University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies
ER #233 Contact: Adnan Dzumhur
A Visual Guide to Cold War is a digital collection of visual primary sources curated from the Library of Congress archives: propaganda posters, political cartoons, movie clips, and historical photographs. The Visual Guide is designed for middle and high school history teachers to assist them in teaching about US-Soviet/Russian relations during the Cold War with visual media as primary sources. The project supports the teaching of this critical period in world history through visuals that convey both the U.S. and Soviet perspectives and encourages inquiry-based learning through the concepts of visual representation, media production, and national identity. This project adds new media types to the Visual Guide, including comics to offer teachers a means to connect better with younger learners. A Professional Development Module will equip educators with the necessary tools and strategies to teach the Cold War using primary sources. The module provides guidance on how to teach students to analyze primary sources and identify bias and perspective. It also includes specific examples of using different types of primary sources in class through lesson plans based on primary sources. The module also provides educators with an opportunity for social learning through collaboration and discussions on TPS Teachers Network online forum.
Wake Forest University
ER #199 Contact: Danielle Parker Moore
More than just a seat on a bus. Rosa Parks' Lifetime of Civic Action
Each year, Wake Forest University’s Department of Education hosts the Children’s Defense Fund Freedom School, a summer enrichment program in which children from the community come to campus and are provided with a research-based multicultural curriculum that supports children and families.
The overriding goal of this project is for Freedom School students to engage in historical inquiry as they utilize the Rosa Parks Papers collection to augment their study of the American Civil Rights movement. Specifically, the project team has designed a series of College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Inquiries using an Inquiry Design Model (IDM) through which students can engage with Library of Congress primary source documents. The project also engages both in-service and pre-service teachers.
National Paideia Center
ER #194 Contact: Terry Roberts
Dialogues on Racial Justice: Helping Educators Learn to Talk About Race is designed expressly to help American educators discuss issues of race with compassion, empathy, and candor. The project has two phases: first, partnering with a cohort of history educators from the District of Columbia Public Schools to identify appropriate primary sources from the Library of Congress Collections, draft seminar plans for a select number, and vet those plans through professional dialogue; and second—to make these texts and seminar plans widely available—launching the “Seminar Plan Collection for Social Justice” on the NPC website and link to the Library of Congress website.
National Humanities Center
ER #152 Contact: Andy Mink
“From P.T. Barnum to the Oyster: Understanding the Regulatory History of 20th Century America Through Environmental and Economic History Courses” integrates select Library of Congress collections and TPS inquiry-based approaches and leverages the NHC’s popular Humanities in Class webinar series to create and offer online teacher professional development courses focused on the environmental and economic history of the United States.
University of North Carolina: Center for Slavic, Eurasian, and Eastern European Studies (CSEEES)
ER #142 Contact: Adnan Dzumhur
Visual Guide to U.S.-Soviet Relations During the Cold War is a project from the UNC Center for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies (CSEEES) that aims to develop digital resources for middle and high school history teachers to assist them in teaching about US-Soviet/Russian relations during the Cold War with visual media as primary sources. The project (1) supports the teaching of this critical period in world history through visuals that convey both the U.S. and Soviet perspectives and (2) encourages inquiry-based learning through the concepts of visual representation, media production, and national identity. The project is also tailored for teaching approaches that invite students to think both globally and historically: how and why were these visuals produced and disseminated, for whom, and what impact did they have?
The primary sources for this project are organized in thematic sets and include professionally curated, annotated, and contextualized materials from the vast holdings of the Library of Congress’ digital collections. In order to enable teachers to integrate the primary sources on U.S.-Soviet relations into broader lesson plans that cover the period between 1945-1989, the sets are divided by major historical events, such as the Korean War, the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, the Arms Race, Détente, and Perestroika. The project also features materials housed in the on-site and digital special collections at the UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke University libraries, particularly the Russian-language sources from the Soviet satirical journal “Krokodil” and collections of perestroika-era posters.
Webinar: Visual History of the Cold War
Website: A Visual Guide to the Cold War
NC State College of Education
ER #124 Contact: Meghan Manfra
Connecting Carolina: Integrating Primary Sources from the Library of Congress Collection in North Carolina's History Classrooms This project represents a collaborative partnership between North Carolina State’s College of Education and the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh, NC. The goal is to support the integration of the primary sources made available by the Library of Congress across the grade levels in history classrooms in North Carolina. The Connecting Carolina program leverages current curriculum standards as well as student prior knowledge and provides professional development for teachers focused on the integration of digital history resources available through loc.gov in the classroom by making connections to state history. Specifically, we will use the "Story of North Carolina" exhibit presented by the North Carolina Museum of History to connect American history resources in the Library of Congress collection to our state’s history, thus enabling teachers to build on student prior knowledge while also motivating students to understand American history in a way that is relevant to their home communities and experiences.
PD Plan: Integrating Resources from the Library of Congress to Teach Historical Concepts
NCSS Social Education, 83(2), What's New about Fake News? Integrating Digital History for Media Literacy
NC Civic Education Consortium
ER #104 Contact: Christie Hinson Norris
Chronozoom TimeBook: AP US History Editionactively engages K-12 teachers and students in exploring Library of Congress resources through a sustainable and innovative digital "textbook," designed on a highly interactive timeline (using the free digital platform of ChronoZoom) to highlight the organic interconnectedness of historical events. With the AP U.S. History curriculum as a framework, teachers from across the Southeastern region utilize various Library of Congress resources to create engaging and interconnected primary source exhibits that are positioned across the timeline. Each exhibit is made up of 4-6 digital artifacts from the Library of Congress collection and embellished with resources from state and local archives. More than a textbook, this process transforms the historic record into a deeply compelling TimeBook that encourages inquiry-based learning and highlights the concepts of causation, simultaneity, and agency.
While teachers participate in the creation of the TimeBook to ensure classroom applicability and curricular alignment, the ultimate impact on educators is through a series of professional development opportunities. Ultimately, participating teachers not only receive intensive training on how to effectively integrate the Library of Congress' resources, but also leave with a ready-to-implement technological tool for helping students interact with primary sources while critically examining their historical relatedness.
Library of Congress US History TimeBook
East Carolina University
ER #99 Contact: Christina Tschida
Learning to Teach with Local Sources in Eastern North Carolina - In recent years, critical reading of nonfiction texts has taken on increased importance in the elementary grades. Primary source-based teaching can help to meet that need, but it has long been less common in elementary schools than with older students, leading to a shortage of good models and materials. Based at East Carolina University, this project creates small, generative document sets for use in teacher education and professional development settings. Through these sets (and their associated professional development sessions), teachers learn to select, excerpt, and juxtapose documents to create intriguing, inquiry-oriented lessons and units. Model documents address topics of regional and national interest and are drawn from the Library of Congress, ECU's Joyner Library, and other North Carolina collections. Initially targeted at audiences of pre-service and in-service elementary teachers, the resources have future applications with secondary teachers and with K-12 students themselves.
University of North Carolina School of Education
ER #80 Contact: Cheryl Bolick
America on the World Stage – Online provides professional development in the use of primary sources to teach U.S. History with a global context by leveraging the continuity and flexibility of an online course environment. LEARN NC at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill's School of Education works with experienced teachers to author and host a complimentary bundle of online professional development courses that teach the content and methodology of each module of America on the World Stage. Teachers from the Charlottesville City Public Schools TPS project serve as authors and instructors, and participating teachers develop a five to seven week long serialized course, hosted by LEARN NC. Central to the project is intentional integration of Library of Congress collection materials with the existing teaching kits. Each kit includes relevant primary sources and each course integrates TPS methodology. LEARN NC offers these courses with an expandable selection of "greatest hits" that serve as trailers for each course and feature Library of Congress materials as the centerpiece.
Sign up for LEARN NC email announcements
Project Website
University of North Carolina Wilmington
ER #77 Contact: Cory Callahan
Beyond Words 2.0 has partnered with the TPS Eastern Region program to use the Library of Congress' rich reservoir of digitized resources and analysis tools to develop and support a community of teachers who are skilled at engaging their students in thinking critically and historically about visual documents, especially historical photographs.
Students need these powerful analysis tools to negotiate the deluge of visual data comprising the world away from school. Students must be able to collect and analyze data, form and test reasonable hypotheses, make decisions and solve problems, and justify their conclusions. These skills, newly refined through thinking deeply about the past, may then transfer to the present, strengthening their democratic dispositions.
Primer for Thinking Historically About a Photograph: Shorpy
Primer for Dorothea Lange's 1935 Migrant Mother
Visual Document Analysis Handout
National Humanities Center: America in Class
ER #73 Contact: Richard Schramm
Revolution, Rights, and Removal: African Americans, Women, and Native Americans and the Making of America - The National Humanities Center builds on its successful series of TPS seminars to sponsor five brand new ninety-minute online professional development seminars for high school teachers of American history and literature. Although funded by the TPS Eastern region, the seminars are available to teachers throughout the nation. Led by Fellows of the National Humanities Center and other distinguished scholars, the seminars explore the role African Americans played in the American Revolution, the causes and consequences of Indian removal, westward expansion and the creation of the United States, the struggle for woman suffrage, and the emergence of Jim Crow. In support of the Common Core State Standards, they focus on the close reading of challenging primary texts which are drawn from the Library of Congress' American Memory Timeline and primary resource sets as well as the Center's teaching anthologies. The seminars seek to deepen teacher content knowledge, provide fresh instructional resources, and model close reading discussion strategies.
Paideia Active Learning
ER #59 Contact: Terry Roberts
Legacies of the Civil War is a three-day institute designed to provide K-12 teachers with the training and materials to successfully use Library of Congress digital primary sources through Paideia Seminar discussion to teach and learn about the Civil War time period. Given the paramount significance of the Civil War in American cultural history and its robust presence in the Library of Congress' collections, the National Paideia Center is dedicated to introducing participants (and through them, their students) to the multiple "legacies of the Civil War" as represented through artistic expressions such as drawing, photography, music, and poetry.
National Humanities Center: America in Class
ER #47 Contact: Richard Schramm
Sponsored by the America in Class® from the National Humanities Center, Key Questions, Key Texts offers five free, live, interactive, ninety-minute online seminars that integrate resources from the Library of Congress' American Memory Timeline with those of the Center's teaching anthologies. Under the leadership of distinguished scholars, each seminar explores a key question in U.S. history: Why did some early European attempts to colonize the New World fail and others succeed? What intellectual transformations changed loyal subjects of the Crown in British North America into rebels? How did African Americans, free and enslaved, fight for their freedom in the Civil War? What was new to Americans in the urban experience of the late 19th and early 20th centuries? In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, what benefits and costs for immigrant groups were associated with strategies of assimilation? These questions guide participants through rich collections of primary resources and enable them to organize lessons around fresh, engaging material.
Wake Forest University
ER #40 Contact: Adam Friedman
"What does this source represent?" Beyond Simply Showing and Telling by Using the Broadsides and Printed Ephemera Collection to Facilitate Historical Inquiry in the Standards Based Classroom provides in-service and pre-service teachers with the means and wherewithal to integrate primary source documents into their history instruction. The project serves middle and secondary social studies teachers in two school districts in North Carolina: Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools and Wake County Public Schools, as well as two consortiums in Virginia: the Southside Virginia Educator's Development Institute (SEDI), which serves the eight school districts, and the Southwest Virginia Public Education Consortium (SVPEC), which is comprised of an additional sixteen school districts. The project also serves pre-service social studies teachers at four universities.
The project features the American Memory collection, An American Time Capsule: Three Centuries of Broadsides, and Printed Ephemera. Items in the collection span the history of the United States and are ideal for use in K-12 social studies classrooms. This online collection is used to demonstrate literature-based best practices for incorporating primary source documents into K-12 social studies instruction. There are relatively short documents that can be analyzed using a variety of pedagogical strategies. The documents are in a variety of print and visual forms and reflect topics and themes that are commonly found in K-12 social studies content standards.
North Carolina Office of Archives and History
ER #37 Contact: Marcie Gordon
Exploring African American Life and Culture through Primary Sources selected North Carolina teachers to explore the role of African Americans in the state and nation's history. Use of primary source documents, artifacts, and historic sites, combined with lectures from noted scholars, equip educators to teach the rich heritage and contributions of African Americans in North Carolina and the United States from the colonial period to the modern era. Additionally, teachers across the state participate in an on-line teacher workshop based on materials developed in the institute.