Start with a Question

Chris Jordan is a photographer and artist making bold statements with images. At about the 7 minute 30 second mark he calls the statistics surrounding prescription drug consumption, imprisonment, and breast augmentation surgeries "atrocities" in our culture. Is he right?  Since I teach teenage girls and see their daily struggles (not to mention that I vividly remember my own), the stats on breast augmentation surgeries for women under the age of 21, and given as a gift for high school graduation.... well, I'm not sure what to say. Once we have gotten past our first five days and students have set up their initial tech, critical research, and analysis skills; I'd really love to dive into history with these images of today's statistics.  The lesson is that we have arrived at this place because of our history.  My job is to teach kids the history and to help them understand how it affected the present.  Their job is to help create change that will move us in a ...

Human beings tend to either fear what they don't understand or to make their own far-fetched assumptions. In 18th and 19th centuries, this was certainly true between Americans and Japanese.  Some of the interpretations of the culture and people across the Pacific are comical.  The best way to help our students understand this historical perspective is through the eyes of the people who were living at the time.  Visual primary sources are the go-to resource.  All of the primary source images in this post are from John W. Dower's essay "Black Ships and Samurai" on MIT's Visualizing Cultures database . Historical Perspective I love these simple charts from The Historical Thinking Project . Both would be helpful when implementing this lesson. The first helps students to put aside their modern bias because they have grown up in a time of instant communication and technological fashion. The second helps students compare historical perspectives that are at odds w...

Tokugawa Ieyasu truly was the ultimate warrior.  He was able to unite Japan in the early 1600s after decades upon decades of fighting between competing warlords.  He did this with a combination of strategic alliances, patient planning, and fierce loyalty to his family name.  Ieyasu's rise to power was his life's work and he built a military empire that was meant to last with strict structures and social classes in place. Government and Social Hierarchy The Tokugawa shogunate was a huge bureacracy , but unlike the inefficient double-dipping politicians we think of when bureaucracy is mentioned in the present day, the Tokugawa regime had a clear system of authority and everyone knew their role.  Most never questioned the authority of the shogun.  Society was divided into 5 classes, with the two at the top being of samurai stock and education.  Ieyasu himself defined the levels of society best as documented in the early seventeenth century : …t...