With the launch of the Library's newest primary source set, Understanding the Cosmos: Changing Models of the Solar System and the Universe, teachers and students can explore these models and the astronomers who created them.
Our ideas about science and technology play an important role in how we imagine the future. Does new technology directly improve society? Or is it more complicated than that. We can look at a series of items from the new online collection Finding Our Place in the Cosmos: From Galileo to Sagan and Beyond to explore how Carl Sagan’s ideas developed and changed on this topic over time.
“The context for each imaginary contraption becomes fodder for understanding ideas about space and flight.” We’ve added some ideas at the end for ways to use these primary sources to deepen student understanding of the ways in which people have imagined space and flight.
This summer, attending the Library of Congress Summer Teacher Institute took me back to the “awe” of history. Seeing the diary entry from the night President Lincoln was shot, and being able to see the emotion in the writing…You don’t get that in a transcript or in a modified document.
When President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law on July 2, 1964, he said that “the purpose of the law is simple. It does not restrict the freedom of any American, so long as he respects the rights of others.”
The role of the Ambassador is to raise “national awareness of the importance of young people’s literature as it relates to lifelong literacy, education and the development and betterment of the lives of young people.” DiCamillo, the fourth to hold this position, has chosen “Stories Connect Us” as her theme, saying “When we read together, we connect. Together, we see the world. Together, we see each other.”