Teaching with Informational Text: Historic Newspapers from the Library of Congress

Here’s a question for anyone teaching with informational text, including teachers working to meet Common Core State Standards:

Where can you find a wide range of authors writing from varied points of view, making arguments with appeals to evidence, rich with rhetorical strategies and figurative language, often using a number of different media, all in one package? In historic newspapers, that’s where.

Newspapers from the 19^th and 20^th centuries are rich sources of informational text in a dizzying array of formats. In a typical paper from 1900 , you might find factual reporting, fire-breathing editorials, biographical profiles, literary nonfiction, weather reports, box scores, charts, graphs, maps, cartoons, and a poem about current events—maybe even all on the same page! The subjects covered allow for connections across the curriculum, and the stories can prompt explorations of point of view, interpretation of language, analysis of an argument, and textual structure.

An easy way to dive deep into historic newspapers is to explore Chronicling America on the Library’s Web site, where you’ll find free access to millions of historic American newspaper pages from 1836-1922. (This blog has written about Chronicling America in a previous post.)

The Topics in Chronicling America list lets teachers quickly find a number of articles on a single topic, such as the Haymarket Affair of 1886, and make comparisons between coverage in a number of papers from around the country, or even within a single newspaper.

• Ask students to select an article that makes a strong argument, such as “Chicago’s Wild Mobs” or “A Human Tiger.”  Challenge students to identify the specific claims the article makes, and to see if each claim is backed by at least one piece of evidence. How does the amount of evidence cited change students’ ideas of a particular article’s authority?

• Find two articles from different newspapers that express very different points of view on a single issue or event, like “Great Day for Labor” and “Mob Violence Feared.” Encourage your students to compare and contrast the methods used by the two writers to make their case. Do they cite different evidence? Or do they use different persuasive techniques?

• Newspapers of 100 years ago were full of cartoons, maps, portraits, and other visual elements. Select a visual, and ask students to compare it with a newspaper text account of the same event. (For Haymarket, they might compare “The First Dynamite Bomb Thrown in America” with “The Anarchists’ Lives.”) What does each medium do better than the other? How much more convincing do your students find one or the other?

How have you used historic newspapers to help your students explore informational text?