Middle East in Historical Context Inquiry Sets Now Available for Classroom Use
As teachers begin the 2025-26 school year, the California History-Social Science Project is proud to announce that there are four new inquiry sets that teachers may now use to teach Middle Eastern and Arab American History:
Premodern Elite Culture in Andalusia introduces students to the multicultural world of medieval Iberia, where Muslim, Jewish, and Christian elites shared cultural practices across political and religious divides. Through structured interpretation of court poetry, visual arts, and chronicles, students gain an understanding of the commonalities premodern elites shared, contextualizing later studies of political absolutism and revolutionary change.
Middle Eastern Jewish Life and Early Zionism, 1880-1920 presents a variety of voices from Arabic-speaking and Sephardic Jewish communities alongside European Jewish perspectives. The set situates the emergence and early debates over Zionism among Jewish communities, highlighting perspectives often excluded by European-centered narratives on this topic. The set provides historical grounding for classroom discussions of nationalism, empire, and identity.
The Arab American Immigrant Experience narrates the history of Arab immigration to the United States and how these immigrants navigated racial stereotyping. Focused attention is paid to how Arab Americans were represented in popular culture, introducing students to the concept of Orientalism and illustrating how Arab Americans contested these stereotypes. Using oral histories, photography, and poetry, the set introduces Arab American immigration history while teaching media literacy related to Arab communities.
Modern Palestinian History contextualizes the 1948 Nakba–the displacement of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes with Israel’s establishment–with sources ranging from Ottoman maps to British commission reports and Palestinian writings and poetry. Students trace the intersections of Zionist colonization in Palestine and British imperial rule, while also examining Palestinian claims to political continuity, cultural resilience, and resistance to displacement after 1948. The set encourages engagement with how colonialism and nationalism reshaped Palestine through the twentieth century.
These four new offerings are the result of a year-long partnership between the CHSSP, the Department of History, and the Middle East/South Asia Studies program at UC Davis. Called The Middle East in Historical Context, the project invited renowned historians to UC Davis, where they gave public talks and consulted with faculty, teacher-leaders, and scholars to develop new lessons based on their research expertise. These inquiry sets address the pressing needs of teachers seeking accessible, scholarly resources for examining Middle Eastern and Arab American histories in their full complexity and from multiple perspectives. The project was generously supported by grant funding from the UC Office of the President.
Each inquiry set features primary source materials paired with contextual information, discussion questions, and literacy supports. They broach timely, sometimes contested topics with attention to providing multiple perspectives, and they introduce rarely taught resources into California classrooms: Ladino memoirs, Palestinian refugee poetry, Arab American immigrant newspapers, illuminated manuscripts from Andalusia, etc. The sets are aligned with California’s adopted documents, secondary texts, and teaching activities in California’s Framework for History-Social Science.
Please let us know as you incorporate these resources into your classroom. CHSSP is eager to hear about your experience! We can be reached at: chssp@ucdavis.edu
Read more about the project in this 2025 interview with CHSSP Deputy Director Beth Slutsky and faculty lead Stacy Fahrenthold: “Bringing Middle Eastern History into K-12 Classrooms” [May 19, 2025]