This year’s National History Day theme is “Rights and Responsibilities in History,” inviting students to view history through that thematic lens. Alaska History Day’s sponsor organization, the Alaska Historical Society, adopted the rights and responsibilities theme for the 2024 conference, held in Cordova.
Thinking about rights AND responsibilities in history, whether local or global, invites historians of all ages consider questions of time and place, cause and effect, change over time, and impact and significance.
- Rights: Freedoms or privileges that individuals possess as human beings or as individuals in a society.
- Responsibilities: the duties or obligations of individuals as members of society
Rights and responsibilities are two powerful forces in history, but one does not work without the other.
In recognition of these two important and interrelated concept, we are pleased to announce the publication of five lesson plans and materials created by Alaska teachers and historians. These varied plans consider different areas of the (now) state, from the Seward Peninsula, to Southeast, to the Interior, and the Aleutians, over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In these lesson plans, aimed for students in middle and high school, students will learn about:
- The right to free speech and the responsibility of careful communication with Delta Junction teacher Lynn Chavez’ lesson: A $45,000 Typo Expedited Telegraph Construction in Alaska.
- Indigenous Alaskans’ rights and the American government’s responsibilities to them in Sitka historian Rebecca Poulson’s materials on Alaska 1867-1877 and Alaska Native rights.
- The relationship between rights, responsibilities, and justice in Anchorage educator Megan McBride’s lesson on “The Myth of Lawlessness in the Gold Rush-Era.”
- The World War II-era experience of Indigenous Alaskans through oral history interviews gathered by Dr. Holly Miowak Guise, exploring the rights and responsibilities of the Unangax and the United States Government, in Anchorage teacher Liza Tran’s lesson, World War II- Oral Histories
- Connecting concepts of civil rights over time and place, with Nome’s QasuGlana/Barb Amarok lesson on a young Alberta Schenck’s work to resist segregation in her community, helping to influence the passage of the 1945 Alaska Civil Rights Act in “Alaska Rights & Responsibilities: The Work of Alberta Schenck”
These lessons are available via the links above, or at: https://www.akhistoryday.org/lesson-plan-category/rights-and-responsibilities-theme/
Thank you to the Atwood Foundation for grant funding that supported these teachers’ valuable work! We hope these lessons can help teachers connect these important concepts to the history of our home state.