Sometimes listeners are surprised to find a familiar tune lurking behind the lyrics of a new song. Songwriters may revisit and reuse existing compositions, hoping to catch a listener’s attention through something familiar. The Civil War era song "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" not only resembles an earlier song, but also inspired a number of parodies.
One of the Library's primary source sets for educators, Civil War Music, has recently been re-tuned to reflect the central role that music played in the Civil War, with the addition of more than a dozen items from the Library's collections.
Back in December 2017, a colleague of ours here at the Library published a short piece in the Music Educator's Journal highlighting the many video recordings of musical performances at the Library of Congress hosted on the Library’s YouTube channel. Focusing on videos documenting the American Folklife Center’s Homegrown concert series, Lee Ann Potter (Director, Educational Outreach) noted that these resources offer great value to teachers and students. What is that value, and how can we here at the AFC help realize it?
As the Educational Outreach Team takes a break to celebrate the winter holidays we hope this image from the Library of Congress Lands End All-America quilt collection reminds you to take a moment and look up at the stars with your family and friends.
Rob Williams first used the Library’s digital newspaper collections more than a decade ago as a high-school teacher of U.S. history in Powhatan County, Virginia, near Richmond. Today, he’s a recording artist—he released his third album, “An Hour Before Daylight,” in October. But he still draws inspiration from the same online resources that captivated his history students.
Two articles about Patrick Gilmore's June 1869 peace jubilee in Boston, an event many students and teachers may not be familiar with, might pique students' interest in learning about the event and lend themselves to structured evaluation and analysis of each source of information