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.
Each of these historical artifacts is a part of the history of Mexican American communities in the 19th and 20th centuries. And each one can be found in the new Library of Congress primary source set, Mexican American Migrations and Communities.
The article highlights a number of images from the early 20th century that the National Child Labor Committee used in their campaign to abolish child labor, including photographs by Lewis Hine. Although today these dramatic photos are often viewed as art objects, the NCLC used them as tools--as persuasive elements that would help them make their case against child labor in the public sphere and in the halls of Congress.
The first post of this two-part series offered ten tips for filling classroom spaces with engaging primary source displays to promote systematic critical thinking. This second post lists ten ways to introduce primary sources into pedagogy. No matter your grade level or subject, the ten ideas start from this basic premise: For every lesson a primary source!
As your students look around their classroom environment, does a visually stimulating array of primary sources surround them? As a teacher, you can saturate your classroom with primary sources to promote critical thinking and inquiry.
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.
The Teaching with the Library of Congress blog regularly offers suggestions for helping students practice primary source analysis techniques. Since the launch of the interactive Primary Source Analysis Tool a year ago, thousands of students have analyzed maps, texts, photographs, political cartoons, and more the high tech way.
Like many readers of the Teaching with the Library of Congress blog, we have identified strategies related to the Common Core’s instructional “shift” toward integrating more informational texts into literacy programs. Today’s summer blog round-up pulls together five posts packed with ideas for using informational texts from the Library’s collections.
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.
