Primary Source American History - 2018-19 edition

Primary Source American History a workbook in the form of a toolbox of teacher assignments. The main idea behind it is to create a large number of primary source readings – more than 90 in total – that can be assigned to U.S. History students in high school or as part of a university core survey course on U.S. History. But this workbook contains a variety of teacher resources, including:

94 primary source reading assignments,
Eight research and documentation projects (five papers, a PowerPoint presentation and a video),
20 unit vocabulary lists
22 review worksheets,
Three Mock Trials (two criminal and one civil),
Two Mock Congresses (with short speech/paper),
One Oval Office simulation

All of the assignments are in print-ready format. Because it is a digital text in MS Word DOC format, they are adaptable to your classroom preferences. Moreover, it’s easy for the teacher purchasing this to post the first 750-odd pages on a school password-protected school intranet to use as a textbook supplement. (You may want to withhold the Mock Trials and Mock Congresses for the appropriate time.)

All of the primary source readings have a series of questions at the end, which are generally a mix of reading comprehension, student opinion, Document-Based Questions, and – whenever possible – links to current events. The primary source documents are a necessity for the honors-level students at the college preparatory high school where I teach, as most are tracked to take the College Board’s AP U.S. History exam. As such, I give them the document-based questions (DBQs) at the end of the texts (marked with a “►”) as preparation for the kind of questions they’ll likely encounter in the AP exam.

In this third edition, I’ve included more readings about immigration and international trade. I’ve also added the an Oval Office simulation on a North Korean crisis. Finally, I’ve tried to update the questions to readings in the first edition in order to to relate them to current events as much as possible.

The full index of readings and documents is available on my Pinterest site here: https://www.pinterest.com/teddlem/my-store/

– Thomas R. Eddlem
July, 2018