Choosing a college

Try to find out whether any of the local community colleges have a particularly good reputation with CWU by contacting the Teaching department by email.  Let them know you are a recent high school grad and are looking at community colleges in the Seattle area to get started.  Ask whether their department has a particularly good relationship with any of our local colleges or could recommend one with a strong reputation for education programs. Be sure to review and spellcheck before sending.

Here's the website to get started.

Do gays have a civil right to marry?

The assignment is to consider the issue of gay marriage in light of the Constitution and then do the assignment found here:

Here is a related op-ed piece by Eugene Robinson:

Here is the press release about the resolution of the NAACP to support marriage equality.

Here are remarks by the NAACP Chairman and President at the press conference.

Look at the Supreme Court decision in Loving v. The State of Virginia.

See what else you can find to support your opinion after you have drafted the assignment.

From WWII to the Civil Rights Movement

The Supreme Court decision in Plessy vs. Ferguson established "separate but equal" as legal doctrine and ushered in the era of Jim Crow.  However, WWII exposed blacks, especially southern blacks to the equality and dignity afforded to blacks in  Europe, and the injustice of fighting for the country that treated you like a second class citizen motivated many blacks and northern whites to take on the issue of racial inequality.

The Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) overturned the "separate but equal" doctrine and made segregation illegal in public places including state run schools. In part the decision read:

"We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of "separate but equal" has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Therefore, we hold that the plaintiffs and others similarly situated for whom the actions have been brought are, by reason of the segregation complained of, deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment."


However, a decade passed without any progress in ending segregation in the South, which was in the grip of the Klu Klux Klan.  Various, nonviolent activities began to be held to end segregation.  One of the most dramatic was the Freedom Riders bus trip into the deep south.

Watch the PBS American Experience movie The Freedom Riders after reading the four page introduction. After watching the movie, reply to the questions in the comments to this post.

The Transition from The Great Depression to WWII

This assignment should be completed within 5 days.  Take it one piece at a time.  After you read the first essay, answer the questions in the first comment by replying to the comments, and so on.  When it comes to the videos, we can watch the longer ones together on the TV and discuss them.

Essays to read:

The WPA: Antidote to the Great Depression? read the full essay.

 FDR and Hitler: A Study in Contrasts  read the full essay.

 The Great Depression, the New Deal and the American West read the full essay.

Videos to watch:

The American West in the 1930s and 1940s

The American West and the Great Depression

WWII and the Transformation of the American West

(The person speaking in these videos is Richard White who is a professor at Stanford University.)

The Plow that Broke the Plains - A short documentary produced by the U.S. Farm Service Administration during The New Deal period:

OK, those were just a warm up! Now you can attend Stanford for an hour+ and watch an excellent lecture by Richard White.  The American West in The Depression and the New Deal