Explore a cartoon, published as the front cover of a magazine in January 1905, that draws on the many metaphors about the New Year offering a clean start. Although many of the specific images in the cartoon may be unfamiliar to students, the labels on them offer a clear starting point for researching the context and the details the artist included.
Now you can bring Library of Congress artifacts and experts into your classroom! Short (less than three minutes) videos about some of the Library’s “hidden treasures,” created in partnership with HISTORY, feature Library curators briefly describing each item and its importance in history.
On the Library of Congress Web site, Chronicling America provides free access to millions of historic American newspaper pages from 1836-1922. Although the sheer volume of stories might seem daunting, Chronicling America makes it easy to explore the pages.
Looking for primary sources relating to a specific period in United States history? Try using the American Memory Timeline from the Library of Congress.
National Hispanic Heritage Month is September 15th to October 15th, and the collections of the Library of Congress are rich in primary sources for your students to explore.
Part of the power of teaching with primary sources comes from their immediacy—eyewitness accounts of historic events can have an emotional impact that secondary sources might lack. This is especially true of primary sources relating to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
Can science teachers use primary sources? They certainly can. One approach is to use primary sources to examine how scientific discoveries were treated in popular culture.
