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"In the 1950s and 1960s, ethnic writers moved onto the bestseller lists and achieved recognition in literary circles. Ralph Ellison, Philip Roth, and N. Scott Momaday showed how Americans once at the margins were now closer to the country's cultural center. In doing so, all three writers expanded the boundaries of American literature and opened up the definition of what it is to be American. The video provides the backdrop for this era, as a post-World War II America began to enjoy a prosperity that led it toward conformity and mass consumption. However, the postwar economic boom and "white flight" to the suburbs increased the physical and class distance between the white middle class and ethnic minorities who remained in older neighborhoods closer to the city centers. Ellison, Roth, and Momaday helped to resist the imaginative segregation that accompanied these changes in the urban and suburban landscape. Ellison's adaptations from jazz and blues, Roth's ethnic comedic rifts, and Momaday's ingenious use of Native American narrative traditions all helped to make storytelling richer and expanded readers' awareness of where narrative art comes from and who is capable of creating it. The video also emphasizes the risk these authors took in their innovative approaches as representatives of their own communities, often facing fierce criticism and misunderstanding of their fiction and its intentions. "

The American government incarcerated Kim Ima's father when he was 4 years old, despite the fact that he was an American citizen who had not committed any crime. Kenji Ima was one of 120,000 Japanese Americans locked away in America's concentration camps during World War II simply because of his ancestry. "Imagine what it would be like," Kim Ima says as she introduces the play she is about to perform to a history class at the Bronx High School for Writing and the Creative Arts. Black, Hispanic and Arab American students, jammed in a semi-circle of chairs in a worn classroom, nod and furrow their brows as they are quickly transported back to 1940s America. Kim Ima is one of several actors working for Living Voices, a Seattle theater company that puts performers in classrooms and corporate offices, inviting audiences to view history from the perspective of a character who experienced significant historical events.

"So what's to be done? Civic energy is going to have to come from the ground up to strengthen social cohesion, civic participation, and our ability to solve big challenges together. One big idea to strengthen our civic stocks and create pathways to better outcomes in education and employment is universal national service - an opportunity for every 18-28 year-old to perform at least a year of civilian national service through well-known groups like City Year, Teach for America and Habitat for Humanity or to join one of the branches of our Armed Services. Another bold idea would be to engage philanthropy in a $1 billion annual campaign to restore American history and civic education to its rightful place in American schools. We need "problems of American democracy" courses that teach students about the importance of bedrock American values, educate them through real-world experience about institutions that secure rights, check power, and enable public service, and provide practical skills to turn the wheels of a diverse democracy to address public problems. A final idea is for community leaders from different parties and sectors to experiment boldly with ways to fix public problems. "

"The New Deal, a series of experimental projects and programs implemented during President Franklin Roosevelt's presidency in the 1930s, was designed to help the country recover from the Great Depression. For African-Americans, those initiatives offered social and economic programs that helped many people stake a greater claim on full citizenship for the first time. The exhibition, "Claiming Citizenship: African Americans and New Deal Photography," now at New York's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, shows African-Americans taking advantage of opportunities that hadn't been available to them previously. "You can see how during the New Deal the government was experimenting with the possibility that all citizens deserved education, deserved medical care, deserved food security," said exhibition curator Rickie Solinger. The photos are drawn from the Library of Congress and the National Archives."

""The widespread assumption is that Asian Americans came to the United States very disadvantaged, and they wound up advantaged through extraordinary investments in their children's education," says Brown University economist Nathaniel Hilger. But that's not what really happened, he says. Hilger recently used old census records to trace the fortunes of whites, blacks and Asians who were born in California during the early- to mid-20th century. He found that educational gains had little to do with how Asian Americans managed to close the wage gap with whites by the 1970s. Instead, his research suggests that society simply became less racist toward Asians."

"In the Academy Award-winning documentary Hearts and Minds, Daniel Ellsberg, who secretly copied and then released the Pentagon Papers, offers a catalog of presidential lying about the U.S. role in Vietnam: Truman lied. Eisenhower lied. Kennedy lied. Johnson "lied and lied and lied." Nixon lied. (Painting by Robert Shetterly, American's Who Tell the Truth series) Ellsberg concludes: "The American public was lied to month by month by each of these five administrations. As I say, it's a tribute to the American public that their leaders perceived that they had to be lied to; it's no tribute to us that it was so easy to fool the public."

Without question, Tom Robinson would be better off today. In fact, Tom Robinson could live a life completely unimaginable and unrecognizable to the characters in Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird" - the groundbreaking book, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this week.  No lynchings.  No all white male juries.  No presumption of guilt based on skin color.  No state-sanctioned discrimination. Yet, Tom would realize a sad, but undeniable truth -- that racism is still alive and all too well in contemporary America.  He would know it in the economic injustice that has left a disproportionate number of African-Americans -- 25 percent -- living in poverty.   He would see it in the criminal injustice that has left a disproportionate number of African-American men - 6 times the number of white, non-Hispanic men -- living in jails and prisons.  And he would feel it in the hate-filled, racist rhetoric that still defines too much of our political discourse - rhetoric that questions the Civil Rights Act, rhetoric that questions the birthplace of our President.

A slideshow on using family history as a thread for American History.

An American Studies class blog from Winnetka, Illinois. Perhaps we can interact with them on something.

Commentator and broadcast news veteran Robert Trout was on the air from London on this day 58 years ago when the Japanese bombed the American Naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. He tells us what it was like being part of the newscast that first told Americans they had entered the Second World War.

I decided then that I could never give anyone reason to doubt I was an American. I convinced myself that if I worked enough, if I achieved enough, I would be rewarded with citizenship. I felt I could earn it. I've tried. Over the past 14 years, I've graduated from high school and college and built a career as a journalist, interviewing some of the most famous people in the country. On the surface, I've created a good life. I've lived the American dream.

Recently New York magazine published an article called "Paper Tigers: What Happens to All Of The Asian-American Overachievers When the Test-taking Ends?" The-test taking in that headline refers to Asian-American students' over-representation in almost every index of achievement in education. And the what-happens question refers to their under-representation in corporate leadership. Wesley Yang wrote that article, and he joined us, along with Jane Hyun. She's a leadership strategist and executive coach who's the author of "Breaking The Bamboo Ceiling."

"What is the difference between civil rights and civil liberties? How does a bill become a law? Why do we have an electoral college, and how does it work? These might seem like very basic questions and could be considered general knowledge, but to the American public, they are simply esoteric: Though blind patriotism has turned to nationalism with unprecedented fervor, 69 percent of Americans cannot even name the three branches of government."

"Ten years ago, writer Richard Rubin set out to talk to every living American veteran of World War I he could find. It wasn't easy, but he tracked down dozens of centenarian vets, ages 101 to 113, collected their stories and put them in a new book called The Last of the Doughboys. He tells NPR's Melissa Block about the veterans he talked to, and the stories they shared."

"To holistically prepare this new generation for life in an open society, what's needed is a new model for high-school civics; one that integrates American history and government, critical thinking, media literacy, and digital literacy. The goal of such education should not be merely to instill understanding of our online civic landscape, but how to navigate and participate in it in constructive and meaningful ways: Not what to think, but how to think."

The American notion of equality threatens the capacity to be open to new ideas.

Do you judge Muslim women who wear head scarves? Tell us on or in the comment section below.

"Three -- three decades of research reveal that students of color are suspended and expelled at a rate three times greater than white students, and are punished in harsher ways for the same infractions. They also learn this through the absence of their lives and narratives in the curricula. The Cooperative Children's Book Center did a review of nearly 4,000 books and found that only three percent were about African-Americans. And they further learn this through the lack of teachers that look like them. An analysis of data from the National Center for Education Statistics found that 45 percent of our nation's pre-K to high school students were people of color, while only 17 percent of our teachers are. 7:35 Our youth of color pay a profound price when their schooling sends them the message that they must be controlled, that they must leave their identities at home in order to be successful. Every child deserves an education that guarantees the safety to learn in the comfort of one's own skin."

"The online survey is not scientific but offers a wealth of information and insight about the post-election school climate. Participants included teachers from nearly all states and the District of Columbia. According to the report, those who responded may have been more likely to perceive problems than those who did not. It was distributed among several organizations that reach a large teacher population, including the American Federation of Teachers.  The report also offers a set of recommendations to help school leaders manage student anxiety and combat hate speech and acts of bias. In short, these recommendations are: Set the tone. Take care of the wounded. Double down on anti-bullying strategies. Encourage courage. Be ready for a crisis. Teaching Tolerance will further analyze the survey results and use the data to shape our resources and offerings to K-12 teachers and others who work in schools. Visit Voting and Elections: Resources for a Civil Classroom to view a package of materials currently available to help educators navigate these troubling times.

"Alongside activists - and sometimes as activists, and more about that particular problem below - more and more Americans also are practicing citizen journalism, posting, sharing and uploading photos, videos and stories as they happen. And that can be a problem: Unlike career reporters, students and new citizen journalists may or may not know how to identify themselves in public, what to say if confronted by law enforcement, how to handle volatile crowd situations and whom to turn to for help."