This lesson explores the online exhibition Some Were Neighbors. In this lesson, students will examine examples of choices of ordinary people during the Holocaust and think critically about the fears, pressures, and motivations that might have shaped their behaviors.
After viewing archival film footage documenting Jewish life in Nasielsk, a small town in Poland, before the German invasion in September 1939, students explore how the community changed during the Nazi occupation that followed.
The Rohingya, a religious and ethnic minority in Burma, went from being citizens to outsiders and became the targets of a sustained campaign of genocide. By exploring the online exhibition Burma’s Path to Genocide students learn how government policies and the proliferation of hate speech led to genocide of the Rohingya. Rohingya are still at risk of genocide today.
This lesson explores the online exhibition State of Deception. Students will dialogue and reflect on the ways in which propaganda affected society during the Holocaust and how it continues to affect people today.
Students will examine photographs taken in and around the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and killing center in 1944 and engage in photo analysis techniques to deconstruct the photographs.
This lesson provides a method of assessing what students know and how they think about the Holocaust. Through interacting with a range of historical photographs and images, students generate questions that can then lead to more productive lesson planning.
Students will examine Holocaust-era diaries as both historical and as deliberately-created literary texts, and will understand how the Holocaust affected the lives of the individuals.
This lesson is a case study examining Nazi Germany and the United States during the 1930s, at a time when racism and eugenics were enshrined in law and practice. Students will examine the national and historical contexts in which racism manifested in the two countries, and explore how the pseudoscience of eugenics as well as concerns about "racial purity" found its way into the laws of the United States and Nazi Germany.
By examining the Wagner-Rogers Bill of 1939, students learn how Americans debated the country’s role as a haven for refugees, identifying economic, social, and geopolitical factors that influenced Americans’ attitudes about the United States’ role in the world during the critical years 1938–1941.
By exploring the Americans and the Holocaust online exhibition, students will examine the motives, pressures, and fears that shaped American attitudes and responses to the threats of Nazism and the Holocaust during the 1930s and 1940s.
Watch videos and read articles about the Holocaust and the conditions that made it possible.
