The 100th anniversary year of the Nineteenth Amendment offers an important opportunity to deepen student understanding of the women’s suffrage movement.

Contemporary social studies instruction should focus on objectives and concepts from many disciplines at all skill levels. In this lesson, fourth and fifth grade students successfully practiced intellectual skills while analyzing primary and secondary sources that documented the life of Belle Case La Follette. The students showed they were capable of a rigorous study of the accomplishments and tribulations of a significant historical figure.

Teaching about the civil rights movement in the elementary grades has, in many schools, focused exclusively on the lives of Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks. Many students are well versed in the content of King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, and they know well that Rosa did not give up her seat on the bus. While these moments and heroes of the movement are essential in the study of this era in history, the study of more obscure and lesser known people and events is a great way to deepen our students’ understanding of the sacrifices that so many thousands of ordinary people made in the…

Can you name several well-known military personnel throughout U.S. history? When hearing this question, most people may begin reciting names like George Washington, Ulysses Grant, George Patten, or Norman Schwarzkopf Jr., who all happen to be men. When thinking about the U.S. military historically, we tend to imagine that it is a man’s world. While men continue to dominate our military, women have also been quick to put on a uniform and helped defend U.S. soil since the birth of the nation. However, both society and academia have failed to represent women’s contributions to the war effort in…

Decades of curriculum research have uncovered a persistent trend: white people are depicted as dominating the history of the United States, whereas communities of color and their experiences are omitted or misrepresented in social studies textbooks and curriculum standards. The message the resulting curriculum sends to children is that the United States is a country of white people, and people of color have little or no place in it. The author presents silenced-yet-powerful stories of three Americans—girls of Indigenous, Chinese, and Mexican ancestry—who fought for equal education in America…

Two accounts of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, published in the last two years and named as Notable Social Studies Trade Books for Young Readers, are welcome additions to biography shelves in school classrooms and libraries. Both books reviewed here, Ruth Bader Ginsburg: The Case of R. B. G. vs. Inequality and I Dissent: Ruth Bader Ginsburg Makes Her Mark, are inspirational and tell a story that is both typical and exceptional–the striving of the children of immigrants and their conviction that the law could be an instrument of societal change.