About This Database

Researchers' First Step Toward Understanding Today's Most Important and Controversial Issues

Issues and Controversies helps researchers understand today's crucial issues by exploring hundreds of hot topics in politics, government, business, society, education, and popular culture. Each article presents both sides of an issue clearly, coherently, and without bias. Updated weekly, with a backfile dating to 1995, Issues and Controversies offers in-depth articles made to inspire thought-provoking debates. Its straightforward presentation of the key facts, arguments, history, and current context of today's most important and timely issues makes the database an ideal resource for research papers, debate preparation, and persuasive writing assignments. The articles are written by our own expert writers and editors, and each article includes a full range of supporting materials.

Highlights:

• Extensive and objective coverage: more than 1,000 timely, in-depth articles covering complex, hot-button issues in language students can understand, with weekly updates
• Pro and con statements: main arguments focusing researchers' thinking
• Rich related resources: editorial cartoons, newspaper editorials, and discussion questions and activities, along with objective coverage, illustrating the range of opinions and prompting researchers to do their own critical thinking and analysis
• "Need a Research Topic?": summaries of key topics linked to related articles to jump-start student research
• Curriculum Tools: promoting classroom use, with practical activities and research tools for students and educators
• Full coverage of each National High School Debate Topic: overview, with a series of in-depth articles on the key aspects of the debate
• Bill of Rights in Debate: deepening understanding of constitutional issues in contemporary life.

Features:

• Issues from the headlines, including such topics as the new Obama administration and U.S. Congress, abortion, gun control, health care, tax policy, climate change, Middle East policy, same-sex marriage, affirmative action, and the Supreme Court
• Thousands of links to key news coverage and other background information, lending context to the discussion
• Content supporting Common Core, state, and national standards
• Searchable Reuters^® newsfeed, updated hourly
• Thousands of timelines, primary source documents, and additional resources
• "By the Numbers," giving statistical overviews of main article topics
• World Almanac^® and Encyclopedia content
• Citations display in MLA style, with APA guidelines.