Source Sets
28 ready-to-teach sets, each built around one big question with 5 to 8 sources from the collection, a suggested sequence, a writing prompt, and a free student packet you can copy into Google Drive.
Was the New Deal a success?
Students weigh FDR's own words against photographs, recordings, and a skeptical cartoon to judge what the New Deal set out to do and what it delivered.
Were the colonists justified in declaring independence?
Students trace the escalating conflict through Parliament's acts, including its claim of full authority over the colonies, and the colonists' replies, ending with the Declaration itself.
Should the Constitution have been ratified?
Federalists and Anti-Federalists go head to head over the new Constitution, with the Articles of Confederation as the starting point.
What caused the Civil War?
Laws, a Supreme Court decision, speeches, and secession documents let students build a causal argument for why the Union broke apart.
Who freed the enslaved people?
Students compare the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment with photographs and records of enslaved people freeing themselves.
How did women win the right to vote?
From Seneca Falls to the 19th Amendment, students follow arguments, speeches, and protest photographs across seventy years.
Did Progressive Era reformers make life better for workers?
Muckraking texts, photographs of child labor and the Triangle fire, mill workers who opposed a federal child labor law, and Theodore Roosevelt's warning about muckrakers set up a debate about what reform achieved.
Captains of industry or robber barons?
Carnegie's defense of wealth meets antitrust law, Populist and labor protest, and Gilded Age cartoons.
Was America a land of opportunity for immigrants?
Immigrant memoirs, exclusion laws, cartoons, and immigration paperwork show both welcome and restriction.
How did U.S. policy toward Native nations change from 1830 to 1934?
Removal, treaties, allotment, boarding schools, and citizenship: students track a century of federal policy and Native responses.
Why did the United States enter World War I?
A secret telegram, Wilson's war message, and wartime posters let students explain how neutrality ended, plus the free-speech limits that followed.
Was the peace after World War I a fair one?
Wilson's Fourteen Points meet the actual treaty, its critics, and the new map of Europe.
Was the incarceration of Japanese Americans justified?
Executive Order 9066 and the Korematsu decision lay out the government's wartime case, alongside photographs, camp newspapers, and the 1988 Civil Liberties Act.
Should the United States have dropped the atomic bomb?
Students examine the decision, the Potsdam ultimatum, and the human cost in Hiroshima.
Who started the Cold War?
Wartime agreements, the Iron Curtain, containment, and rival alliances let students assign responsibility for the Cold War.
Nonviolence or Black Power: which approach did more to advance civil rights?
King's letter and speech meet Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael, with photographs of sit-ins and the March on Washington and the responses of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.
How did the law on segregated schools change, and why?
From Plessy to Mendez, Brown, Little Rock, and busing, students trace the court cases and local conflicts over segregated schools.
What rights do students have at school?
Landmark Supreme Court cases about speech, searches, prayer, and the press in schools.
Why did American support for the Vietnam War change?
From the Tonkin Gulf Resolution and the 1954 Geneva accords to President Johnson's own words, protest, the Pentagon Papers case, and the War Powers Resolution.
Did the French Revolution live up to its own ideals?
Revolutionary declarations and speeches are tested against Olympe de Gouges, the Terror, and Burke's critique.
Was the Industrial Revolution progress?
Adam Smith and the factory town meet Engels, child and women miners, Peterloo, and Marx.
How did people argue for and against imperialism?
Arguments for empire from Lugard and Macaulay meet critics, cartoons, and the debate over U.S. expansion after 1898.
Where do our rights come from?
From Magna Carta and the English Bill of Rights to Hobbes, Locke, and the Declaration, students trace ideas about rights and government.
What happened when Europe and the Americas met?
Columbus, Cortés, Aztec accounts, Spanish law, and the Columbian Exchange give competing views of the encounter.
How did China respond to Western power?
From the Qianlong Emperor's letter to the fall of the Qing, students follow China's encounters with foreign powers.
How did former colonies make the case for independence?
Declarations and speeches from Vietnam, India, Kenya, Bandung, the UN, Africa, and South Africa.
Could World War II have been prevented?
Appeasement, the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and wartime speeches let students judge the choices of the late 1930s.
What made a good citizen in the ancient world?
Athens, Rome, China, and India offer different answers about citizens, laws, and rulers.