Lessons
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Who Counts as an American?
National Population and IdentityStudents explore how governments and societies use data to define identity, citizenship, and belonging — examining Native perspectives on blood quantum, federal definitions of...
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Reading the Language of Law as Data
Media, Language, and PowerAcross 15 historical US laws, students analyze patterns in justification language to discover how governments frame restriction as protection, pairing a categorical language...
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The Data History of the Attention Economy
Media, Language, and PowerStudents investigate how media have competed for audience attention over time, weighing evidence from newspapers and radio against historian Tim Wu's "attention merchant" idea...
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Booms and Busts: A Century of American Population Data
National Population and IdentityStudents use census data from 1910–2020 to investigate how historical forces shape population change, interpreting trends and connecting shifts like the Great Depression and the...
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Vietnam Photojournalism as Data
War, Dissent, and Civil LibertiesStudents use six Library of Congress Vietnam War photographs as nontraditional data, applying a 5×5 grid protocol to code quantifiable variables from each image, calculating a...
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WWI Propaganda and the Data of Dissent
War, Dissent, and Civil LibertiesStudents treat wartime language as data, using historical newspapers (1917–1919) to categorize propaganda techniques, compare them to the suppression of dissent under the...
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The Data Behind Industrial America
Industrialization and the Gilded AgeBetween 1860 and 1910 the United States became the world's largest industrial economy — but who benefited? Students test two competing primary sources (Carnegie's Gospel of...
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Reading the Receipt: The True Cost of the Boston Tea Party
Revolution and RebellionStudents analyze an East India Company invoice documenting the tea destroyed during the Boston Tea Party to investigate the event's economic impact. They calculate the value of...