Learn more about the Veterans History Project (VHP) from the Library of Congress and the many ways it can be used in the classroom. Teachers who have both contributed to and taught with the rich collections of the Veterans History Project, education staff from the Library, and the VHP staff will discuss these rich resources and will answer your questions, too. Join us on October 21, 4 PM ET, at https://plus.google.com/events/cv6rl35sr9s1v7osukrsmdpm0a0.
VHP collects, preserves, and makes accessible the personal accounts of American war veterans so that future generations may hear directly from veterans and better understand the realities of war. Hear firsthand how this one-of-a-kind collection, with more than 65,000 resources, can be incorporated into the K-12 curriculum.
To pique your interest, check out the Blog Round-Up: Primary Source Highlights for Veterans Day. Here are a couple of highlights from the post:
- The Veterans History Project: Making Veterans’ Stories Come to Life offers an overview of VHP, including teaching activity ideas.
- In The Vietnam War: One Veteran’s Experience, Megan Harris of the VHP staff focuses on one veteran’s collection, reflecting on what one individual’s experience can tell us about a larger historical event.
Can’t join the live event? The full webinar schedule, including upcoming events and recordings of past events is available here. We’ll add the recording from this event, too. UPDATE, 22 October: Here’s the link to the presentation.
Comments (4)
This was a worthwhile hour! Thanks for all the input – I think this type of project has the potential to move into additional settings such as local history museums – as a museum educator, I am considering how we might incorporate some of the ideas we received today – Thanks again!
I highly recommend listening to the recording of the VHP presentation if the timing didn’t work out for readers of this blog. In addition to touching personal stories about the connections made with veterans, the teachers who presented on how they had used VHP with students shared lots of valuable strategies.
I have a question for Monica from VHP. Teachers and students sometimes need to locate only fully digitized collections of veterans’ materials by time period or name of conflict. What is your advice for this type of search? Is there a “highlights” area?
Thanks for your help!
Thanks Mary – There are a few ways to see digitised collections on the VHP site. The center image of the home page, http://www.loc.gov/vets is reserved for our rotating web presentations, or themed exhibits. It’s called Experiencing War and a new release is offered about 4 times a year. The full listing of all previous Experiencing War Features (now numbering 45!) is here http://www.loc.gov/vets/stories/ex-war-all.html These features, are a great way to navigate because each one is topically related. But you can also view digitized content by going to the search page, and clicking the box midway down in the center column for digitized collections. Hope that helps.
Thank you, Monica. The Experiencing War feature is such a useful bookmark for teachers, although I think it would be even handier to display an obvious link to it from the VHP homepage. I always seem to wander around a lot in search of that particular page even though I know I’ve seen it somewhere before. Great tip on limiting a search to only digitized content, too. I appreciate your help.