In And Justice for Some, you'll find tools to explore those crucial moments in our nation's history when circumstances have collided with principles, demonstrating through drama the vital importance of safeguarding our rights so that all people can share them equally.
Lement and Dunakin present four original plays that document instances of injustice perpetrated in pivotal cases from four key epochs of U.S. history: the Salem witch trials; the Anthony Burns fugitive slave trial; a Supreme Court case concerning the internment of Japanese Americans; and the Rosenberg Trial. These courtroom dramas—available online where they can be printed for distribution to your students—can be staged in full or read aloud in class by your students as individual scenes or as a whole. Each comes with an extensive study guide that builds an awareness of important historical, sociological, psychological, and textual themes. These comprehensive guides include:
- background information on the trial
- biographies of the major characters and summaries of their roles in the conflict
- a timeline of historical events
- play- and era-specific vocabulary lists
- writing, reading, analyzing, and reflecting activities that engage students with the difficult questions posed by the text and help them build interpretive skills
- extensive resource lists for further investigation.
With these plays and study guides, your students will personalize U.S. history by identifying with characters, exploring contradictory points of view, and making decisions about how they would approach historical conflicts—all while you introduce and reinforce the exciting and wide—ranging ideas that underpin the social studies.
Bring out the drama in social studies. Read And Justice for Some and give your students a chance to understand firsthand how injustice happens-and how by looking at history, they can help make it a thing of the past.
