This lesson is part of a United States in the Twentieth Century course taught to high school juniors.
 

It is designed to be taught in three to four class periods with several homework assignments between class sessions.  You can adapt the time required for this assignment by limiting the products required or increasing the amount of independent work expected.
   

Several assumptions are made in developing this lesson. First, it is assumed that the students is familar with newspaper reporting and the differences between hard news and feature writing. Second, it is assumed that students have worked with primary source documents previously. Finally, it is assumed that students have had previous experience with evaluating information from the web. This lesson lends itself to reinforcing any information literacy skills that have been previous introduced.
   

Technical knowledge of presentation applications like PowerPoint, graphic and word processing applications, and a working knowledge of e-mail are pre-requisite to this lesson. This lesson could be taught without prior knowledge of one or more of these tools, but additional time would need to be allocated for the lesson.
 

The goal of this Webquest is for the students to have an opportunity to look at history like a historian, using primary source documents and reflecting on an event that has occured in the past.  It is important that the students go beyond answering factual questions to discussing essential ideas associated with Constitutional issues, civil rights and governmental powers.