COMPARING CULTURES

Subject areas include sensation and perception, memory, learning, motivation and emotions, personality, psychotherapy, and social, developmental, and abnormal psychology.

Each section presents background information on the issues, a scenario, details about the characters, and a bibliography.

Each topic is divided into four categories with at least 20 questions per category.

Designed to spark beyond-the-textbook research, each lesson includes two pages of teacher background, a reproducible map, and a reproducible handout with directions indicating how students should color-code their maps (plus, often, short-answer questions for research).

As they make decisions and choose courses of action, readers put themselves in the place of a young Mayan traveling through a perilous jungle, an English serf tempted to hunt in the king’s forest, or a Japanese samurai holding a man’s life at sword point.

Both everyday experiences and historically significant events are documented with such items as the fact that Paul Revere wasn’t considered a hero until Longfellow wrote about his ride nearly 100 years afterwards.

“Answers” and appropriate “questions” in more than 40 categories cover the people and events emphasized in junior and senior high U.

California Rancho (1826)—Should you greet the rough-looking American mountain man with suspicion or hospitality? Escape From Virginia (1830)—Run from slavery, or stay with the master? Oregon or Texas Ho! (1830)—Face the long trail, or Mexican guns? A Painful Decision (1848)—Try the traditional dentist, or a newfangled drug? Gold in California! (1849)—Travel by Cape Horn, the […]

North or South? (late 1850s)—Should you keep your slaves or join the abolitionists? After the Buffalo (1864)—Settle on Sand Creek reservation or stay free on the plains as Cheyenne always have? After the War (1867)—Resist Reconstruction or move to Chicago? Tenement Folk (1889)—Work in Chicago or Pittsburgh? Land Rush (1889)—Race on horseback or on foot?