The story in history Book

The Story in History gives teachers and students of all levels an entirely new way to learn about American history -- by re-experiencing it from the vantage point of the imaginative writer. In over 20 exercises using sources as various as early maps of the Americas, Walt Whitman's accounts of the Civil War, Sioux oral histories, diaries of the women on the Oregon Trail, ads in 1940s issues of Life, and poetry by Gwendolyn Brooks and Pablo Neruda, students combine research, imagination, and personal memory to explore both the "big events" and everyday life of earlier times, in their own poems, stories, and plays. As a result, students gain both a deeper understanding of the issues and conflicts that comprise the American experience, and a keener sense of how writing really works.