Dear Teacher,

Welcome to the Land and Freedom series of high school lessons in U.S. History and Economics. We hope that they will provide an engaging and valuable addition to your curriculum. The lessons are designed to be inserted into existing curricula where needed. Each provides a background reading with study questions, three or four classroom activities, and a brief guide for the teacher, offering key concepts and performance objectives. I believe you will find every single lesson in this series offers a vital and fresh perspective, because they focus on the oft-neglected importance of land in history and economics.

The Land and Freedom series is brought to you completely free of charge by the Henry George School of Social Science, a not-for-profit educational organization that has offered free public education in political economy since 1932.

Each lesson in our U.S. History series is a complete, stand-alone lesson; you may use one or all as needed. The Economics lessons also stand alone, but there is more context, and some of the lessons comprise two- or three-part mini-units.

These lessons are designed for ease of access and use, right from the web. Each reading is provided with a "print friendly" version, and activities are coded with page breaks to make printing as easy as possible (at least in the newer browsers). Sometimes, however, a bit of adjustment in your browser's "print preview" window might be called for to make a page print exactly as you want it to. Occasionally, items that could not practically be presented in html are offered in Adobe Acrobat format.

Landandfreedom.org offers two other key services. Each series of lessons has a list of "further investigations" -- a series of carefully-researched links to online resouces on the topic at hand. These links can be very useful jumping-off points for papers or extra-credit projects. And, we offer "Land and Freedom In the News" -- a twice-monthly news article, with study questions and other activities, keyed to one or more of our lesson plans. The news articles will be archived and are fully searchable.

Last, but not least, we encourage you to tell us what you think. The "World-wide Discussion Board" is up and running. Please tell us how the lessons and activities worked for you, and let's compare notes on how we make social science relevant and meaningful in our classrooms!

All Best Wishes,
Lindy Davies
Land and Freedom Webmaster