Synergy: 1919

From the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to race riots, labor protests, and the Communist scare, the year 1919 has become known as a transformative year in American history.

Read the recently published children's book on this topic, then learn more at the website:

1919: THE YEAR THAT CHANGED AMERICA by Martin W. Sander explores six transformative events that have had a lasting impact on American history. This engaging work of nonfiction features photographs, primary source documents, and short narratives.

Wikipedia’s “year” pages provide a useful quick-reference for the key events of each year. In addition each year page contains births, deaths, Nobel prizes, and other useful information to jumpstart an investigation of a particular year such as 1919.

1919 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1919

ARC courtesy of Bloomsbury Children.

Website: Making the History of 1989

MAKING THE HISTORY OF 1989 is a website exploring the fall of communism in Eastern Europe.

The website begins with an introductory essay explaining the significance of 1989 in world history. The primary sources section contains over 300 government documents, images, videos, and artifacts. The scholar interviews and case studies explore specific aspects of the time period. Finally, thematic teaching modules each provide an introduction, primary sources, teaching strategies, lesson plans, document-based questions, writing prompts, and resources.

Librarians will find this website provides a useful context for world history lessons. Involve students in comparing the perspectives represented in the scholar interviews. Involve students in building their own case studies using the primary sources.

To visit the website, go to http://chnm.gmu.edu/1989/.