Social Studies Story Briefs

How do we make a "sound judgment" in a culturally diverse society? How do we know the best path to follow in an interdependent world? These stories, based on social-studies, help us to understand that personal and environmental relationships impact our lives and our world.

As Dante and Virgil make their way through the Inferno, they encounter demons with pitchforks. Although the pitchforks are raised, as if to attack, th...

Three days after Anne Frank told "Kitty" about an unsettling conversation with her father - that the Frank family may have to go into hiding somewhere...

Anne Frank, a Jewish girl living with her family in Amsterdam, was thirteen years old during the summer of 1942.  At the time, German forces were...

While he was on the run, following his escape from Washington, John Wilkes Booth recorded his thoughts in a diary. Some of its pages are missing, lead...

Slaves helped to build the White House which upset First Lady Abigail Adams. She and John Adams were the first family to move into the Executive Mansi...

When Napoleon and his men reach the Berezina River, they find the bridge destroyed and the river thawed. To escape a trap, they must build a 100-mete...

Understanding Dante's Inferno becomes much-easier when we view illustrations by an artist like Gustave Dore.

An unknown miniaturist, working in Venice during the 1340s, created this work illuminating a page from Dante’s Divine Comedy. The 14th-century m...

Not normally a writer of poetry - or anything else as a published author - Mary Elizabeth Frye (an American who lived in Baltimore) was moved by the s...

Dorothea Lange, a famous American photographer who captured the plight of Depression-era people with her camera, took many still-famous pictures in th...

Despite her obvious intelligence, Dorothy Height faced racial discrimination during her youth. Barnard College refused to accept her, but Height was ...

Americans fighting in World War I were called doughboys.

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