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.

Irish children, detained in the country's Industrial Schools, were forced to work as well as study during their years of detention in such places. One...

Arrested and jailed for protesting without a permit, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. used his time in jail to write a letter urging a change in how Americ...

When Bobbie Lou Pendergrass lost her brother, who was an unarmed adviser in Vietnam, she wrote to President Kennedy asking why America was in Vietnam ...

President Thomas Jefferson asked one of his key aides, twenty-eight-year-old Meriwether Lewis, to lead an expedition west - all the way to the "wester...

Despite dreadful conditions and too-few horses, Lewis & Clark reach the Great Falls on June 13, 1805. Sacagawea soon makes a remarkable discovery, lea...

Lewis Payne is arrested on April 17, 1865, three days after President Lincoln was shot. His fate is now sealed, after his attempted assassination of t...

After attacking Secretary of State William Seward - on the night of April 14, 1865 - Lewis Powell (also known as Lewis Paine/Payne) hid in a wooded ar...

Marion Post Wolcott took thousands of pictures for the U.S. government’s Farm Security Administration. This image, made in 1939, depicts a migrant c...

Thousands of Irish children were sent to places called "Industrial Schools" throughout the 1950s. Many of these "schools" were not suitable for childr...

Lina Radke, a German-born athlete, refused to be intimidated by cultural limitations on females participating in sports.

Noah Brooks was a journalist who knew President Lincoln well and wrote about his personality.

Shortly before his inauguration as America's 16th President, Abraham Lincoln visited Philadelphia.

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