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Teaching with Historic Places

Heritage Education Services Program

Teaching with Historic Places (TwHP) uses properties listed in the National Park Service's National Register of Historic Places to enliven history, social studies, geography, civics, and other subjects. TwHP has created a variety of products and activities that help teachers bring historic places into the classroom.


Transportation

To celebrate American ingenuity and generate public appreciation for our nation's transportation history, Teaching with Historic Places is featuring on the Web the following lesson plans that are related to America's transportation revolution. These lessons, based on sites listed in the National Register of Historic Places, are free and ready for immediate classroom use by students in history and social studies classes.

• Allegheny Portage Railroad: Developing Transportation Technology
Follow 19th-century travelers as they cross the treacherous Allegheny Mountains using an innovative inclined railway.

• America's Space Program: Exploring a New Frontier
Discover how NASA, private industry, and research institutions across the country cooperated to develop and implement the complex technology that enabled man to land on the moon.

• Chattanooga, Tennessee: Train Town
Examine how geography and boosterism influenced the placement of rail lines, which then stimulated the growth of towns such as Chattanooga.

• The Building of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal
Assess the importance of America's early canal system and its economic and social effects.

• Floyd Bennett Field: Naval Aviation’s Home in Brooklyn
Learn about the vital role played by naval aviators delivering aircraft to combat-bound units in the Pacific during WWII, and the women workers on the home front who helped in one of U.S. history's greatest industrial feats.

• Going-to-the-Sun Road: A Model of Landscape Engineering
Learn about some of the practical problems of constructing roads in difficult terrain and about the added challenge of building in such a way as to enhance, rather than damage, fragile and beautiful places such as Glacier National Park.

• Glen Echo Park: Center for Education and Recreation
Understand why the Washington Railway and Electric Company of Washington, D.C., which was responsible for the installation of the electric railway system or "trolley system" throughout the city and its suburbs, purchased the Chautauqua lands and expanded the small amusement park that had already been built on the site.

• Liberty Ships and Victory Ships, America's Lifeline in War
Learn how the United States mobilized a massive construction effort to build a large merchant fleet to serve in war and peace.

• Navesink Lighthouse and Robbins Reef Lighthouse: Lighting the Way through New York Bay
Learn about two historic lighthouses that illustrate how technological advancements contributed to maritime safety and about the isolated, often routine, but sometimes heroic lives led by their keepers.

• The Old Court House in St. Louis: Yesterday & Today
Examine St. Louis's handsome Courthouse as a gathering place for pioneers heading west and a possible option for being the center of the transportation revolution.

• The Penniman House: A Whaling Story
Meet Captain Edward Penniman, and learn about 19th-century whaling in southeastern Massachusetts and how the whaling industry impacted Penniman's family and life.

• Roadside Attractions
Follow the highways of the 1920s and 1930s, exploring the whimsical, extravagant architecture that came with American auto culture.

• The Siege and Battle of Corinth: A New Kind of War
Understand how newly developed technologies affected two military engagements and one tiny town in Mississippi during the Civil War.

• Skagway: Gateway to the Klondike
Learn how Skagway, a transportation gateway for commerce and tourism, serves as an example of how a frontier town survived the end of its boomtown era.

• The United States Air Force Academy: Founding a Proud Tradition
Learn how the expansion of military air power in the first half of the 20th century led to the establishment of the United States Air Force and the Air Force Academy.

•Wheat Farms, Flour Mills, and Railroads: A Web of Interdependence
Examine the inextricable connections binding railroads, North Dakota wheat fields, and Minnesota flour mills during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

•Wright Brothers National Memorial: Site of the First Controlled Powered Flight
Discover why the Wright Brothers chose the Outer Banks of North Carolina to conduct their flight experiments, how they achieved controlled powered flight in 1903, and how their accomplishments have been commemorated.

 
To learn more about TwHP's other lessons, visit the Lesson Plan Descriptions page.