Celebrate International Literacy Day on September 8 with the Library of Congress! This year's theme is "literacy in a digital world," and the Library has a variety of programs and resources to support and celebrate literacy.
In the May/June 2017 issue of Social Education, the journal of the National Council for the Social Studies, our “Sources and Strategies” article features a letter that Walt Whitman wrote to his mother on December 29, 1862. Whitman wrote the letter to let his mother know that he had found his brother George alive and healing from an injury sustained during the Battle of Fredericksburg.
For Children's Book Week, we want to highlight books and authors talks available for free online from the Library of Congress. Of course, these can be powerful and engaging literacy tools any week of the year!
Does each generation represent William Shakespeare in its own way? April, National Poetry Month, includes the anniversaries of both Shakepeare's birth and death, and this year marks the 400th anniversary of his death.
National Poetry month, a month to celebrate poetry, is a perfect time to explore the Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature. Some of the readings focus closely on the poems; others include musings on the selections and what inspired them. Some of the recordings are of a single poet, and others are panels or conversations between two or more poets. Hearing a poem in the poet's voice brings it to life in unexpected ways, and the range of poets offers something for all lovers of poetry.
I am the head of the Poetry and Literature Center at the Library. The Center is home to the U.S. Poet Laureate, the only federally-funded position for a literary artist in the country and the most visible position for a poet by far.
Learn about Zora Neale Hurston's time in Florida with the Federal Writers project in the May/June 2015 "Sources and Strategies" article in Social Education, the journal of the National Council for the Social Studies.
Enduring themes, characters, and images from Shakespeare's writing have long been woven into the fabric of other media and popular culture. Examining relevant primary sources from the collections of the Library of Congress may strengthen student connections to a particular work.
F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby is one of the most often taught in American literature classes. However, the further we move away chronologically from 1922, a time of economic boom following the devastation of World War I, the less students know about this significant time between the Great War and the War to end all Wars.