Despite the controversies, Huckleberry Finn has remained a staple in high school literature study because teachers seek to engage students with texts that provoke discussion and questions. Primary sources from the Library of Congress can help deepen students' thinking around the issues central to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and other literary works.
Currently 12 Years a Slave, the film version of the true story of Solomon Northup, is showing in theaters. His account is a powerful one: A free African American, Northup was kidnapped in 1841 and taken from New York to Washington, D.C., then to New Orleans, where he was sold into twelve years of slavery. A study of primary sources from the Library of Congress indicates that Northrup's experience was far from unique.
On November 19, 1863, renowned orator Edward Everett spoke at the dedication of a memorial cemetery. The world has little noted nor long remembered what he said in those two hours.
Everett’s oration was upstaged by the next speaker’s concise 272 words, now familiar as Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. The following day, Everett himself sent Lincoln a note, complimenting him, “I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”
It can be tricky to understand exactly what is going on during an eclipse. However, eclipses offer a great opportunity for exploring the relationship between the Earth, moon and sun.
The Teaching with the Library of Congress blog offers many entry points to primary sources from the Library of Congress to help your students study and honor the contributions of veterans.
For aficionados of history, graveyards are not creepy settings for Halloween movies, but an opportunity to study human customs and cultural norms of the past and present. The way graves are adorned and the epitaphs they bear can give us information about one life, but can also encourage us to wonder about the people they commemorate and their cultures.
The Teaching with the Library of Congress blog has published a number of posts highlighting primary sources related to the rich traditions of Native Americans.
These resources offer an enormous variety of choices and unleash students' imaginations as to how they want to tell the story. We start with the available analysis tool and teacher’s guides and work from those to expand our projects.
