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~ Teaching American History Grant ~
California

Grantee: Fresno County Office of Education, Fresno, CA
Project Name: The Meaning of Liberty Fellowship
Project Director: Patty Lehman (559) 265-3073, plehman@fcoe.org
Funding: $1,986,781
Number of Teachers Served: 150
Number of Counties: 3
Number of Students Served: 314,000
Grade Levels: K-12

Partners: California State University, Fresno's History Project, the American Institute of Historians and History Educators, the Bill of Rights Institute, the Civil War Society, the Fresno Historical Society, and the American Institute for History Education.

Topics: The empire vs. the Colonies; the agrarian South and the industrializing North; liberal democracy vs. totalitarianism

Methods: Colloquia, field trips, summer institutes, and book club.

The three counties served by this project have a 67 percent student poverty rate and a large number of Latino, Hmong, and other Indochinese students, including many who are English language learners.  The project will provide 11 days of training for 50 teachers per year, with half of each day devoted to learning American history, and the other half devoted to pedagogical training and using historical resources for planning lessons.  In the first year, teacher "Fellows" will study the rift between the British Empire and its North American colonies by reading the work of philosophers and political leaders and studying the Revolutionary War, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Federalist Papers.  Year 2 Fellows will contrast the agrarian South with the developing market economy of the northern states during the 19th Century.  Topics will include slavery, major political leaders of the time, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the formation of the urban working class, immigration, and the United States' entrance onto the world stage.  In the final year of the project, Fellows will contrast American societies with totalitarian regimes that the U.S. opposed in the 20th century.  Fellows will study Progressivism, World War I, Wilsonian international liberalism, Russian and German socialism, Japanese imperialism, Italian facism, the Cold War, and the War on Terorr.

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