Classroom Materials: History Lessons and Background Materials

• Teaching World War One History through Food

  This page provides five videos that explore the history of World War One through food. It is intended as a teaching resource to deepen students' knowledge and understanding of Americans' experience of World War One and to offer history teachers materials for their classroom use.

• Infusing the Pacific World into the US History Survey Courses: Recommended Reading

  In this guide, Allison Frickert-Murashige provides reading recommendations for faculty looking to learn more themselves about the Pacific World before teaching it in their US history courses. She provides readings Bridging Cultures participants used to begin thinking about bringing the Pacific World into their courses, as well as recommended topics where this approach is useful.

• Ideas for Conceptualizing the Pacific World within the US Survey Course, 1400-1850

  In this guide, Allison Frickert-Murashige provides ideas of topics to include in a US history survey course incorporating the Pacific World.

• Teaching Environmental History in the US and World History Surveys: Overview of Topics and Resources

  This guide provides an overview of topics that faculty can consider in their US history survey courses in taking an environmental view of US and world history. It also provides a thorough list of recent scholarship on environmental history.

• Lecture Topics for First Half of American History Survey

  Brittany Adams focuses on incorporating more regional history into the early survey. She also emphasizes the importance of de-centering the British colonial narrative when teaching students who identify more with western US history, as do many of her students at UC Irvine.

• Chinese Immigrants in America in the 19th Century: A Study Module

  These materials, produced by Vincent A. Clark as a result of his work in the Bridging Cultures program, consist of an illustrated introduction, excerpts from four contemporaneous articles, an online quiz (not included in these materials), and an assignment for an e-mail discussion. The introduction describes not only the life of the immigrants in the United States but their economic and cultural background in China. The goal is to expand the students’ knowledge to include the China from which these immigrants came. Two of the articles oppose Chinese immigrants; two praise them. They are designed to let students see the varying perceptions of the immigrants, the arguments for and against Chinese immigration, and the complex class and ethnic dimensions of this controversy.

• Teaching the American Civil War from a Transoceanic Perspective

  In the following, Timothy Draper and Amy Powers provide ideas for ways of bringing global contexts into a unit or course on the American Civil War. They include useful topics to cover, along with primary and secondary source readings. Topics include Karl Marx on the Civil War, the war's impact on Hawaii, and the experience of various immigrant groups during the war.

• Through the Lens of History: Biafra, Nigeria, the West and the World

  David Trask shares a unit in which students analyze a single event in 1960s Nigerian history to learn more about colonial and post-colonial Africa, the West and the world.

• Linking Family History and World History

  Linda Pomerantz shares a lesson plan designed to illustrate ways that family history research using visual primary sources may be incorporated into a world history survey course. The lesson demonstrates ways to work with primary source materials and link them to large themes in world history.

• Reacting to the Past

  This page provides a brief description of the methods and goals of Reacting to the Past games and provides links to the games published by W.W. Norton & Company and Reacting Consortium Press.