This activity guide accompanies the exhibition America on the Move. It delivers a variety of historical primary-source materials from the exhibition directly to your classroom. Through these documents and activities, students can build a deeper understanding of how transportation shaped American commerce, communities, landscapes, and population migrations.

Find the right vehicles for a new movie from the America on the Move collection, then watch the movie that you’ve created on the big screen. See how much you know about the history of transportation with the interactive games in this online collection. You can find information, artifacts and photographs in the collection as well.

This site offers twelve puzzle sets. Each set challenges you with four or five jigsaw puzzles made from images found in the American Memory collections. As each puzzle in the set is completed, a new puzzle will appear...until you have completed all of the puzzles in that set. You will then have a chance to use what you have learned to discover the Big Picture...the theme the images in the set have in common

This guide was written to help you bring to life the human struggle that was endured in the Campaign for Vicksburg. The guide can help you bring a complex subject to your students. You and your students will probably come up with new and different ways to see the Park. We hope this guide will give you a few new tools to teach and enlighten your class. After all, the Campaign for Vicksburg was more than generals and maps, it was the common soldier, sailor and civilian who witnessed a lifetime in 47 days. Invite your students to experience those times and see beyond the hills to the people.

This site presents stories about successful teaching in middle school. Learn how an e-mail list helped students write better historical fiction, or how fifth-grade students planned a virtual vacation using cd-roms, travel books, and the Internet.

This site invites you to explore the process of piecing together the lives of ordinary people in the past. It is an experimental, interactive case study based on the research that went into the book and film A Midwife’s Tale, both based upon the remarkable diary of 18th-century midwife/healer Martha Ballard. Although DoHistory is centered on the life of Martha Ballard, you can learn basic skills and techniques for interpreting fragments that survive from any period in history.

Travel through time and decide how to get from here to there, while assembling your own photo album. See how much you know about the history of transportation with the interactive games in this online collection. You can find information, artifacts and photographs in the collection as well.

In the The Turns of the Centuries: Everyday Life in a New England Town, 1680-1920, students learn the basic skills needed to "read" primary and secondary sources, including a broad array of documents, maps, images, and buildings, to see what they can reveal about the characteristics of everyday life in Deerfield, MA over three century turns. At the same time, they learn the historical background of each era so that the source materials will be understood in the proper context. Then, they use what they have learned to analyze the ways the town has changed since its beginning. The unit progresses chronologically through the three century turns, covering the periods 1680-1720, 1780-1820, and 1880-1920. This unit is lengthy, encompassing 15 separate lessons, some of which have many parts. However, it is designed in such a way that smaller groups of lessons can easily be extracted and used independently. Use the lessons and accompanying materials to suit your teaching needs.

This guide offers activities parents can use to help young children (preschool through Grade 5) learn about history. It includes suggestions about how parents can work with teachers and schools to help children succeed in school.

Welcome to Hindsight, an online history project that will transport you back to New York City on May 8, 1970. Your mission is to determine what happened on that day, and what meaning it might hold for us today. Our site uses the web's characteristics to foster historical inquiry -- you will navigate through multiple sources of evidence, explore diverse perspectives, and make connections within this "web" of material. The site is part archive, part essay, and part interactive exhibit.

For too many Americans, the history class in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (remember the teacher’s plaintive question, “anyone, anyone?”) is all too familiar. Our approach is meant to challenge this false and familiar image of history: understanding and reconstructing the past requires ways of thinking, reading, and questioning much more engaging and challenging than mere memorization.
Teaching in a way that differs from your own schooling experience is not necessarily easy to imagine, let alone execute. Especially given the many pressures and demands on teachers today. This part of the Historical Thinking Matters website is devoted to providing instructional resources for teacher educators who want to challenge these iconic pictures of history instruction and start preparing their students to teach for historical thinking.

This project provides a model for engaging students in an investigation of authentic materials from the past. The students will be provided with four primary sources and questions to guide their investigation. A wealth of other primary resources can be accessed on the websites listed in the reference section.

The History Engine is an educational tool that gives students the opportunity to learn history by doing the work—researching, writing, and publishing—of an historian. The result is an ever-growing collection of historical articles or "episodes" that paint a wide-ranging portrait of life in the United States throughout its history, available in our online database to scholars, teachers, and the general public.

The History Engine project aims to enhance historical education and research for teachers, students, and scholars alike. It allows undergraduate professors to introduce a more collaborative and creative approach to history into their classrooms, while maintaining rigorous academic standards. The History Engine gives students a more intimate experience with the process of history. Participants who work with the History Engine project learn the craft of an historian: they examine primary documents, place these documents in a larger historical context using secondary sources, and prepare cogent analysis of their sources for the public eye. Finally, the History Engine provides a way for professors to take advantage of digital technology in their classrooms while maintaining rigorous academic standards. The cumulative database provides all the easy-access and searchability of other websites, but also subjects its contents to a careful academic screening process on the part of library staff, archivists, professors, and teaching assistants.

This site is designed to help elementary students understand primary sources. Students learn how archival collections are organized, how to interpret artifacts and documents, how to use primary sources to tell a story, and how to do online research.

Ideas for exploring the history of children's own locality through the use of an old photograph.

Imaging the French Revolution—an experiment in digital scholarship—is organized in three sections. In , seven scholars— selected for their previous work on revolutionary images—analyze forty-two images of crowds and crowd violence in the French Revolution, a shared on-line archive that provided the starting point for the project. Offering the most relevant examples and comments from an on-line forum that took place during the summer of 2003, highlights an effort by those same scholars to consider issues of interpretation, methodology, and the impact of digital media on scholarship. In many cases, authors incorporated the fruits of these discussions into their final essays. These instances are marked for readers with the icon labeled “Further Discussion,” which provides a link to some of the original excerpts. Finally, s allow readers to consider the work of the scholars and to draw their own conclusion. Not only are readers given access to the same archive as the scholars—an usual circumstance, particularly for visual studies—but we also provide an “Image Tool” that permits close study and comparison of the forty-two images. Furthermore, each image includes relevant data and is linked to the various places throughout the site (both discussion and essays) where scholars discuss it. For a more detailed explanation of the historiographical and methodological goals of this project, as well as an appraisal of its results, please consult the introductory and concluding essays.

The school offers lessons for teaching about jazz in American history or music class for Grades 5, 8, and 11. Learn about the evolution of jazz, different jazz styles, improvisation, basic musical elements, and how jazz influenced (and was influenced by) American culture. The mission of The Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz is to offer public school-based jazz education programs for young people around the world, helping students develop imaginative thinking, creativity, curiosity, a positive self image, and a respect for their own and others' cultural heritage.

In The Lessons of 1704, students learn the basic skills needed to do research and to "read" primary and secondary sources, to see what they can reveal about the cultural characteristics and attitudes of the English, French, and Native Americans in the Deerfield area in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. At the same time, they learn about the attitudes and behaviors of these three groups toward one another. Then, they use what they have learned to analyze the 1704 attack on Deerfield and the various events that led up to it. Their study of cultures and attitudes not only helps them understand how Queen Anne's War affected the peoples of the Deerfield area, but also it helps them understand why conflicts happen and how they can escalate. The unit then leads students through an analysis of a wide variety of "accounts" of the attack, from contemporary writings, to an early 20th century movie, to late 20th century "action figures." These "accounts" all reflect a distinct point of view, which students learn to "read" and understand. Throughout, the unit encourages students to question motives and attitudes before reaching conclusions about the causes and effects of an important event in American history.

By immersing themselves in primary sources (George Catlin's letters), students will learn the difference between objective and subjective writing styles. They will draw facts out of the letters to create newspaper articles in Activity 1, and write their own letters as if they were members of the Catlin family in Activity 2. These activities are designed to enliven historical figures, to connect the "current events" of the past with the current events of the present, and to help students read and interpret historical documents.