the great financiers and industrialists at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries? In this lesson, students…
Practice working with primary documents by comparing accounts of the Chicago Fire and testing the credibility of a Civil War diary.
In this first lesson of the curriculum unit Composition in Painting: Everything in its right place, students will begin by learning the definition of composition in the visual arts and some of its…
If James Madison was the "father" of the Constitution," John Marshall was the "father of the Supreme Court"—almost single-handedly clarifying its powers. This new lesson is designed to help…
Students are bound to be curious to know what all that Greek writing means. This lesson plan uses an EDSITEment created Greek alphabet animation to help students "decode" the inscription on the…
Through close study of Alfred Stieglitz’ 1907 photograph "The Steerage" and William Carlos William's 1962 poem "Danse Russe," students will explore how poetry can be, in Plutarch’s words, "a…
George Washington Harris was an authentic comic genius whose work influenced later writers such as Mark Twain and William Faulkner. In this lesson, students read a Sut Lovingood story by George…
This lesson plan introduces students to allegory in the visual arts through the works of a number of well-known artists, including Thomas Cole and Caravaggio.
The earliest writing systems evolved independently and at roughly the same time in Egypt and Mesopotamia, but current scholarship suggests that Mesopotamia’s writing appeared first. That writing…
This lesson plan highlights the importance of First Amendment rights by examining Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms painting series. Students discover the First Amendment in action as they…
For American diplomacy, the war against Japan was not just about the destruction of Japanese supremacy in the Pacific, China, and Southeast Asia. The ultimate issue was just what would replace…
There was general agreement at the beginning of the 19th century that the U.S. would greatly benefit from some internal improvements of a national nature, such as a nationwide network of roads and…
King Arthur, Camelot, Gawain, a bold challenge, a perilous journey, a beheading, an enchantment, and a shape-shifter are the ingredients of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. For the modern…
In White Fang, Jack London sought to trace the “development of domesticity, faithfulness, love, morality, and all the amenities and virtues.” In this lesson, students explore images from…
In this lesson, students will explore the role of the individual in the modern world by closely reading and analyzing T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
A freshman senator from Wisconsin, Joseph R. McCarthy, shocked the country in 1950 when he claimed to possess evidence that significant numbers of communists continued to hold positions of…
This lesson allow students to explore the forces that prompted the literary modernism movement, specifically focusing on modernist poetry. By allowing students to explore the movement…
Nathaniel Hawthorne' stories are more often associated with dark examinations of complex systems of morality than any sense of conventional comic humor; and yet Hawthorne's subtle satiric wit…
Centered on poems about the natural world, this lesson encourages students, first, to make the reading of poetry a creative act; and, second, to appreciate particular literary devices in their…
In this lesson, students explore the use of multiple voices in narration and examine the character of Addie Bundren in Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying."
This lesson will help students develop a better understanding of the election of 1824 and its significance.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, relations between the United States and the Soviet Union had deteriorated to the point of "cold war," while domestically the revelation that Soviet spies had…
The Magna Carta served to lay the foundation for the evolution of parliamentary government and subsequent declarations of rights in Great Britain and the United States. In attempting to establish…
Similes are used often in literature, appearing in every genre from poetry to prose and from epics to essays. Utilized by writers to bring their literary imagery to life, similes are an important…
By the beginning of 1944, victory in Europe was all but assured. The task of diplomacy largely involved efforts to define the structure of the postwar world. Why and how did the United States…