Teaching Tolerance offers the following essays and activities to help students gain a deeper understanding of past and present struggles for Latino civil rights.

In this lesson, students will work in pairs and use expert reading strategies to analyze the Court’s ruling in Hernandez v. Texas. After participating in a carousel discussion, students will write a three-minute paper describing how the United States would be different if the Court had reached an alternate conclusion.

This lesson unit is intended to help you assess how well students are able to: Perform arithmetic operations, including those involving whole-number exponents, recognizing and applying the conventional order of operations; Write and evaluate numerical expressions from diagrammatic representations and be able to identify equivalent expressions; apply the distributive and commutative properties appropriately; and use the method for finding areas of compound rectangles.

Students discover why Leonardo is considered the ultimate Renaissance man. They will learn about his famous notebooks, focusing upon his machines of motion, then zooming in on the flying machines.

Did changes in state constitutions tend to affect the voting population? In this lesson, students discuss the general trend in the first half of the 19th century to extend the right to vote to more white males.

Americans affirmed their independence with the ringing declaration that "all men are created equal." Some of them owned slaves, however,and were unwilling to give them up as they gave speeches and wrote pamphlets championing freedom, liberty, and equality. So "to form a more perfect union" in 1787, certain compromises were made in the Constitution regarding slavery. This settled the slavery controversy for the first few decades of the American republic, but this situation changed with the application of Missouri for statehood in 1819.

This lesson focuses on character analysis throughout William Golding's novel Lord of the Flies. While contemplating both direct and indirect characterization techniques, students will be able to consider how characterization builds relationships among the boys in the novel.

In this lesson, students gain a sense of the dramatic effect of FDR's voice on his audience, see the scope of what he was proposing in these first two "Fireside Chats," and make an overall analysis of why the series of speeches were so successful.

This lesson focuses on the shift toward mass production in northern factories and on southern plantations that occurred during the first half of the 19th century. Using an economics-focused approach to examining U.S. history prior to the civil war, students examine the role of slavery, industrialization, regionalism, and political responses that ultimately led to the start of a war.

Students learn more about Faulkner's life and the culture of the South while exploring the use of multiple voices in narration.

Published in 1929, "The Sound and the Fury" is often referred to as William Faulkner's first work of genius. Faulkner's style is characterized by frequent time shifts, narrator shifts, unconventional punctuation and sentence structure, as well as a stream-of-consciousness technique that reveals the inner thoughts of characters to the reader. This curriculum unit will examine narrative structure and time, narrative voice/point of view, and symbolism throughout "The Sound and the Fury."

How did Abraham Lincoln understand the relationship between principles of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution?

Students examine the Autobiography of Frederick Douglass to discover how his skilled use of language painted a realistic portrait of slavery and removed some common misconceptions about slaves and their situation.

What conditions provided the impetus for the Sedition Act? Partisan animosity was strong during Adams's presidency. The first two political parties in the U.S. were in their infancy"”the Federalists, to which the majority of members of Congress belonged, and the Democratic-Republicans, led by former vice-president Thomas Jefferson and four-term Congressman James Madison, who had left the House in 1796.

A guided exploration of "Hopitutskwa," the Hopi homeland, through maps and place names. Using English translations, students make inferences about the Hopi cultural relationship to landscape and place. They examine regional place names of their own home communities and create personal maps by identifying and naming places of importance in their lives.

During the Middle Ages, the feudal system meant that most people in Europe lived in small farming villages. As the population expanded and the towns grew, however, a need arose to find ways to differentiate between two people who shared the same first name.

Reading Emily Dickinson's letters alongside her poems helps students to better appreciate a remarkable voice in American literature, grasp how Dickinson perceived herself and her poetry, and perhaps most relevant to their own endeavors consider the ways in which a writer constructs a "supposed person."

Why is James Madison such an important figure? Why is he known as the "Father of the Constitution"? How involved was James Madison in the most important events in America from 1775 to 1817? The answers to these questions provide context for understanding the importance of James Madison's opinions on constitutional issues.

Uncover the sources of Twain's comic genius in American traditions of dialect humor and literary satire.

By examining King's famous essay in defense of nonviolent protest, along with two significant criticisms of his direct action campaign, this lesson will help students assess various alternatives for securing civil rights for black Americans in a self-governing society.