Designed to accompany the Student Workbook, the Teacher's Guide provides chapter summaries which teachers may use in teaching students to read for the main idea. There are reading questions with answers for each chapter of the LAND OF HOPE text; the Students Workbook has the same questions with blank spaces for students to write answers. Primary documents accompany each chapter, broken into shorter segments to help with reading comprehension; these documents also have reading questions with answers. Documents are often the text of speeches but may include diary entries and song lyrics. There are about two dozen map exercises, with keys. (The maps, without the answers, are also in the Student Workbook.) Extensive testing materials are included: multiple choice and put-in-order short answer questions, quote identifications, and synthetical essay questions for each chapter and for final exams. Teaching strategies are suggested, as well as supplementary materials to "thicken" topics covered in the text when teachers or students desire further details or alternate interpretations. The authors have long experience with teaching US History and know, and share here, a lot of tricks.

Did you know the original Wizard of Oz was a spoof of the Populist Party in the late 18th century? The Populists wanted to get off the gold standard (the yellow brick road) and into greenbacks (the Emerald City). Dorothy is accompanied by an industrial worker (no heart), a farmer (no brain), and the Cowardly Lion (William Jennings Bryan). Any student who has seen the movie then remembers the Populists!