This page provides resources for teaching Washington State History, from our partners and from the CCRH website.
The Washington State Historical Society Education Department has many useful resources, including History Boxes, Lesson Plans, and Columbia Kids, the online history magazine for kids up to age fourteen.
The Washington State Historical Society “Treaty Trail” site includes curriculum, resources, and online activities for teaching about treaties in Washington State—who negotiated them, their significance, their relationship to the U.S. Constitution, and some of their ongoing consequences.
The Center for Columbia River History community history websites include primary documents and secondary historical narratives focused on Washington State. These materials are ideal for meeting state standards.
Through primary documents, photographs, and oral history interviews, the Camas Community history website tells the story of Camas, Washington, a mill town located near the Columbia River gorge. The site is divided into three parts demonstrating change over time from the early contact era to the end of the 20th century: I – the Cascade Indians & Early Town History; II – Company Town; III – Growth and Change.
The Columbia Basin Native Fishery website profiles many indigenous groups of the Columbia Basin. The site includes documents regarding Indian fishing rights such as treaties and court cases in both the U.S. and Canada. These documents can be used to answer the “questions to consider.” Other sections address treaty harvest rights, dams and their effects on the Native fishery, and traditional fishing methods. A photo archive includes images of Indian fishing and of the river before and after it was dammed.
The Crewport Community History website tells the story of the Crewport, Washington Farm Labor Camp constructed by the Farm Security Administration during WWII, just two miles north of the City of Granger, Washington. This web site, grounded in oral history interviews and supplemented by photos and documents, weaves together the history of migrant families who resided at Crewport from the 1940’s through the late 1960’s when the Camp was closed. Created in partnership with Yakima Valley Community College, the Crewport community history is an example of a community based service learning project using oral history in the classroom.
The Moses Lake Community History website also uses images, documents, photos, and oral histories to explore the history of a community impacted by the building of Grand Coulee Dam. Although many welcomed federal programs that provided irrigation water and cheap hydroelectric power, the resulting inundation of the lands along the Columbia fundamentally altered Native American communities and several small settlements that had grown up since the mid-1880s. This site provides “go to the source” and “questions to consider” for each section.
