Library of Congress
Loc: The Learning Page: American Indian Reservation Controversies
Primary sources help students understand issues and controversies surrounding the American Indian Reservations of the 1870s. Historians provide different accounts and views of this facet of American history, and students utilize these...
Library of Congress
Loc: Teachers: Women in the Civil War: Ladies, Contraband, Spies
With this lesson, a collection of primary texts, including diaries, letters, and photographs help learners understand how women were affected by the Civil War. Students will explore, through reading a collection of documents, the...
Alabama Learning Exchange
Alex: Locating With the Lcc
The parts of the LCC call numbers are taught in this lesson using colored index cards to represent the four parts. Students will be able to recognize what each part of the call number stands for.
Library of Congress
Loc: Women in the Civil War: Ladies, Contraband and Spies
This lesson uses primary sources - diaries, letters, and photographs - to explore the experiences of women in the Civil War. By looking at a series of document galleries, the perspectives of slave women, plantation mistresses, female...
Library of Congress
Loc: Teachers: Declaration of Independence: Created Equal?
What does the Declaration of Independence mean with the phrase, "All men are created equal"? Students examine "equality", and what it means now and what it meant during the time of Thomas Jefferson, and "develop a rationale for...
Library of Congress
Loc: African American Identity in the Gilded Age
Examine the tension experienced by African-Americans as they struggled to establish a vibrant and meaningful identity based on the promises of liberty and equality in the midst of a society that was ambivalent towards them and sought to...
Library of Congress
Loc: Billy the Kid: Perspectives on an Outlaw
This lesson relates to the westward movement in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Students analyze the role that gunfighters played in the settlement of the West and distinguish between their factual...
Library of Congress
Loc: Sourcing a Document: The First Thanksgiving
In this activity, students discuss the reliability of a painting of the First Thanksgiving to introduce the idea that is crucial to consider a source's date.
Library of Congress
Loc: Teachers: The American Dream
With the help of digitized primary documents -- pictures, photograph, recordings, and written accounts -- students will explore and define what the "American Dream" meant for people over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth...
Library of Congress
Loc: The Titanic: Shifting Responses to Its Sinking
In 1912, popular media headlined the sinking of the world's largest luxury passenger ocean liner while on its maiden voyage. Newspapers captivated the world's attention with stories from survivors and about victims who did not survive....
Library of Congress
Loc: The Alaska Purchase: Debating the Sale
The 1867 Treaty of Cession, in which the United States purchased Alaska from the Russian empire, marked an unusually peaceful transition. The purchase of Alaska was done under amicable circumstances, and both Russia and the U.S. felt...
Library of Congress
Loc: The Constitution: Drafting a More Perfect Union
This lesson provides discussion, culminating, and extension activities to enhance student understanding of the Constitution, and the Committees of Detail and Style. Students have the opportunity to compare the work of those two...
Library of Congress
Loc: The American West: Images of Its People
Different peoples have contributed to the history of the western United States. To gain an understanding and appreciation of this history, middle schoolers investigate the region's cultures and identify the contributions that each make...
Library of Congress
Loc: The Huexotzinco Codex
Students will analyze a set of pictograph documents created by native peoples of Puebla, Mexico in 1531. Students will take on the role of historians, study the documents, and create a scenario to explain what these documents were for,...
Library of Congress
Loc: Change in Early 20th Century America: Doing the Decades
This unit provides a flexible investigative structure for the study of selected themes in U.S. history and culture using the American Memory collections and related resources. Core goals are the development of relationships between...
Cyberbee
Cyberbee: Election Lessons
These Election Lessons contain a variety of activities to use in your classroom, including a history of campaign buttons. Many of the links use primary sources from the Library of Congress.
Library of Congress
Loc: Thomas Jefferson's Library: The Case for a National Library
Students examine a letter written by Thomas Jefferson and identify techniques he used to persuade Congress to purchase his personal library. Students consider a selection of Jefferson's books and then write their own persuasive letters...
Library of Congress
Loc: The Great Gatsby: Primary Sources From the Roaring Twenties
In order to appreciate historical fiction, students need to understand the factual context and recognize how popular culture reflects the values, mores, and events of the time period. Since a newspaper records significant events and...
Library of Congress
Loc: Immigration History Firsthand
Immigration History Firsthand has been designed to provide elementary children with experiences which enable them to begin understanding primary sources. Students move from personal artifacts to the vast Library of Congress online...
Library of Congress
Loc: Teachers: Personal Stories and Primary Sources
Students will explore the value of personal stories and first-hand accounts when exploring history, in this case, the events of the early twentieth century, which included World War I and the Great Depression. Through this five-unit...
Library of Congress
Loc: Teachers: Suffrage Strategies: Voices for Votes Lesson Plan
Students will learn all about the history of suffrage for women and what influences were used to change people's attitudes. They will then use their understanding to create a modern-day election document of ephemera, for example, a...
Library of Congress
Loc: Become a Historical Detective
Search American Memory collections and play the role of a detective in this instructional activity that seeks to find out if Billy the Kid really was killed by Pat Garrett at Fort Sumner, New Mexico.
Library of Congress
Loc: American Memory: Colonial Settlement 1600s 1763
The settlement of the colonies in America is the focus of this article. The course of events is divided into topics and time periods, making it easier to understand. Note is made of the effects to the already present Native Americans as...
Library of Congress
Loc: Rise of Industrial America: Railroads in the Late 19th Century
A compilation of primary source documents addressing building and running the railroad system in the late 19th century.