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This article informs that a school-year research experiment using primary resources to teach an important national issue--protest movements against the Vietnam War at the local level--is an excellent way to motivate students and energize classroom teaching. In the author's case, it is just the charge the author need to jumpstart his intellectual battery. As a teacher for over thirty years, the author constantly look for new pedagogical challenges. The author teach in the small suburban school district of Amityville, New York. Amityville is approximately thirty miles east of New York City, on Long Island. It is a culturally diverse community best known for a famous incident later made into a movie trilogy--"The Amityville Horror." Unfortunately, Amityville Memorial High School is often sarcastically referred to as the "real horror." Indeed, because the school has almost ninety percent minority students, many with low reading and writing levels, its academic reputation has been less than stellar. However, this has not deferred the author from challenging his own students to undertake serious scholarly research and apply it to the study of American history.

Provides information on the adaptation of writing assignments based on the U.S. history for teaching the world history survey course. Value of examining primary source documents; Major assignments valuable in teaching world history survey; Significance of the periodical articles assignment.

The article presents and discusses the winning paper in the Junior Division Historical Paper, National History Day 2008 competition by Samvit Jain. The efforts of Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce tribe in Idaho during the 19th century to repatriate the tribe through protests won the support of the Indian rights movement of the 1880s. The U.S. government-proposed reservation for the Nez Perce tribe in 1863, U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant's peace policy for American Indians, which consolidated tribes on reservations and assigned them to Christian denominations, and Chief Joseph's testimony to a Congressional Investigating Committee on American Indian rights are discussed.

The author discusses his experiences teaching survey courses on the subject of history at the university level in the U.S. as of May 2013. According to the author, he altered his survey courses by eliminating a textbook for the course as well as short answer and essay examinations. The author states that his philosophy in his survey courses design was based on the concept that history involves the interpretation of historical effects and their causes as opposed to rote memorization of facts, dates, and names. The article discusses potential drawbacks concerning permitting students to write papers at home, particularly the potential for plagiarism.

This article presents information on United States History Survey. Several authors help understand the problems that are faced in teaching and testing surveys. However, their papers also reveal that common understanding does not necessarily lead to uniform remedies. Each of them offers a particular way of tackling the problems of survey teaching; together they offer a range of issues to think about as people debate ways to teach this primal course. A scholar contends that people should adopt the web as organizing framework. The author think that the Web and its notion of interconnected people, events, ideas, and places at a time and over time is quite appealing as an organizing assumption.

The article offers information on the essay writing contest for students in grade six through 12 in the U.S. in line with the celebration of National History Day. The contest in the research paper category requires individual students to produce a scholarly paper accompanied by an annotated bibliography. The judges for the contest include educators, public historians and archivists. During the 2008-2009 school year, the theme that students can explore in their research paper should be related to "The Individual in History: Actions and Legacies." It offers advice to students who would like to enter the contest.

The author discusses the eviction of the mixed race population of Malaga Island in Maine. She mentions the eugenics movement that developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the economic decline in Maine that lead to a greater drain by public welfare, and the combination of motives to destroy the Malaga community.

The article discusses the scientific significance of the October 4, 1951, death of African American Henrietta Lacks and human cell lines extracted from her known as HeLa cells by U.S. physician George Otto Gey and the issue of the responsibilities of medical researchers to protect the rights of patients undergoing treatment. According to the article, the cells extracted from the cancerous tumors that led to the death of Lacks were taken without consent. The article states that the HeLa cell line represented a medical breakthrough in cancer research and genetic research.

The article explores the efforts of Hugh Hammond Bennett to promote soil conservation in the U.S. and how his efforts enabled the U.S. to cope with the Dust Bowl, a series of dust storms caused by drought in U.S. and Canadian prairie lands during the 1930s. He launched a national program of soil conservation after he discovered the problem of soil erosion which could negatively affect U.S. agriculture. Bennett also founded and headed the U.S. Soil Conservation Service. An overview of the reports published by Bennett that offer information on soil erosion is provided. It outlines the features of the national soil program proposed by Bennett in 1933.