The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, is an award-winning six-part documentary series by noted historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Covering from about the year 1500 through to the new millennium, the series addresses in a detailed yet entertaining way the challenges faced by African Americans throughout these centuries as well as their many triumphs. Each episode lasts approximately one hour, making the series a convenient one to work into a typical high-school class period. About this African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross Worksheet This worksheet provides students with 45 fill-in-the-blank problems for them to solve as they watch Episode 6 of The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, which covers the period of 1968 to 2013 in African American history. Summary of Episode 6: A More Perfect Union After 1968, African Americans set out to build a bright new future on the foundation of the civil rights movement’s victories, but a growing class disparity threatened to split the black community in two. As hundreds of African Americans won political office across the country and the black middle class made unprecedented progress, larger economic and political forces isolated the black urban poor in the inner cities, vulnerable to new social ills and an epidemic of incarceration. Yet African Americans of all backgrounds came together to support Illinois’ Senator Barack Obama in his historic campaign for the presidency of the United States. When he won in 2008, many hoped that America had finally transcended race and racism. By the time of his second victory, it was clear that many issues, including true racial equality, remain to be resolved. Now we ask: How will African Americans help redefine the United States in the years to come? How These African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross Worksheets are Structured These The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross worksheets present students with fill-in problems to encourage them to pay close attention to the video as it plays. Cloze problems largely eliminate the problem of students guessing, and when they are well-constructed, they have the added benefit of helping students to zero in on main ideas and key details – exactly the content they should be mastering from the video. Each hour-long episode comes with between 40 and 70 fill-in problems, appropriately spaced out so that students can keep up. Some students, however, may feel that the pace is too brisk. In that case, teachers can simply assign some students to do the odd problems and others the evens, a strategy that can also help to discourage students from copying from classmates instead of paying attention as they should.

Few teaching units can effectively capture the breadth of human history since the dawn of farming to the present day, but Jared Diamond's breathtaking series, Guns, Germs and Steel does so with aplomb. High school students being what they are, however, they may not fully appreciate Diamond's fascinating episodes for their own sake. That's where these worksheets come in. They will help hold students accountable for paying close attention to the videos so that much more content is learned and absorbed. This bundle contains video worksheets for episodes 1 and 2 of Jared Diamond's 3-part series. (There is no worksheet provided for episode 3 simply because, after having used this series with World History and Economics classes for several years, I have concluded that the third episode is the weakest. The most important content is well-covered in the first two episodes, which is what my classes focus on every year.) ABOUT GUNS, GERMS and STEEL This series is *perfect* for World History courses and fits in well when studying the ancient world and again when looking at the age of European imperialism. Basically, the series is an exploration of one of the key questions about the modern world: why are wealth and power distributed so unequally? Why are some continents so rich while others seem to be so poor? Because this is the major focus of the series, it is also ideal for Economics classes. During the Age of Imperialism, a number of explanations were floated to explain these discrepancies. By and large, they were based on racism. Diamond debunks these skillfully, presenting the idea that won him a Pulitzer Prize: the physical geography of the earth has had a controlling influence on the development of key technological breakthroughs that gave some areas a head start over others. It all starts with farming, and with the fact that not all world areas started off with the same wealth of animals that were capable of being domesticated. The shape of the continents has actually been a key historical force, according to Diamond; those with a long east-west axis enjoyed a great advantage over those with a north-south orientation. From these factors, much of the modern world has sprung. WHEN TO USE THE VIDEOS AND WORKSHEETS Guns, Germs and Steel fits into the curriculum at a number of key places -- it truly is a very versatile video to add to your teaching library. You could show episodes when the class reaches any of the following moments in history: * Neolithic revolution * Fertile Crescent * Age of Exploration * Age of Imperialism * Spanish Conquest of South America * Age of New Imperialism