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Teaching with Primary Sources — MTSU

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Close Reading Exercises

Fate in the Trojan War: The Iliad
Ancient Greece (ca. 8th century BCE)
Life of Charlemagne
Medieval Europe (early 9th century CE)
A Poem by Phillis Wheatley
1773
Remember the Ladies: a Letter from Abigail Adams
1776
The Constitution and the Electoral College
1787 & 1804
Benjamin Banneker Challenges Thomas Jefferson
1791
Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft
1792 (World History)
"A Wall of Separation between Church and State": Thomas Jefferson's Letter to the Danbury Baptists
1802
James K. Polk and Manifest Destiny
1845
Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau
1849
A Young Boy Witnesses the Cruelty of Slavery: Life of Frederick Douglass
1849
Dred Scott v. Sanford
1857
Lincoln-Douglas Debate
1858
Chief Joseph and the Resistance of the Nez Perce
1877 & 1879
The Rag-Pickers - How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis
1890
Ida B. Wells' Anti-Lynching Campaign from A Red Record
1894
"Lift Every Voice and Sing" by James Weldon Johnson
1900
Advice for Collective Bargaining: A Letter to the AFL in 1917
1917
Anti-War Speeches by Eugene Debs
1918
Tennessee Ratifies the 19th Amendment
1920
"Dulce et decorum est": A World War I Poem
1921
"Ballad of Booker T." by Langston Hughes
1941
Brown v Board of Education
1954
Letter from Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King, Jr.
1963