Picturing Modern America 1880-1920
About this resource
- Appropriate grades
- 6–12
- Subjects
- social studies (American Indians, United States history, women), thinking skills (higher order thinking, visual literacy)
- Provider
- Center for Children and Technology at the Education Development Center
- Special requirements
- Some features such as creating a slideshow require free registration so that users can save their work and come back later to finish or make changes.
Legal
This catalog record is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. This license applies to the content of this page only and does not apply to the referenced website.
From the Center for Children and Technology Picturing Modern America 1880-1920 features historical thinking exercises for middle and high school students to practice doing history the way historians do.
Picturing Modern America (PMA) contains interactive exercises designed to:
- Deepen students' understanding of common topics in the study of modern America during 1880-1920 such as industrialization, women's suffrage, immigration, the West, World War I, and child labor.
- Build students' skills in analyzing primary sources, especially visual sources.
- Generate questions that students can pursue by searching in American Memory and other sources.
The exercises fall into three categories:
- Image Detective. Here students develop their skill at ?reading' a single document. They will be observing details, drawing tentative conclusions, posing questions for further research.
- Investigations. Students explore selected themes like women's changing roles, prairie settlement, child labor and the representation of Indians, using small collections of documents or mini-archives.
- Exhibit Builder. Students act as curators, and create and save their own online exhibits, using images from American Memory and text they write themselves.
