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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
