1. What was your favorite take-away from our 98th Annual Conference in Chicago? Mary Ellen: Earlier this fall, I was part of a conference put on by Dr. Diana Hess, the Dean of Education at the University of Wisconsin- Madison.  The conference t-shirts read, “Teach like our democracy depends on it - because it does.” The 98th Annual Conference highlighted this message throughout with the vital issue sessions and keynote speakers.    More importantly, the special strand of Illinois programming around “Inquiry as Engagement: Connecting Across Differences” had…

Benjamin Banneker's Letter to Thomas Jefferson John A. Moore Next Door to Old Smokey: Engaging in Scientific Measurements and Public Action Bertha Vazquez, Hilary Landorf, and L. Bahia Simons-Lane  

In the first article in this issue, a professor-teacher team of authors, Karen L. B. Burgard, Caroline O’Quinn, Michael L. Boucher, Jr., Natasha Pinnix, Cynthia Trejo, and Charnae Dickson offers, “Using Photographs to Create Culturally Relevant Classrooms: People of San Antonio, Texas, in the 1930s.” The authors outline how educatorscan utilize historic photos to provide students with a deeper understanding of the past. When students do not see their heritage and culture represented in images, the development of their historical understanding can be incomplete or fragmented. Historical…

Connect-the-Dots: Making Meaning from Historical Evidence Chris Edwards Yellow Fever in Philadelphia, 1793 (Book Review) Sandra W. Moss World War I Posters: Thinking Critically about History and the Media Tom Carty On the Trail of an Epidemic: Yellow Fever in New Orleans, 1845-1860

* The Pledge of Allegiance, its history, and the addition of the phrase "under God" can serve as a jumping off point into major themes of U.S. history and First Amendment freedoms. Here is a free article in Social Education, September 2013 by Eric C. Groce, Tina Heafner, and Elizabeth Bellows: https://www.socialstudies.org/publications/socialeducation/september2013/under_god_and_pledge_allegiance. * After reading that lesson plan and article (above), teachers (and students) can examine the hand-typed sermon that inspired President Eisenhower to support inserting the phrase "Under God" into…

*/ The National Women’s History Museum (NWHM) recently released Where are the Women? A Report on the Status of Women in the United States examining the status of women's history in state-level social studies standards. Learning standards describe what states expect students to know and be able to do at specific stages of education. The report and analysis find that women's experiences and stories are not well integrated into U.S. state history standards. The lack of representation and context in state-level materials presupposes that women's history is even less represented at the classroom…

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Learning the stories of Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Stacey Abrams can deepen students’ understanding of the long and ongoing struggle for voting rights in the United States.

The exploration of the trajectory of Shirley Chisholm’s political life can be a springboard into a classroom lesson on suffrage that connects issues of race, class, and gender.