New Library of Congress Ebooks: Japanese American Internment, Women’s Suffrage, and Political Cartoons

What would it be like to hold history in your hands? To leaf through the pages of a suffragist’s scrapbook? To scrutinize a political cartoon published by Benjamin Franklin? To hear a decorated veteran speak to you about what it was like to live in a detention camp in his own country?

The Library of Congress is providing students everywhere with a chance to touch, draw on, and explore treasures from its vast collections with the release of its three newest free interactive ebooks for tablets.

These Student Discovery Sets gather unique documents and artifacts related to landmark moments in the nation’s history and, through interactive tools, let students zoom in on, illustrate, and makes notes about what they discover. The newest sets cover Political Cartoons and Public Debates, Japanese American Internment, and Women’s Suffrage.

The objects in the Student Discovery Sets are primary sources: items created by eyewitnesses to history. From Ansel Adams’s compelling photos of internment camps to eighteenth-century cartoons to the songs of suffrage activists, these maps, booklets, posters, cartoons, and iconic images immerse students in history, culture, and science and give them the power to explore.

The Library’s latest Student Discovery Sets are available now for the iPad, and can be downloaded for free on iBooks. They join nine previously published sets on the U.S. Constitution, Symbols of the United States, Immigration, the Dust Bowl, the Harlem Renaissance, Understanding the Cosmos, the Industrial Revolution, Jim Crow and Segregation, and Children’s Lives at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.

The sets are designed for students, providing easy access to open-ended exploration. A Teacher’s Guide for each set, with background information, teaching ideas and additional resources, is one click away on the Library’s website for teachers, loc.gov/teachers.

If you’ve tried the Library’s Student Discovery Sets, please let us know how you’ve used them.