sheg.stanford.edu/rlh
The Stanford History Education Group – Reading History Like a Historian
SHEG has developed Common Core aligned lessons to engage students in historical inquiry. Each lesson is designed around an essential question. The lessons include primary source documents (including art, photographs, and political cartoons) and secondary source document excerpts from multiple perspectives. Students must source the documents, explain their context, engage in close readings, and corroborate them against one another in order to answer the essential question.
Here is a list of lessons focused on East Asian History and the Asian American experience.
World History
- Invasion on Nanking (Nanking Massacre)
- China’ Cultural Revolution
U.S. History
- Chinese Immigration and Exclusion
- Japanese Segregation and Exclusion
- The Atomic Bomb
- Japanese Internment
- The Korean War
- Gulf of Tonkin Resolution
I use these Reading History Like a Historian lessons once a week in my classroom. I have been pleasantly surprised by how much the students enjoy them. They are genuinely engaged! They like the fact that these lessons make them into history detectives. I have used the lessons listed above on Japanese Segregation and Exclusion, and the Atomic Bomb. My students are currently using the documents included in the Atomic Bomb lesson to write a formal essay.
The Japanese Segregation lesson focuses on how the Japanese were treated differently than the Chinese after Teddy Roosevelt’s peace negotiations ending the Russo-Japanese War. The City of San Francisco attempted to segregate Japanese students with Chinese-American students. TR had to personally intervene to end this practice. In exchange he received assurances from the Japanese government that they would limit Japanese emigration to America.
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