|
American Experience: Toolkits | Resources
Some stories just can't be told. They must be experienced.
UNC-TV's American Experience Toolkits
 Welcome! As television's most-watched history series, American Experience is both on-air and online, bringing to life the incredible characters and epic stories that have shaped America's past and present. We encourage educators to use this site in correlation with American Experience as a resource tool in their social studies classroom. This site provides modules with essential questions that address historical topics of instruction, audio and/or video resources, and suggestions for use to innovate dynamic K-12 classroom instruction, as well as connections to the North Carolina Social Studies Standard Course of Study. This is a “living” resource in which additional information will continuously be added.
Getting Started
The purpose of this American Experience project is to provide a broad understanding of how and why events, people, and technology changed the course of history in the United States. The toolbox begins by highlighting a specific episode taken from the American Experience collection. Big ideas (concepts) and essential questions serve as catalysts to promote historical inquiry rather than simple recall of historical events. Teachers are encouraged to take advantage of all elements of the toolbox which:
- incorporate other American Experience episodes and resources that are pivotal in understanding multiple perspectives
- provide instructional and learning activities that stimulate student interest in the learning process
- align correlating standards included in the North Carolina Social Studies Standard Course of Study
- initiate a forum designed as an online collaborative professional learning community
Toolkits
American Experience: The 1930's
 One of America’s most tumultuous decades, the 1930s challenged Americans with a financial crisis, environmental catastrophe, and high unemployment rates. The repercussions of the Great Depression brought about change for both the people and the government, and many new habits and policies are still being debated today. This fall, PBS's American Experience presents The 1930's, a five-part series that examines the political and cultural life of America during one of history's most tumultuous decades. Over five consecutive Mondays, The 1930s explores themes straight from today's news headlines:
- Banking security, stock market manipulation, and speculation
- The role of government during economic crisis, and economic recovery
- The relationship between environmental conservation and economic growth and stability
- FDR's New Deal, the economic stimulus plan of its time
The 1930s Teacher’s Guide examines the role of government and the New Deal, the relationship between conservation and economic recovery, and looks at the personal side of what life was like in the 1930s.
American Experience
The 1930s: The Crash of 1929
Airs on UNC-TV, Monday, October 26, at 9 PM
In the "roaring twenties," while the stock market was rising, there were few critics. It was a "New Era" when everyone could get rich. Leaders of Wall Street such as Charles Mitchell, President of the National City Bank (which would become Citibank), stock specialist Michael Meehan, and Jesse Livermore, a Wall Street insider, found new ways to manipulate the stock market and grew incredibly wealthy, helping create the economic boom of that fabulous decade. Their success made them folk heroes of the day. The upward climb of the market seemed limitless. But in October of 1929, the market plunged downward taking with it the finances of the Wall Street titans and everyday investors alike. The Crash of 1929 captures the unbounded optimism of the age and the shocking consequences when reality finally hit, exploring a fateful year through the words and experiences of the descendants of several titans of finance.
American Experience
The 1930s: Civilian Conservation Corps
Airs on UNC-TV, Monday, November 2, at 9 PM
In March 1933, within weeks of his inauguration, President Franklin Roosevelt sent legislation to Congress aimed at providing relief for the one out of every four American workers who were unemployed. He proposed the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) to provide jobs in natural resource conservation. Over the next decade, the CCC put more than three million young men to work in the nation's forests and parks, planting trees, building flood barriers, fighting fires, and maintaining roads and trails. Corps workers lived in camps under quasi-military discipline, and received a wage of thirty dollars per month, twenty-five of which they were required to send home to their families. This film tells the story of one of the boldest and most popular New Deal experiments, positioning it as a pivotal moment in the emergence of modern environmentalism and federal unemployment relief.
American Experience
The 1930s: Hoover Dam
Airs on UNC-TV, Monday, November 9 at 9 PM
Rising more than 700 feet above the raging waters of the Colorado River, it was called one of the greatest engineering works in history. Hoover Dam, built during the Great Depression, drew men desperate for work to a remote and rugged canyon near Las Vegas. There they struggled against heat, choking dust and perilous heights to build a colossus of concrete that brought electricity and water to millions and transformed the American Southwest, and in the midst of the Great Depression, Hoover Dam was a symbol of hope for the dispossessed.
American Experience
The 1930s: Surviving the Dust Bowl
Airs on UNC-TV, Monday, November 16 at 9 PM
They were called "Black Blizzards," dark clouds reaching miles into the sky, churning millions of tons of dirt into torrents of destruction. For ten years beginning in 1930, dust storms ravaged the parched and over-plowed Southern Plains, turning bountiful wheat fields into desert. Surviving the Dust Bowl is the remarkable story of the determined people who clung to their homes and way of life, enduring drought, dust, disease--even death--for nearly a decade.
American Experience
The 1930s: Seabiscuit
Airs on UNC-TV, Monday, November 23 at 9 PM
He was boxy, with stumpy legs that wouldn't completely straighten, a short straggly tail and an ungainly gait, but though he didn't look the part, Seabiscuit was one of the most remarkable thoroughbred racehorses in history. In the 1930s, when Americans longed to escape the grim realities of Depression-era life, four men turned Seabiscuit into a national hero. In telling the story of Seabiscuit's unlikely career, this film illuminates the precarious economic conditions that defined America in the 1930s and explores the fascinating behind-the-scenes world of thoroughbred racing.
Other featured American Experience Toolkits include:
Episode: "A Class Apart"
From a small-town Texas murder emerged a landmark civil rights case. The little-known story of the Mexican American lawyers who took Hernandez v. Texas to the Supreme Court, challenging Jim Crow-style discrimination.
Episode: "Alexander Hamilton"
Alexander Hamilton provides insights into social studies topics including the founding of the American republic, the Federalist papers and the U.S. Constitution, the development of the American economy, partisan politics, the qualities of political leaders, the private lives of public officials, and more.
Episode: "The Alaska Pipeline"
In the early weeks of 1968, after a decade-long search for oil in Alaska’s frozen wilderness, gas burst up out of an exploratory well on the North Slope with such force the crew thought it was about to burst. Geologists calculated that as much as ten billion barrels of oil lay below the frozen tundra of Prudhoe Bay—the largest oil find in North America.
UNC-TV Education on Facebook
 Social networking in education has advanced professional dialogue amongst educators worldwide. The purpose of the UNC-TV Education on Facebook site is to provide a forum, or vehicle, for stimulating thought regarding the American Experience film and toolbox. If you do not already have a Facebook account, you will asked to create one.
UNC-TV Education-Facebook is engaging its one-of-a-kind, educator-moderated UNC-TV Education-Facebook page to reach out to local teachers, school administrators, and others, and provide the latest insights on how American Experience can be used as a professional learning community for classroom instruction. After reviewing the episode(s) and utilizing the suggested resources, teachers are encouraged to log into the Facebook site and join us for a healthy exchange!
|
