Teaching U.S. History Thematically: Document-Based Lessons for the Secondary Classroom

Get started with an innovative approach to teaching history that develops literacy and higher-order thinking skills, connects the past to students' lives, and meets state and national standards (grades 7-12).

Now in a second edition, this popular book provides an introductory unit to help teachers build a trustful classroom climate; over 70 primary sources (including a dozen new ones) organized into thematic units structured around an essential question from U.S. history; and a new final unit focusing on periodization and chronology. As students analyze carefully excerpted documents, they build an understanding of how diverse historical figures have approached key issues. At the same time, students learn to participate in civic debates and develop their own views on what it means to be a 21st-century American. Each unit connects to current events with dynamic classroom activities that make history come alive.

In addition to the documents, this teaching manual provides strategies to assess student learning; mini-lectures designed to introduce documents; activities to help students process, display, and integrate their learning; guidance to help teachers create their own units; and more.

Book Features:

• Addresses the politicization of history head-on with updated material that allows students entry points into timely topics like vaccination mandates, election denial, and climate change, as well as debates swirling around their own education, like the one about critical race theory.
• Makes document-based teaching easy with a curated collection of primary sources (speeches by presidents and protesters, Supreme Court cases, political cartoons) excerpted into manageable chunks for students.
• Challenges the "master narrative" of U.S. history with texts from Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Malcolm X, Dolores Huerta, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, and Judy Heumann.
• Offers printable copies of the documents included in the book, which can be downloaded at tcpress.com.