Education

We The Teachers

We The Teachers is a bi-weekly podcast featuring Teaching American History scholars discussing American history with a focus on primary documents.

The Ashbrook Center and TeachingAmericanHistory.org seek to provide high-quality content-focused programs, resources, and courses for teachers of American History, Government, Civics, and related subjects. Students, citizens, and anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the American experience can also benefit from our resources, which include podcasts, a vast documents library, monthly webinars, and in-person seminars.

Latest Episodes:

Core Documents Collection: Women’s Voices in Religion in American History and Politics Jul 11, 2019

Show notes

While women have historically made up an overwhelming percentage of America’s religious practitioners, their roles in shaping the practice as well as the doctrines of American religious groups have too often been underappreciated and undertold. Teaching American History's latest Core Documents Collection, Religion in American History and Politics: Women's Voices, edited by Sarah Morgan Smith helps to overcome this deficit, posing questions about the ways in which women understood their relationship to religious authorities, the reasons a woman might or might not act upon a felt call to religious leadership or preaching, and of course, the many ways in which religious women have been inspired by their beliefs to pursue justice and reform in their societies. The volume is an attempt to allow those women to speak for themselves so that when we speak of concepts like “antebellum evangelicalism,” “anti-Catholicism,” or even the Civil Rights Movement, we better understand them not as monolithic moments in time, but as moments of intense engagement between men and women of many different persuasions. This is, of necessity, a selective and not exhaustive collection: it is focused on texts by individuals who were clearly situated in a way to shape the discourse of their time.

This 35-document volume, which also includes eight images, helps to rediscover the impactful ideas, words, and actions of a variety of women from throughout American History, where, animated by faith, they sought social, political, and economic reform. The volume is available for free as a PDF or Apple eBook, for $.99 for the Kindle, and for $10 through Amazon's print-on-demand service.

In keeping with our tradition of interviewing each volume's editor, we have included Dr. Sarah Morgan Smith's thoughts on her work on this volume, and her insights about where to start and how to include these important documents in a history, government, or civics course.

The post Core Documents Collection: Women’s Voices in Religion in American History and Politics appeared first on Teaching American History.

2019-2020 Webinars – Registration is Open May 28, 2019

Show notes

Saturday Webinars: American Minds - REGISTER HERE

During the 2019-20 school year we will revisit a general theme – the individual – we’ve studied in past series, like American Presidents. This time, however, we are excluding presidents and instead broadening our scope to include individuals who have had significant impact on our culture, society, and government through literature, reform leadership, science, religion, and war, as well as politics. Our American Minds webinar series will help you integrate a broader selection of individuals into your history and government courses, and will also provide English teachers with an easy avenue to consider some literary icons from a historical perspective. Each program is 75 minutes long and airs on select Saturdays at 11am ET.

Jonathan Edwards – 17 AUG 19
Benjamin Franklin – 7 SEP 19
Alexander Hamilton – 5 OCT 19
Henry Clay – 2 NOV 19
Harriet Beecher Stowe – 7 DEC 19
Frederick Douglass – 11 JAN 20
William Jennings Bryan – 1 FEB 20
Jane Addams – 7 MAR 20
Douglas MacArthur – 4 APR 20
Ralph Ellison – 2 May 20

Documents in Detail: Selections from the 50 Core American Documents - REGISTER HERE

Documents in Detail will continue during the 2019-20 school year with ten more 60-minute episodes take place typically on the third Wednesday of each month, at 7pm EST. Each episode will focus on one document, drawn from our collection of 50 Core American Documents. Spanning American history from 1776 to 1964, each episode is a deep-dive into a single document, exploring its historical context, ideas, language, and impact on politics, law, and culture.

Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, 28 AUG 19
Federalist 1, 25 SEP 19
Thomas Jefferson’s First Inaugural Address, 23 OCT 19
The Webster-Hayne Debates, 20 NOV 19
John C. Calhoun’s Speech on the Oregon Bill, 18 DEC 19
Abraham Lincoln’s Fragment on the Constitution and Union, 22 JAN 20
Plessy v. Ferguson, 19 FEB 20
1912 Progressive Party Platform, 25 MAR 20
Speech on the 150th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, 22 APR 20
Herbert Hoover’s Speech on the New Deal, 13 May 20

For both series, individual episode information, including documents links, will be published one month before the episode air date.

The post 2019-2020 Webinars – Registration is Open appeared first on Teaching American History.

Saturday Webinar: Federalists vs. Antifederalists May 17, 2019

Show notes

The second of TAH.org's Great American Debates webinar series took place on Saturday, 8 September. Our episode focused on the Federalist-Antifederalist Debates that took place most obviously from late 1787 through 1788, when the Constitution was being considered for ratification throughout the 13 states. Our program took a serious look at the ideas of both sides, considering them as ideas expressed and debated at the time, and looking at how some of these issues have been alive as points of contention throughout American history. For more information about the "out of doors" debates over the Constitution, take a look at our Ratification of the Constitution exhibit.

See the full archive page here.

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The post Saturday Webinar: Federalists vs. Antifederalists appeared first on Teaching American History.

Documents in Detail: LBJ’s Great Society May 16, 2019

Show notes

In this final episode of the 2018-19 Documents in Detail year, we discuss President Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" speech - its reception in 1964, and its legacy for American social policy and political thinking.

Access the full archive here.

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Documents in Detail: LBJ’s Great Society appeared first on Teaching American History.

Saturday Webinars: The Great Society vs. Modern Conservatism May 13, 2019

Show notes

The final episode in the 2018-19 Great American Debates webinar series, in which the ideas, principles, and implications of LBJ's Great Society-style liberalism and Ronald Reagan's limited government conservatism are compared, analyzed, and discussed.

Access the full archive here.

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Saturday Webinars: The Great Society vs. Modern Conservatism appeared first on Teaching American History.

Documents in Detail: FDR’s 1944 State of the Union Speech Apr 25, 2019

Show notes

In this month's episode of Documents in Detail, TAH faculty members discussed the meaning, context around, and importance of Franklin Roosevelt's 1933 State of the Union address, famous for its full-throated defense of FDR's vision for a reformed America, what he called a "second" Bill of Rights, and how he worked with his political allies and adversaries to frame, present, and even sometimes misrepresent, his foreign and domestic policies. An ever-complicated man, FDR's motives are often difficult to discern, although papers such as the 1944 SOTU offer a clear sense of his understanding of what America ought to be.

Access the full archive here.

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Documents in Detail: FDR’s 1944 State of the Union Speech appeared first on Teaching American History.

Saturday Webinars: Martin Luther King, jr. vs. Malcolm X Apr 11, 2019

Show notes

Drs. Chris Burkett, Peter Myers, and Lucas Morel discussed the different views and goals of Martin Luther King, jr. and Malcolm X in our latest Great American Debates series of Saturday Webinars.

Access the full archive here, and our podcast options below.

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The post Saturday Webinars: Martin Luther King, jr. vs. Malcolm X appeared first on Teaching American History.

Documents in Detail: Wilson’s Fourteen Points Mar 26, 2019

Show notes

Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points laid out Wilson's plan for not only a post-war world, but in many ways a new world order, in response to the destruction of World War 1. TAH scholars discuss the meaning of, context around, and impact of Wilson's ideas in this one-hour webinar.

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The post Documents in Detail: Wilson’s Fourteen Points appeared first on Teaching American History.

Core American Documents: The Bill of Rights Mar 11, 2019

Show notes

TeachingAmericanHistory.org is excited to share another resource for American history, government, civics, and social studies teachers. While you may be familiar with our 50 Core American Documents book, we are launching a new 35-volume document collection.

This collection of documents on the American Founding inaugurates a new series of document collections from TeachingAmericanHistory.org.

Each Core American Document volume will contain the following:

Key documents on the period, theme, or institution, selected by an expert and reviewed by an editorial board
An introduction highlighting key documents and themes
A thematic table of contents, showing the connections between various documents
Study questions for each document, as well as questions that refer to other documents in the collection
Notes on each document to identify people, events, movements, or ideas to improve understanding of the document’s historical context.

When complete, the series will be comprehensive and authoritative, and will present America’s story in the words of those who wrote it – America’s presidents, labor leaders, farmers, philosophers, industrialists, politicians, workers, explorers, religious leaders, judges, soldiers; its slaveholders and abolitionists; its expansionists and isolationists; its reformers and stand-patters; its strict and broad constructionists; its hard-eyed realists and visionary utopians – all united in their commitment to equality and liberty, yet so often divided by their different understandings of these most fundamental American ideas.

The latest volume in Teaching American History's Core American Documents Collections is out - the Bill of Rights. Edited by Professor Gordon Lloyd, this 26-document volume include all the same components of our other Core Documents volumes, with the goal in mind of establishing the context around the creation of the Bill of Rights, and the many sources of the right codified in those first ten amendments to the Constitution. Professor Lloyd explains how he went about choosing documents, and why he started at a somewhat novel point in history - and it's not Magna Carta.

Kindle Edition

Physical Copy

iTunes Ebook (coming soon)

PDF

The post Core American Documents: The Bill of Rights appeared first on Teaching American History.

Saturday Webinar: FDR vs. Hoover Mar 02, 2019

Show notes

TAH'S Saturday Webinar on March 3rd, 2019, focused on the ideological, practical, and political debates between Franklin Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover, primarily during the election campaign of 1932, but reaching deeper into American traditions of limited government and the role of the federal government in the life of the individual.

Access the full archive here.

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The post Saturday Webinar: FDR vs. Hoover appeared first on Teaching American History.