I’ve always been gay. I just didn’t really know it until I fell in love for the first time. That relationship included a lot of firsts. It was my first serious relationship,  my first time living with someone, and, to date, the longest relationship I've ever been in.

Nothing says summer like sitting in the sun with a good book. Check out five summer reads, recommended by Tracy O'Brien, Facing History's Director of Library Services. 

Cicada Scott, a senior from Manitou Springs, Colorado, received the $2,500 Benjamin B. Ferencz Upstander Award for the 2016 Facing History Together Student Essay Contest. To celebrate LGBT Pride Month in June, we go behind the scenes to learn more about what inspired Cicada to open up about being a non-binary gender teenager. Preferring pronouns like "them" and "they," Cicada describes non-binary as a "catchall category for people who are neither exclusively male or exclusively female."

After graduation, they plan to attend college at the University of Colorado, Boulder. They are looking into studying robotics but are still deciding the right major. 

In the spring of 2015, I took the online course "Teaching To Kill a Mockingbird." It was the first time I was reading To Kill a Mockingbird with my 8th grade students and I was looking for support to help me teach such an important text. What I gained from the course was so much more than I could’ve imagined. I received access to primary sources to illustrate the realities of the Jim Crow South; I participated as a learner in activities that I later assigned to my students; and I  learned about virtual resources I could implement in multiple lessons and units.  

Today’s News, Tomorrow’s History is an ongoing series with Listenwise. This series connects Facing History’s themes with today’s current events using public radio to guide and facilitate discussions around the social issues of our time. We will take a look at the current responses to the changes in United States currency.  

https://listenwise.com/When you look at traditional American currency, from bills to coins, you will see the portraits of presidents, founders, and inventors. On these bills, all faces are men. In 48 other countries in the world, there are women on paper currency. The United States will join these countries in the year 2020.

How is a little known lynching case from 1917 relevant today?

For students at Overton High School in Memphis, Tennessee, discovering the case of Ell Persons became a call to action. Angered by the brutality of his murder and the high number of lynchings that took place in their own backyard, they decided to channel their energy into something positive. They have been hard at work to create a memorial for Persons and to bring light to an often forgotten part of U.S. history so that others, too, will learn from the past.

 “What do you think Nachila is feeling right at this moment?” asks Dr. Bethany Nelson to a room full of history students at Southeastern Regional Vocational Technical High School in South Easton, Massachusetts.

“She’s thinking, ‘I’m ready to die,” shouts one student. “I’m not afraid of you,” shouts another. Multiple students enthusiastically chime in to participate.

Nachila Ortiz is one of five high school students standing in front of the room, reenacting a photograph that is projected over their bodies. Three of the students pose, channeling the emotions in the faces of Jewish partisans captured by the Nazis during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Two others pose as the Nazi officers; one pointing an imaginary rifle.

Guest blogger, Clara Ramírez-Barat, shares how a two-year research project with the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is exploring innovative strategies to engage young people in justice and peace-building efforts through education. Facing History’s international director, Karen Murphy, has played a lead role in this emerging field. She wrote a case study for that project and previously teamed up with ICTJ to develop a children’s guide to the Kenyan Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation Commission to help youth address complex parts of their country’s history.

*This post was adapted from the Preface to the Second Edition of Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust.

When Salvaged Pages: Young Writers' Diaries of the Holocaust was published in 2002, I expected that it would have a typical life span, generating some interest for a while and then tapering off. And then, something unexpected happened. Teachers, organizers of educators’ conferences, and Jewish community leaders who organized local Holocaust education wanted me to show teachers how to use Salvaged Pages in the classroom, and how it could complement instruction on Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl. Salvaged Pages gradually developed into an educational tool over the next decade.

Today, on Yom HaShoah Ve'Hagevurah, or Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day, we give pause to remember the six million Jews and the five million other targeted individuals who were murdered during the Holocaust. But we can also celebrate moments of bravery. Resistance has been tied into this commemoration from its inception in Israel in the 1950s.