This collection uses primary sources to explore the American Indian Movement between 1968 and 1978. Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and draw diverse material from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. Each set includes an overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee.

Students use Library of Congress primary sources to examine 19th and 20th century social life in the United States in order to formulate ideas about the American Dream.

This site helps teachers and students navigate the vast online collections of primary source materials at the Library of Congress. The links, arranged by chronological period, lead to sets of selected primary sources on a variety of topics in U.S. history.

The collection consists of over 62,000 pieces of sheet music registered for copyright during the nineteenth century. Included are popular songs, operatic arias, piano music, sacred music and secular choral music, solo instrumental music, method books and instructional materials, and music for band and orchestra.

The Printed Ephemera Collection at the Library of Congress is a rich repository of Americana. In total, the Collection comprises 28,000 primary source items dating from the seventeenth century to the present and encompassing key events and eras in American history. Among them are a variety of posters, notices, invitations, proclamations, leaflets, propaganda, manifestos, menus and business cards. They capture the experience of the Revolutionary War, slavery, the western land rush, the Civil War, Women's Suffrage, and the Industrial Revolution from the viewpoint of those who lived through them.

Students use Library of Congress primary sources to examine the western United State's cultures and identify the contributions each make to the whole.

Dime novels written by women were once enormously popular with their readers, but the genre has been neglected for most of its history by scholars, collectors, and libraries. The genre suffers from the double burden of being both popular and written for working-class women. This project hopes to overcome the history of oversight to both the form and its readers by providing information about the novels themselves, the authors, the readers, and nineteenth century public reaction.
This site is a source of information about women’s dime novels and includes primary sources on dime novels, biographies for lesser-known authors, lists of relevant archival collections and cover art.

In this learning experience, the students will complete a primary source inquiry into the impacts of Reconstruction on Black experiences in Virginia and the South. The students will use the Claim-Evidence-Reasoning structure to defend one of two claims.Students will analyze sources that depict/detail Black experiences and perspectives before, during, and after the Reconstruction. This learning experience will be most effective after students have been introduced to the what and when of Reconstruction.

WR122 continues the focus of WR 121 on academic writing as a means of inquiry with added emphasis on persuasion and argument supported by external research; it also uses critical reading, discussion and the writing process to explore ideas, develop cultural awareness and formulate original positions. The course emphasizes development of writing and critical thinking through logical reasoning, rhetorical control, independent research, and information literacy.

This lesson focuses on the vocabulary and skills students need to define, identify, discuss and apply a variety of informative writing techniques. The texts in this lesson are infographics related to marginalized people. Students are asked to apply the techniques they learn to an informative text of their own. 

In this unit you will learn about the formal parts of an argument and how they work together. You will also learn about a common and not always honest way that people making arguments attempt to persuade their audiences, sometimes through manipulation.

This unit contains two lessons, a primary source reading, an information literacy activity, and a discussion activity.

This resource was created as part of a Developmental Reading course redesign project, with contributions from Theresa Love and David Pontious and support from an Open Oregon Educational Resources grant.

Students are often asked to perform speeches, but rarely do we require students to analyze speeches as carefully as we study works of literature. In this unit, students are required to identify the rhetorical strategies in a famous speech and the specific purpose for each chosen device. They will write an essay about its effectiveness and why it is still famous after all these years.

This inquiry provides students the opportunity to analyze the attitudes and beliefs of different time periods using Treaties made between the Territory of Washington and Native American tribes. Students will investigate the intentions behind the treaties of 1854-1855 to determine if the ideals were met or not.  Then they will look into how Native Americans used the treaties in 1960-70’s to establish themselves as different from Washington State citizens and as a way to remain “Indian.”  This inquiry is meant to challenge students to analyze the intentions of documents and to predict how they could be seen or used in the future. Students will need to have a solid background on native American cultures and traditions as well as an understanding of manifest destiny to accurately comprehend the results of the treaties recommendations are written below on how this might be done and focusses. The unit will come to a close when students write an argumentative essay using evidence and counterargument to address how documents can be used differently throughout time. 

Images can be a useful component in any subject.  This lesson will guide students through an analysis of an image.  Students will use critical thinksing skills to interpret an image. Students will then generate a hypothesis about the source and construct questions for further investigation. 

In this lesson students use the Informational Text Analysis Tool to deconstruct the essential elements of informational text. Informational text is more important to teachers than ever before, especially with the rise of the new Core standards. The Library of Congress is an excellent resource for finding and using texts to build students' reading skills.Through a diverse array of classic and contemporary literature as well as challenging informational and primary source texts, students build knowledge, gain insights, explore possibilities, and broaden their perspective.

These primary source excerpts are broken into 2 groups: Cuban perspectives and American perspectives of the Bay of Pigs invasion. Consider having students work in pairs or small groups to read, discussion and answer the questions for their perspective. Then have students from both perspectives share observations. Consider using a guided question such as "Why are views so different for the same event, especially of those who fought at the Bay of Pigs?"

Description: The attached unit has incorporated Media Literacy for Social Studies by scaffolding a variety of primary source document activities of varying perspectives on New Imperialism (1850-1914) which allow the studnt to identify possible bias or misinformation. The guided questions which accompany the primary sources ask the student to explain differing responses and to think critically about why those responses may be different depending on the context. 

In this lesson Students individually consider a visual text and draw conclusions based on what they see. They write about their conclusions and explain the evidence used to make that determination. Students will be able to analyze a visual text. Students will be able to develop and support a claim about the visual text based on evidence found in the text.

This informational text explains that while both the Arctic and Antarctica are cold, Antarctica is much colder and drier - a polar desert. The text is written at a grades four through five reading level. This version is a full-color PDF that can be printed, cut and folded to form a book. Each book contains color photographs and illustrations.

This informational text explains that while both the Arctic and Antarctica are cold, Antarctica is much colder and drier - a polar desert. The text is written at a kindergarten through grade one reading level. This version is a full-color PDF that can be printed, cut and folded to form a book. Each book contains color photographs and illustrations.