America's Promise: 400 Years of Defining the American Dream

The HRVI’s “America's Promise” project is cosponsored by Dutchess, Orange, and Ulster County BOCES and funded through a Teaching American History grant from the U.S. Department of Education grant from the U.S. Department of Education awarded in 2003, and again in 2006.

Teachers participating in the Institutes have access to the digitized archives made available through Marist and the College's Hudson River Valley Institute, a regional history center whose partners include an extensive network of collaborating institutions including the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute in Hyde Park, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in Manhattan, the Hudson River Valley National Heritage Area, and the National Maritime Historical Society.

Weeklong summer institutes have been developed to address the following topics. Lesson Plans will be added under each topic as they become available:

• The American Revolution: the Creation of American Democracy (2003)
  
  • Stamp Act: Virtual vs. Actual Representation (Grade 11)
  • An Empire in the Balance (Grade 11,A.P.)
  • Economics of the Revolution (Grade 7,11)
  • Washington’s Encampment at Fredericksburgh (Grade 7)
  • Geography of the American Revolution (Grade 11,A.P.)
  • Loyalists in the American Revolution (Grade 7,8)
    
  
  
• From Slavery to Freedom: African American Life in the Hudson River Valley Before the Civil War (2003)
  
  • Slavery in the Eyes of the Many (Grade 11)
  • Slavery in New York (Grade 7,11)
  • Resistance to Slavery (Grade 8)
  • Children and Slavery (Grade 7,8)
  • Perspectives on Slavery (G.E.D.)
  • Abolitionists and their impact on Sectionalism (Grade 11)
    
  
  
• Franklin D. Roosevelt, the New Deal and World War II: the Defense of American Democracy (2004)
  
  • Japanese Internment During WWII (Grade 8,11)
  • Internment: Fears, Justifications, Endurance, Reaction, and Apology (Grade 8,11)
  • The Manhattan Project (Grade 11)
  • FDR: Court Packing or Court Reform (Grade 8)
  • The Roosevelt Administration and Messages for Today (Grade 8,11)
  • The Impact of the Great Depression on Teenagers (Grade 8)
    
  
  
• Pursuing Justice in the Modern World: Eleanor Roosevelt and American History (2004)
  
  • Women and Children in the Great Depression (Grade 8)
  • Eleanor Roosevelt & Human Rights (Grade 8)
    
  
  
• American History through the Lens of Supreme Court Cases: A Review of Landmark Supreme Court Cases and Their Impact on the Constitutional and Civic Values of Our Society (2005)
  
  • Supreme Court Vocabulary Lesson Plan High School (Academic Intervention Services)
  • Does the Supreme Court Affect Teens?: A Survey of Court Cases General Equivalency Diploma (GED) Social Studies
  • Schenck v. United States, Lesson Plan (Grade:11^th)
  • James McBride's The Color of Water, Lesson Plan (Grade:11^th)
  • Korematsu v. United States, Lesson Plan (Grade:11^th)
  • The United States Supreme Court as an agent of Social Change, Lesson Plan (Grade:11^th)
  
  
  
• Commerce, Industry, and Immigration in the Nineteenth Century: The Case of the Hudson River Valley (2005)
  
  
• Hamilton, Jefferson, and the Birth of Modern America (2006)
  
  
• The Civil Rights Movement (2006)
  
  • Music and the Civil Rights Movement (Grade:7/8^th)
  • Struggle for Civil Rights: African American Women (Grade:11/12^th)
  • The Civil Rights Movement (Grade:11^th)
  • Revolutionaries in the Civil Rights Movement (Grade:8^th)
  • Putting the American Civil Rights Movement into an International Context (Grade:9/10^th)
  • The American Dream (Grade:12^th)
  • Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Grade:12^th)
  
  
  
• Henry Hudson and the Clash of Cultures in the New World: European and Native Americans in Seventeenth Century North America and the Hudson River Valley (2007)
  
  
• Social Movements, Social Justice, and the Expansion of American Democracy (2007)
  
  
• Presidential Leadership During Wartime (2008)
  
  
• Beyond Europe: Asian and Carribbean Emigration to the United States in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (2008)