What really happened at the Battle of Lexington? In this lesson, students practice sourcing, corroboration, and contextualization as they weigh competing accounts of who fired the first shots of the Revolutionary War.

In this lesson, students practice sourcing to understand what took place in Boston on March 5, 1770. First, students analyze two illustrations of the event and reason about how each illustration’s source and context influenced the way the work depicted the Boston Massacre. Then, students examine a colonist’s testimony and a British army official’s narrative of the incident and consider why the accounts strongly differ.

Most students are familiar with the Declaration of Independence. But have they ever critically examined the text or questioned the motives of its authors? In this lesson plan, students weigh contrasting interpretations by prominent historians to answer the question: Why did the Founders write the Declaration of Independence?

The second part of the lesson encourages students to think through what the Declaration of Independence means and what the grievances meant.

In this report, released by researchers from the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) in 2016, researchers share that, when it comes to evaluating information that flows across social channels or pops up in a Google search, young and otherwise digital-savvy students can easily be duped.

The ratification of the Constitution was hotly debated across the country but nowhere as fiercely as in New York. Students read Federalist and Anti-Federalist positions from the New York State Convention to explore the different sides of the debate and to understand who stood on each side.

Textbooks may offer helpful summaries of historical figures' lives and contributions, but rarely do they capture a sense of their personalities. Two letters to George Washington allow students to consider the competing politics and personalities of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton.

The purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France in October 1803 doubled the size of the United States and foreshadowed its emergence as a global power. The purchase marked an unprecedented use of executive power by President Thomas Jefferson and evoked strong resistance from Federalists. In this lesson, a timeline of the purchase along with letters by Federalist leaders help students decide whether practical concerns or political agendas motivated the opposition.

Students are often captivated by the story of the Salem witch trials. But do they understand the deeper causes of the crisis? And do they see what the crisis reveals about life in Massachusetts at the end of the 17th century? In this lesson, students use four historical sources to build a more textured understanding of both the causes and historical context of these dramatic events.

Shays' Rebellion is often regarded as the event that led Americans to want a stronger central government, but the story is not so simple. Opinions on the rebellion and the power of government varied, often along class lines. In this lesson, students will gain a more nuanced understanding of how Americans reacted to Shays' Rebellion by analyzing a textbook account and a letter by Thomas Jefferson

Although the Declaration of Independence stated, "All men are created equal," Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers agreed to include slavery in the Constitution. What factors led to this decision? In this lesson, students consider the positions of delegates to the Constitutional Convention along with historians' interpretations to understand this apparent contradiction.