The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Ohio is one of the nation's premier museums for learning about the history of slavery on the North American continent. Check out our guide to this amazing Underground Railroad museum. #undergroundrailroad #blackhistory #openwidetheworld

President John F Kennedy would have announced American strike and invasion by 90,000 troops if Soviet ships brought strategic nuclear missiles to Cuba, documents reveal.

"The Phantom Atlas" by Edward Brooke-Hitching chronicles centuries of fictional locations that were included on maps of the world.

Black History Month is a fantastic time to spotlight some inspirational African American artists! These artists have all made important con...

Here are paper dolls from different ancient nationalities to use when you … study Sonlight’s World History, or read stories from these countries, or study different nationalities, or ju…

Students will experience situations that Lewis and Clark faced during their exploration of the North American continent. Working in teams, students will journal the newfound plants and animals, while having to complete certain tasks along the way (fishing, building shelter, navigating a river). This simulation is in interactive way to engage students in this part of U.S. History.

Upon arriving in the New World, he went hunting with his double-barreled shotgun and promptly got lost.

Students investigate how mountains are formed. Concepts include the composition and structure of the Earth's tectonic plates and tectonic plate boundaries, with an emphasis on plate convergence as it relates to mountain formation. Students learn that geotechnical engineers design technologies to measure movement of tectonic plates and mountain formation, as well as design to alter the mountain environment to create safe and dependable roadways and tunnels.

Here are the most interesting, amazing and unusual things that happened in the world of science this week. A recap of Live Science's best.

Are you looking for an easy and fun way to integrate social studies into your reading curriculum? This pack of reading comprehension passages is the perfect choice! These reading comprehension passages cover the 7 Continents. Each passage includes 2-3 questions to go along with the reading! Your students will read a nonfiction passage about a continent. Then, they will answer 2-3 questions based on the passage. The text is intended for K-2nd graders and can be read together as a class, in small groups, or independently! The best part? This resource is no prep! Just print & go! Topics Included: North America South America Africa Europe Asia Antarctica Australia & Oceania There are so many ways to use this resource! Here are just a few: Centers Small-Group Instruction Bell Ringers Early Finishers Homeworks ___________________________________ TEACHERS LIKE YOU SAID… ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ I love that these teach interesting things about each place and provide a comprehension aspect. Very helpful and appropriate reading level for my kiddos. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ This product was a great resource to supplement my school's social studies curriculum. The passages contained facts about each continent and had aligned questions. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ My students enjoyed using this resource. We spent our summer school unit studying the continents with fun activities and this packet was a great way to incorporate some comprehension and writing skills in a fun way. This 7 continents reading comprehension resource is engaging and interactive! Grab your copy today! ___________________________________ Having difficulty with a file? Visit the FAQs section, submit a help ticket, or ask a question on the Q& A tab before leaving feedback. Copyright © A Page Out of History. Permission to copy for single classroom use only. Please purchase additional licenses if you intend to share this product.

So, we all know the story of how Columbus “discovered” America and found those primitive tribes he called the Indians because, ya know, he thought he was somewhere else. Never a hint in…

She died 11,500 years ago at the tender age of six weeks in what is now the interior of Alaska. Dubbed “Sunrise Girl-child” by the local indigenous people, the remains of the Ice Age infant—uncovered at an archaeological dig in 2013—contained traces of DNA, allowing scientists to perform a full genomic analysis.…

From the time of Columbus until the 1900s, as many as five million Native Americans were enslaved. This week, we explore that history, and the psychological reasons it stayed hidden in plain sight.

The age of exploration in North America started with finding a new trade route to the East and ended with countries settling on a new continent.

While almost every entrepreneur dreams of scaling beyond their state borders, understanding the hurdles of expansion can be tricky. Here are a few pointers.

Native Americans of North America Printables - Print worksheets to help students learn terms, definitions, and history related to Native Americans.

The Nine Nations of North America, according to Joel Garreau We can all probably agree that the borders of the states in the U.S. don’t represent very well the true cultural, linguistic, political, economic, and historic regional differences in the various parts of the country. In many cases these borders are an impediment to sensible regional planning, and do not reflect true regional allegiances. In fact, the way the states were formed is a fascinating historical story, but now-a-days the borders feel a little arbitrary. (There is a nice book on this topic, called “The Fabric of America: How our Borders and Boundaries Shaped the Country and Forged our National Identity,” by Andro Linklater, 2007). Over the years, a number of people have taken stabs at re-imagining the regions of America, (what I like to call “re-regionalizing”). These plans often include our Canadian neighbors to the north and our Mexican neighbors to the south, while other schemes stop short at the borders. The Nine Nations of North America Some of you may remember a book from yesteryear (1981) by Joel Garreau called the Nine Nations of North America. Garreau went on to write, to great acclaim, the influential book “Edge Cities,” which had a big impact in urban and regional planning circles. Anyway, in the Nine Nations book, he divided up the continent into 9 regions, creating larger geographical units than the current states, and smoothed out the data. His “States” included “the Foundry," "Dixie," "the Breadbasket," "MexAmerica," “the Empty Quarter," "Ecotopia," "New England," and the "Islands," and “Quebec.” Although the book is (WOW! Time flies!) 30 years old now, there is still a lot of validity to how he divided us up, and his methodology is worth reading about. “Consider the way North America really works. It is Nine Nations. Each with its capital and distinctive web of power and influence.... These nations look different, feel different, and sound different from each other, and few of their boundaries match the political lines drawn on current maps....Most importantly, each nation has a distinctive prism through which it views the world,” [Garreau, 1981:1-2]. How to Make Regions that Make Sense: There are probably as many ways to group areas of the country together in more or less homogeneous chunks as there are pills in a bottle of Carters’ Little Liver Pills (I don’t actually know what that means – my great-grandmother, Maggie Barnacle, always used to say that when something was of such a vast quantity that it was uncountable, like the stars in the sky. I think Carter’s Little Liver Pills must have been extremely tiny, and therefore so many were in the bottle that they seemed without number.) OK, back to regionalization: Lots of different ways to slice and dice the continent. After all, each Federal agency has their own method of dividing and grouping, for their own purposes, based on some unifying criteria: the Census regions are different than the EPA regions, which are different than Federal Court Districts, ad infinitum. Then, of course, there are natural ways to divide up the country, such as climatic zones, physiographic provinces, watersheds, ecoregions, etc. Here are some other fun ways to divide up the country into more sensible (or not!) regions. I think we can all agree that the state boundaries don’t really reflect very well the true divisions in the U.S. anymore, if they ever did, and some of these other ones capture the true essence of regionalism in the best sense of the word. The U.S. still retains some of its old regionalism, even though overall it is much, much more homogenized than when I was a little girl and my family would take road trips around the country. Back then, going to another state or region was almost as foreign as going abroad. The Burma Shave signs along the (2-lane!) highways down south, the different foods, accents, and dialects, music and radio stations (Call letters starting with “W” east of the Mississippi and starting with “K” west of it), mom-and-pop stores and motels, distinctive regional architecture, and the fact that large parts of the country were still under insane segregation laws, all pointed to a regionalism which we have by and large lost today. I miss that (well, all excepting the insane segregation laws) in our new world of coast-to-coast chain fast food joints, identical big box stores, cookie-cutter suburbs, you-could-be-anywhere hotels, and same-old, same old satellite radio stations and cable TV. Divided States of America In, United States of America Out - Here we have 10 regions. This map was first published in a conservative Turkish newspaper, in response to a "leaked" map supposedly made in the U.S. that divided up Turkey and the Middle East along ethnic/tribal/religious lines, and gave large areas of Turkey, Iraq, etc., back to the Kurds to form an actual nation called Kurdistan, etc. (oops! Did I say “BACK to the Kurds”?) This map dividing up the U.S. was apparently their semi-serious and slightly snarky way of getting back at us for having the temerity to divide up THEIR world. http://bigthink.com/ideas/21064. The carved up Middle East map, supposedly done by someone named Colonel Peters in the U.S. Defense Dept., can be seen here: http://seeker401.wordpress.com/2009/06/25/re-drawing-the-map-in-the-new-middle-east/ New Map of North America created by Colonel Peters, Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, US Defense Department - boy he really gets around, this guy! (NO, PEOPLE - IT’S NOT FOR REAL! This is what’s known as a “spoof.”) Canada and the United States in the Year 2092, by Douglas Coupland, author of “Shampoo Planet” and “Generation X.” This map, first issued in 1992, was in response to a Constitutional amendment in Canada giving Quebec and First Nation territories much more autonomy. This apparently got him thinking about what would happen if the U.S. also instituted some changes based on cultural regionalism, and what the country/continent might look like 100 years into the future. (Hard to believe, but I cut this map out of the New York Times and kept it hanging around my many and various offices for nearly 20 years! Never throw anything away, kids, you never know when it might come in handy!) Check out the "Kudzu Line," the Miami Ciudad Libre, also the Citicorp Cuba, Utah Theocracy, Manhattan People's Soviet, Electric Zone (leased to Consolidated Edison unil 2110) and many other amusing conceits. My personal favorite is Wen-Ge-Hua, Free City of Vancouver. I'm sure that's where I'll be! The 38 States of America? George Etzel Pearcy, a California State University geography professor, re-drew the state borders of the U.S. to end up with 38 states rather than 50. The borders were put in less populated areas, allowing major metropolitan areas to be contained all within one state, and having a goal of one major city in each state, rather than multiple cities vying for scarce state resources. According to the 1975 People’s Almanac, “when Pearcy realigned the U.S., he gave high priority to population density, location of cities, lines of transportation, land relief, and size and shape of individual States. Whenever possible lines were located in less populated areas.” Also, the names of the new states were based on a student survey of each area’s most identifiable physical or cultural attribute. He also believed that millions of taxpayer dollars would be saved by having fewer state governments. Here's more info on how the boundary lines were determined. http://www.tjc.com/38states/ America 2040, (after Armageddon has occurred, obviously, judging by the number of nuked cities and "plague zones.") From Prayers for the Assassin, by Robert Ferrigno. 10 U.S. voting regions from the Boston Globe (2004) http://bigthink.com/ideas/21077 And the 10 voting regions revisited, 2008 And here are some just for fun: you know, the U.S. regions according to such and such. The New Yorker’s Map of the U.S. This one is simple – only three regional divisions needed! Redneckistan, Pacifica, and the New American Republic. And here's a late-breaking one that a reader just sent in. See his comment below. It's an animated version of the map above. And we will end on this note – the U.S. divided up into the major cultural/tribal regions of the original inhabitants of the continent.

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All your history teachers lied to you.

Iroquois Confederacy PART I. Because of the length of study on this topic, we have devoted two pages on our site to this topic. This page is about the Iroquois Confederacy. Click here for PART

Una mappa immaginaria fa capire la portata del colonialismo: l'Africa come sarebbe stata, se non fosse stata conquistata dall'uomo bianco

The president’s statements in a commencement speech perpetuate a cruel, white supremacist version of what happened after Europeans set foot on North America.

Northwest Passage, historical sea passage of the North American continent. It represents centuries of effort to find a route westward from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean through the Arctic Archipelago of what became Canada. Learn more about the Northwest Passage in this article.

Leif Erikson's foray into America began over a thousand years ago—long before Columbus's 1492 journey.

A list of streaming resources to go along with Build Your Library Kindergarten or any North American unit study. Thanks for stopping by. Enjoy!

The diseases brought to North America by Columbus and other colonizers killed 90% of indigenous populations, sparking a global cooling.

Today is the feast of eight missionaries who were martyred in North America in the 1640s, and canonized in 1930. Among them is St Isaac Jogues SJ, from Orleans in France, was the first priest to enter New York, and he preached the Faith in Canada. He had been captured and enslaved by the Iroquois, during which time several of his fingers were eaten or burned off! Pope Urban VII gave him the very exceptional privilege of celebrating Mass, which the mutilated condition of his hands had made canonically impossible; he was called a martyr of Christ by the pontiff. No similar concession, up to that, is known to have been granted. He was eventually captured again, this time by the Mohawks, who decapitated him. This mural showing the martyrdom of St Isaac Jogues and his companion, St Jean de LaLande is in the church of St Casimir in Baltimore.