Junior History Paper Topics

This set covers 125 iconic primary documents from the 1600s to the present. Each entry offers the full text of the document as well as an in-depth, analytical essay that places the document in its historical context. Among the sources included in the set are important legislative documents such as the Reconstruction era amendments; critical Supreme Court decisions; and iconic speeches and writings by leaders such as Sojourner Truth, Booker T. Washington, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Barack Obama.

For all of the continuity of African-American history, including the long history of struggle, the years between 1945 and 1970 represented a new moment. It was a time of new possibilities and new vision, a time when black Americans were determined to be the architects of an inclusive America that championed human rights for all.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., gives us a sumptuously illustrated landmark book tracing African American history from the arrival of the conquistadors to the election of Barack Obama. Informed by the latest, sometimes provocative scholarship and including more than seven hundred images--ancient maps, fine art, documents, photographs, cartoons, posters--Life Upon These Shores focuses on defining events, debates, and controversies, as well as the signal achievements of people famous and obscure. Gates takes us from the sixteenth century through the ordeal of slavery, from the Civil War and Reconstruction through the Jim Crow era and the Great Migration; from the civil rights and black nationalist movements through the age of hip-hop to the Joshua generation. By documenting and illuminating the sheer diversity of African American involvement in American history, society, politics, and culture, Gates bracingly disabuses us of the presumption of a single "black experience." Life Upon These Shores is a book of major importance, a breathtaking tour de force of the historical imagination.

An historical account of the role of African-American soldiers in the Civil War.

A graphic novel depicting the role of Congressman John Lewis and his role in the Civil Rights Movement.

The National Book Award winning history of how racist ideas were created, spread, and deeply rooted in American society. Some Americans insist that we're living in a post-racial society. But racist thought is not just alive and well in America -- it is more sophisticated and more insidious than ever. And as award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi argues, racist ideas have a long and lingering history, one in which nearly every great American thinker is complicit. In this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative, Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history. He uses the life stories of five major American intellectuals to drive this history: Puritan minister Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, W.E.B. Du Bois, and legendary activist Angela Davis. As Kendi shows, racist ideas did not arise from ignorance or hatred. They were created to justify and rationalize deeply entrenched discriminatory policies and the nation's racial inequities. In shedding light on this history, Stamped from the Beginning offers us the tools we need to expose racist thinking. In the process, he gives us reason to hope.