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.
How can you share your response to a major world event? In the 19th and early 20th centuries, you might have put your thoughts down in a poem and sent it to a newspaper. The 1918 entry of the United States into World War I triggered an especially dramatic outpouring of these personal responses in verse.
Sometimes one page can say more about a subject--and about the writer--than a thousand. Short texts from the Library of Congress, including letters and telegrams, can be used to help students unpack meaning and make inferences about the authors.
The Library of Congress showcases documents from the work, lives, and public images of five major writers in its newest primary source set: American Authors in the Nineteenth Century: Whitman, Dickinson, Longfellow, Stowe, and Poe.