Americans celebrate volunteers and public servants, intuitively recognizing that there is something of great value in helping your community. But often we have arrived at distorted understandings of voluntarism and public service: definitions that emphasize trivial engagement and exclude important forms of public service. Exploring the benefits of service, the rules and norms that support and promote it, and the virtues that volunteers display will provide us will a more accurate understanding of what it means to serve.

Philanthropy may be defined as the desire to promote the welfare of society by giving your own money to good causes. Philanthropy is not allocating the money of others, whether through taxes or government programs, to the less fortunate in society. Philanthropy is an action of one individual or one family giving to help others.

In this lesson, students will evaluate Andrew Carnegie’s actions to understand his approach to the principle of identity.

Introduction to Entrepreneurship and its history in the U.S., student activity that enables students to see the strength of a free market economy as it affects development and production of goods.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries experienced the growth of a modern industrial economy characterized by factories and mass production, linked transportation networks, and large corporations in the United States. The growth was mostly fueled by the rise of big business which dominated most industries as effective organization and management created efficient businesses that utilized various competitive strategies to cut costs and undercut rivals. Although many industrialists engaged in philanthropy, the rise of big business raised many troubling questions including monopoly and the detrimental effects on competition in a capitalist economy, unfair and corrupt business practices and political influence, government regulation of business and the economy, the poor treatment of workers, and economic inequality. Big business and the questions it raised remained central to the discussion of the American economy and politics throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American workers experienced the convulsions of the industrial revolution. While workers generally made impressive gains in wages over these decades, they often toiled for long hours in dangerous conditions. Workers sought to protect their interests against management by organizing into unions and taking collective action, though with mixed results. Some unions chose utopian or violent solutions which usually failed to achieve the results attained by a more business-like approach. Prior to the twentieth century, these efforts to organize workers faced determined opposition and had little success. However, support for the labor movement grew following 1900, and this support was reflected in the actions of all three branches of both state and national government.

In this lesson, students will learn about how John Deere worked with purpose to invent a new plow that made farm work much more efficient. They will use this example to be purposeful in their own lives.

In this lesson, students will learn about the diligence of Henry Ford and how they can use their own diligence to be successful.

In this lesson, students will learn about Steve Jobs’ diligence in his life. They will also learn how to be diligent in their own lives.

Debating matters of public concern is essential in a free, self-governing society. If citizens were not free to decide after listening to opposing views self-government would be distorted. At the core of the Declaration of Independence is the principle that government exists to protect individual rights for us, not that we exist to serve the government. Therefore the people are the master and the government is the servant. If the government can dictate what we can and cannot discuss, then it would imply that the servant can tell the master what to do.

The Founders thought that preserving freedom through self-governing institutions required that citizens have certain virtues. However, they did not believe that government would be primarily responsible for inculcating those virtues. Government depends on these virtues.

This lesson provides activities that help students analyze characteristics of good citizenship.

In this lesson, students will study the nature of immigration and trace the history of immigration in the United States from its founding to the first half of the twentieth century. They will gain an understanding of the experience of immigrants in the 1800s, the factors that brought them to the United States, and the challenges they faced upon their arrival. Students will thus be better equipped to engage in the modern conversation on immigration in the United States.

This lesson provides a background on the history of immigration policy in the United States, that is, the philosophical origins, legal debates, and legal history from the Founding of the nation to the late 1900s. Students will come to understand how American lawmakers viewed immigrants and the reasoning behind the evolving nature of immigration policy.

In this lesson, students will prepare and present their own plan for dealing with immigration in the United States. They will engage first-hand with the modern day debate on immigration and wrestle with the consequences of the different proposals. In doing so, they will refine their research, writing, and presentations skills as well as gain an understanding of how to engage with civility in a discussion about a sensitive topic.

America holds more elections than any other democracy. The reason is federalism. Because of decentralization there are more offices for the electorate to fill and thus more elections.

From the Founding to the present, Americans have always expressed a distrust of political parties. Hardly a day passes without someone’s—the president, a Senator, a Representative—attacking politics in Washington for the spirit of partisanship.