Lewis & Clark: The National Bicentennial Exhibition

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• Learn more about American history, American Indians, explorations, Meriwether Lewis, primary sources, Thomas Jefferson, and William Clark.

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Get ready for an adventure! Captivating images and engaging activities will leave you no choice but to join the 1804 Corps of Discovery and journey across North America with Lewis & Clark: The National Bicentennial Exhibition. Presented by the Missouri Historical Society in conjunction with a traveling exhibition of artifacts, the online exhibition provides rich content and multimedia resources right to your classroom.

Journey allows students to take a linear approach to the materials. From Thomas Jefferson and the origins of the expedition through the return to St. Louis in 1806, an interactive map and accompanying text and images chronicle the efforts and events of the journey. Students may select “learn more” in various places to examine documents and objects relevant to that stage of the journey or to see more information about various places on or nearby the exhibition’s route. At any point in the journey you can toggle from the 1803 map to the modern map, providing the student with a current frame of reference for the places depicted.Themes provide a different perspective to the exhibition, organizing the resources digitized in logical groups and providing context, including modern-day correlations, to help students understand each item and why it was included. The viewer for each object allows the student to zoom in to examine the materials, zoom out to see the whole item, move the image to refocus the center, print the image, and see a text description of that item. The third way to see the exhibition is to go directly into the digitized collection of items and documents by selecting the navigation choice Gallery. Here you may simply browse, or actively search the collection by date, maker, material, name or description.The lesson plans related to this site are thorough and cover a wide range of topics. The For Educators link provides access to lesson plans for grade 4 through 12 that correlate to the major themes of the exhibition: Preparing for the Trip, Politics & Diplomacy, Women, Mapping, Animals, Language, Warriors & Soldiers, Trade & Property, and Plants. Resources in these plans are also varied, for example, the Language unit includes the following resources:

• maps of cultures encountered on the journey
• video of Indian sign language
• interactive “language chain” activity that allows students to understand the communications challenges overcome on the journey by organizing the participants according to the languages they could speak then listening to the conversation of 5 people as Lewis attempts to speak with Cameahwait to negotiate the trade for horses
• Paraphrased, printable student reading selections for printing
• Images of primary source documents and objects
• Websites and readings for teacher reference

For each standards-aligned unit there are both “Essential Questions” and “Connections to Today” to help teachers and students put the material in context and see the relevance of the exploration to our modern lives and work. See also the “Document Analysis Guide” and the “Object Analysis Guide” available in the section explaining the effective use of Primary source materials.