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History Lessons

Reading Like a Historian

The Reading Like a Historian curriculum engages students in historical inquiry. Each lesson revolves around a central historical question and features a set of primary documents designed for groups of students with a range of reading skills.

This curriculum teaches students how to investigate historical questions by employing reading strategies such as sourcing, contextualizing, corroborating, and close reading. Instead of memorizing historical facts, students evaluate the trustworthiness of multiple perspectives on historical issues and learn to make historical claims backed by documentary evidence. To learn more about how to use Reading Like a Historian lessons, watch these videos about how teachers use these materials in their classrooms.

Click here for a complete list of Reading Like a Historian lessons, and click here for a complete list of materials available in Spanish.

Topic

  • U.S. History (47)
  • (-) World History (15)

Time Period

  • Before 500 BCE (3)
  • 500 BCE - 1 CE (7)
  • 1 CE - 500 CE (4)
  • 500 CE - 1300 CE (4)
  • 1300s (4)
  • (-) 1400s (1)
  • (-) 1500s (8)
  • 1600s (3)
  • 1700s (2)
  • (-) 1800s (4)
  • 1900s (18)
Image: Photo of Macchu Picchu taken in 2007. From the Wikimedia Commons.

Inca Empire

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Image: Portrait of Martin Luther made by Lucas Cranach the Elder in 1529. From the Wikimedia Commons.

Martin Luther

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Moctezuma's Zoo

Moctezuma's Zoo

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Image source: Illustration of Moctezuma from the Mendoza Codex. Retrieved from the Public Domain Review.

Moctezuma and Cortés

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Codex Azcatitlan

La Malinche

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Illustration of Atahualpa and Pizarro

Atahualpa and the Bible

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Image: Illustration from the Florentine Codex created c. 1577. From the World Digital Library.

Aztec Encyclopedia

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Image: Print of Galileo by Samuel Sartain from painting by Wyatt, date unknown. From the Library of Congress. In 1633, scientist Galileo Galilei was convicted of heresy by the Inquisition. He was forced to recant his beliefs and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. Students may be surprised to learn Galileo's crime: teaching the sun, rather than the earth, is at the center of the solar system. In this lesson, students explore three primary sources and one New York Times article to answer the quest

Galileo

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Image: 1790 Diagram of a ship from the Atlantic slave trade. From the Wikimedia Commons.

The Middle Passage

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Pagination

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