In the latest issue of City Journal, Barry Strauss reviews a new book on Cato the Younger, the Roman stoic who provided inspiration to many American founders. Though George Washington regularly went to the theater to see other plays—and regularly quoted from them, especially those by Shakespeare—Joseph Addison’s 1713 Cato, a Tragedy is the play with which Washington is most closely associated. Indeed, in 1778, Washington had the play … Read more »
Over at the Washington Post’s “Answer Sheet,” David Bernstein laments the current state of most history classes in middle school and high school, noting that, by and large, his two sons (ages 7 and 15) mostly experience history in the form of “one big lesson in historic trivia.” No wonder, he writes, that so many students find history to be boring—and not worth their time to seriously study.
He continues:
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Just because the national celebration of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday has now passed doesn’t mean that you have to stop the discussion in your classroom about King and the Civil Rights Movement. Indeed, now is a great time to have students look at King’s legacy—for both today and for the future.
The fourth and final chapter in our “Meaning of Martin Luther King Jr. Day” ebook is … Read more »
With the official celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day just a few days away, it’s a good time to take a look at King’s work itself and ways that it can influence how we observe the day in his honor on Monday. As we note in “The Origins and Traditions of Martin Luther King Jr. Day,” in 1994, Congress passed the Read more »
Yesterday, we featured W. E. B. Du Bois’ short story “On Being Crazy” as a good way to help students understand “the African American Experience and the Need for Civil Rights,” which is the goal of the second chapter in our new ebook celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Today, we feature a selection from the next chapter, which focuses on the goals of the Civil Rights Movement.
In … Read more »
Written in 1907 by scholar, author, civil rights activist, and cofounder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), the short story “On Being Crazy” provides a first-person encounter with racial discrimination in public accommodations. The story was written in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 1883 ruling in the Civil Rights Cases, when sanctioned and state-enforced segregation became … Read more »
Eighty-four years ago today, on January 15, 1929, the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta, Georgia, the second of three children to Reverend Martin Luther King Sr. and his wife Alberta. As we prepare to celebrate King’s birthday on Monday—the official Martin Luther King Jr. Day—we will be using this week to feature stories and texts from our latest ebook, “The Meaning of Martin … Read more »
Distinguished scholar-teachers Amy and Leon Kass demonstrate how short stories, speeches, and songs can be used to enhance civic education and how a pedagogical approach that stresses learning through inquiry can make primary sources come alive for students of all ages.
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