US History Regents Short Essay "Transformed by War" + Video Lessons

This product is a short essay task in the format of the new New York State Regents examination in US History and Government. It’s great to do one of these each unit, so I have organized them by

time period.

For additional resources in US and Global history, please visit my store here!

The first of the world wars had transformative effects on the society of the United States. Women achieved the right to vote. African Americans veterans demanded equality in exchange for wartime service. People sought freedom and greater democracy. Others feared communists and anarchists around every corner.

Document set 1: describe the historical context; identify and explain the relationship between the events and/or ideas found in those documents (Cause/Effect or Similarity/Difference or Turning Point).

Document set 2: describe the historical context;  analyze the reliability of one source. [Read more about teaching this at the Innovation blog]

If you are concerned about assigning your students this as a test because they are not likely to do well at first and don’t want to bother their GPA, I recommend using standardized scoring. You can use the z-score calculator here at Innovation Assessments. Use 78 as your standard mean and 14.8 as your standardized standard deviation. Read more about standardized scoring here and where I got those figures. The beauty of this system is you can apply this to their grades every month and as the class improves, as the class average approaches the standardized mean (78 in this case), then the algorithm affects their scores less and less.

Product includes:

• Set 1, 2 documents

• Set 2, 2 documents

• Scoring rubric

• Passcode to video lessons students can use to prepare the task.

Documents:

Photo, African American family 1922

Excerpt, Supreme Court opinion, Schenck v. United States

Excerpt, speech, "Case Against the Reds"

Political cartoon, "Ladies of Rum Row" (prohibition)

Passcode Lessons:

• pt. 1 World War I

• pt. 2 World War I

• Propaganda in the Great War (World War I)

• The 1920s part 1

• 1920s part 2 

• 1920s part 3

About Innovation Passcodes

Passcodes let your students access selected lessons in my own virtual classroom at InnovationAssessments.com. No registration is required. Use the codes at InnovationAssessments.com/TestDrive.