Powerful primary sources: provide rich historical context for your social studies units with the wide range of resources available on the Web

Instructor, Nov-Dec, 2004 by Hannah Trierweiler

Why Use Primary Sources?

www.emsc.nysed.gov/ciai/dbq/ssindex.html

The standards-based online courses offered here will give a boost to any teacher who wants to use historical sources in his or her classroom. Learn how to ask exciting "document-based questions" to motivate inquiry.

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American Memory

http://rs6.loc.gov/amhome.html

To find primary source material for American history units at every level, search this Library of Congress site first. The "Learning Page" for teachers includes lessons on the early colonies, the Civil War, and more.

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Today in History

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/today/today.html

Part of the Library of Congress' "American Memory" site (see above), this page highlights an historical daily event and provides links to related primary sources. Have your middle to upper graders take turns presenting the information to the rest of the class.

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Wonders From a World-Class Library

www.nypl.org/digital

Photographs of endangered animals, astronomical phenomena, and depression-era workers are just some of the resources available from this comprehensive site. Don't miss the "Maps, Atlases & Charts" section, which offers a glimpse of the evolutionary nature of map-making.

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Journey to the Ancient World

www.perseus.tufts.edu

If you teach a unit on Ancient Greece or Rome, you'll find the digital collections available here helpful. There are links to hundreds of images, texts, and museum works, so you can easily show students Greek poetry, Roman coins, or whatever else you need to support your lessons.

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Ads Through The Ages

http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu

Click on "Digitized Collections" to access several rich resources for grades four and up. Kids will especially love looking at the nineteenth-century advertisements in "Ad*Access," which you can use to teach history, media literacy, and critical-thinking skills.

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Africans in America

www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/home.html

This Web site component to the PBS series on "Africans in America" features an excellent collection of primary sources, including paintings, photographs, and documents. Click on "Resource Bank Index" to see portraits of abolitionists, slave narratives, and more.

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Foodie History

http://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbooks/

Invite your students to explore American history by studying what Americans have eaten, from the Revolution onwards. This site has digitized hundreds of cookbooks, with special sections on regional and ethnic cooking. Weave together history and math lessons by sharing, for example, an 1881 recipe for "Jumble Cake."

Historical Speeches

www.americanrhetoric.com

This continually-updated site offers streaming audio and video of thousands of historical speeches, from Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" to many of George W. Bush's reflections on September 11, 2001. Check out "Figures in Sound," a bank of speech clips each showcasing a rhetoric device, such as metaphor, parallelism, and synecdoche.

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Legendary Interviews

www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/audiointerviews

At this online archive, part of the BBC's site, students can listen to anyone--from late cartoonist Charles Schulz, explaining how he likes to get his readers' attention, to Frances Crick, who describes discovering DNA. Interviews are broken down into small, labeled audio files, so there's no hunting down the part you'd like to share with your class.

Want More Web Sites?

www.scholastic.com/instructor

You'll find links to hundreds of sites, organized by the topics you teach!