Math, Science, History, and Search Lessons Based on Baseball
Baseball is my favorite professional sport to watch. The Red Sox have been my favorite team for as long as I can remember which is why I still occasionally look through the baseball cards I collected as a kid. And going to last year’s Hall of Fame induction ceremony for David Ortiz was one of […]
4,000+ Pages of Walt Whitman’s Papers
This week the Library of Congress announced the addition of more than 4,000 new primary source documents to the By the People website. Those primary sources are all letters, notes, and manuscripts written by Walt Whitman. The purpose of the By the People project is to enlist the help of the public to transcribe thousands of primary source documents that are […]
A New Primary Source Crowd-sourcing Project from the Library of Congress
By the People is a crowd-sourcing project that enlists the help of the public to transcribe thousands of primary source documents that are housed by and have been scanned by the Library of Congress. Over the years there have been collections of documents from the American Civil War, papers from the American Revolution, presidential papers, documents […]
Read and Help Transcribe Walt Whitman’s Notebooks and Diaries
A handful of years ago the Library of Congress launched a crowd sourcing project called Crowd which has since been renamed as By the People. The purpose of the project is to enlist the help of the public to transcribe thousands of primary source documents that are housed by and have been scanned by the […]
The WWII Rumor Project – An Activity in Learning Through Primary Sources
A handful of years ago the Library of Congress launched a crowd sourcing project called By the People. The purpose of the project is to enlist the help of the public to transcribe thousands of primary source documents that are housed by and have been scanned by the Library of Congress. Over the years there have […]
Free to Use and Reuse Images of Athletes and Sporting Events
The Library of Congress is a great place to find historical pictures, drawings, and maps to use in lesson plans and classroom projects. Finding things on the Library of Congress’ website isn’t always easy if you only use the search function. But the LOC’s Free to Use and Reuse Sets make it much easier to find thematically […]
This Could be a Great Opportunity for a History Teacher
The Library of Congress has a program called Innovator in Residence that provides funding for one person to develop innovative tools that incorporate artifacts housed by the Library of Congress. Over the last few years I’ve featured a couple of tools that were developed through the Innovator in Residence program. Those are Citizen DJ and […]
Chronicling America – A Great Place to Find Historic Newspapers
Chronicling America is digitized newspaper archive hosted by the Library of Congress. The Chronicling America collection contains millions of copies of newspaper pages printed in the United States between 1789 and 1963. You can search through the collection according to date, state in which the newspaper was published, and keyword. You can read, download, and print […]
A Short Overview of Library of Congress Digital Collections
I reference the Library of Congress nearly every time that I talk or write about searching for historical maps and images. If you know where to look on LOC.gov and how to filter a search, you can find some amazing resources to use in all kinds of history lessons including overlaying historical maps onto current […]
Library of Congress Resources About Ukraine
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve received quite a few requests for resources for teaching and learning about the Russia/ Ukraine conflict. In response to those requests I’ve been directing people to Larry Ferlazzo’s frequently updated list of resources. Today, I found one resource that isn’t on Larry’s list, yet. That is the a […]
Take Flight With This Library of Congress Image Collection
The Library of Congress is a great place to find historical pictures, drawings, and maps to use in lesson plans and classroom projects. Finding things on the Library of Congress’ website isn’t always easy if you only use the search function. But the LOC’s Free to Use and Reuse Sets make it much easier to find […]
The National Jukebox – 16,000+ Early Music Recordings
The Library of Congress offers many interesting collections of digital archives including one called the National Jukebox. I first wrote about it more than a decade ago. Since then the size of the collection has expanded because more recordings have entered the public domain and because the Library of Congress has digitized more recordings. The […]
4,000+ Maps of Military Battles and Campaigns
The Library of Congress housed hundreds of thousands of maps covering a huge array of topics from maps used by fire insurance companies to population density to maps of military battles and campaigns. The LOC’s collection of maps of military battles and campaigns contains more than 4,000 maps that are free to view, download, and […]
Unfolding History – A New Library of Congress Blog
The Library of Congress has started a new blog called Unfolding History. The blog is written by the staff of the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress. The purpose is to highlight interesting manuscripts and their backstories or greater historical context. The first Unfolding History blog post features a couple of 1972 documents […]
Transcribing Early Copyright Applications
By the People is the Library of Congress project that was formerly known as the Crowd project. The name changed at some point in the last year, but the purpose of the project remains the same. That purpose is to enlist the help of the public to transcribe historical documents housed the by the Library […]
Lighthouses and Minibooks
The Library of Congress has a great collection of activities suggestions and resources for parents who are looking for educational activities they can do at home with their kids. The collection is called Resources for Family Engagement. Within this collection you will find activity kits that offer directions and ideas for making mini books at home, designing […]
Great Reads from Great Places – An Interactive Map from the Library of Congress
Great Reads from Great Places is an interactive map produced by the Library of Congress for the National Book Festival. The purpose of the map is twofold. First, to help visitors find National Book Festival-related events in their states. Second, to help visitors find books that are connected to their states. Those connections could be […]
12 Good Places to Find Historical Images to Spark Inquiry
Historical photographs, paintings, sketches, and maps can inspire all kinds of history questions. That is why for more than a decade I’ve used and recommended images from Today’s Document from the National Archives to prompt classroom discussion as the introduction to U.S. and World History lessons. There are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of other similar galleries […]
Read and Transcribe Walt Whitman’s Notebooks and Diaries
A few years ago the Library of Congress launched a crowd sourcing project called Crowd. The purpose of the project is to enlist the help of the public to transcribe thousands of primary source documents that are housed by and have been scanned by the Library of Congress. Over the years there have been collections […]
Spark Interest in Local History With These Digital Newspaper Archives
When I was a kid I did yard work for an elderly widow who had stacks of old newspapers magazines that she and her husband collected. Knowing that history was my strongest subject in school, she always had a new, old newspaper (and a glass of fruit juice) for me whenever I came over to […]
Citizen DJ – A Free Tool for Remixing Music and Spoken Audio
Citizen DJ is a free tool for remixing and creating new songs from audio files that are in the public domain. The tool was developed by Brian Foo who is an Innovator in Residence at the Library of Congress. On the Citizen DJ website you will find large collections of audio files that are in the […]
Daily Artifacts of U.S. History
Earlier this week I was catching up on some RSS feeds in Feedly when I came across this drawing from the patent application for the board game that became Monopoly. That drawing was the featured artifact of the day on the Today’s Document website published by the U.S. National Archives. It’s a resource that I […]
Vintage Travel Posters and Google Earth
The Library of Congress offers thousands of historical images and maps that students can download and reuse for free. Most of the images and maps are found in these digital collections. Some of those images are arranged in collections on the LOC site in a section appropriately titled Free to Use and Reuse Sets. It’s […]
LOC Mystery Photo Contest – A Good Test of Search Strategies
At about this time last year the Library of Congress hosted a mystery photo contest. They’re hosting another one right now. Just like last year’s contest the challenge is to identify the people in twelve pictures pulled from the library’s moving image section. Before you say, “just do a reverse image search” you should know […]
Newspaper Navigator – A New Search Tool from the Library of Congress
This week the Library of Congress launched a new search tool called Newspaper Navigator. Newspaper Navigator is an index of 1.5 million images published in newspapers between 1900 and 1963. You can search Newspaper Navigator by keyword and then narrow your results by date and or the U.S. state in which the newspaper was published. […]
Make Mini Books and More With Help from the Library of Congress
The Library of Congress has a great collection of activities suggestions and resources for parents who are looking for educational activities they can do at home with their kids. The collection is called Resources for Family Engagement. Within this collection you will find activity kits that offer directions and ideas for making mini books at home, designing […]
Explore the Library of Congress on Your iPad
The Library of Congress Collections app is a free iPad app that offers a nice way for students and teachers to explore collections of artifacts housed by the Library of Congress. The collections available through the app are also available directly on the LOC website. The benefit of viewing them in the app is ability to […]
How to Create Image Overlays in Google Earth
Google Earth is one of my favorite tools to use in history and geography lessons. Google Earth enables students to see and explore places in ways that printed maps and images never could. One of the features of Google Earth that I love to use in history lessons is the image overlay function. In the […]
More Than 30,000 Historical Maps for Student Projects
This morning I was looking for a historical map of Mount Vernon to overlay onto Google Earth imagery. (I’m publishing a video about that later this week). I was able to find exactly what I was looking for in the historical map collection available through the Library of Congress. LOC’s online historical map collection has nearly […]
The Library of Congress Poses a Search Challenge for Anyone to Try
In the 2019-20 Practical Ed Tech Handbook I included a section about creating image-based search challenges for students. The idea behind giving students image-based search challenges is to provide them with some prompts that force them to use all available clues and tools in order to arrive at the correct answers. That concept is taken […]
Camera and Locomotive – A Mapped Story About the Transcontinental Railroad
Camera and Locomotive is the title of a fantastic mapped story published by the Library of Congress. Camera and Locomotive tells the story of the building of the Transcontinental Railroad and the development of photography in the United States. As you scroll through the story you will find interactive maps that are loaded with photographs […]
A New Crowdsourcing Project from the Library of Congress
Last year the Library of Congress introduced a new online project called Crowd. The project invites teachers, students, and anyone interested in history to contribute to the transcription of primary source documents. The documents are arranged in thematic collections that the LOC calls “campaigns.” This week the Library of Congress added a new campaign to […]
Crowdsourcing Civil War Document Transcription
Last fall the Library of Congress launched a new online initiative called Crowd. As the name implies, it’s a crowdsourcing project that anyone who registers on the LOC Crowd site can participate in. All of the documents in the Crowd project are documents in the LOC’s collection that need to be transcribed. The latest collection […]
Interactive Versions of Aesop’s Fables – And Dozens of Other Classic Works
The Library of Congress has tons of fantastic resources available for teachers and students, if you know where to find them. One of those great resources is an interactive version of Aesop’s Fables. Aesop’s Fables interactive book from the Library of Congress is available to read on the Web, on an iPad, and on an Android device. The book contains more […]
Two Online Primary Source Document Activities for High School Students
Earlier this week the Library of Congress launched a new crowdsourcing project called Crowd. The project seeks volunteers to transcribe primary source documents that are available online through the Library of Congress. Crowd is similar to the Smithsonian’s Digital Volunteers program. Both programs provide an opportunity for high school students and some middle school students […]
LOC Crowd – Crowdsourcing the Transcription of Primary Sources
The Library of Congress has launched a new crowdsourcing initiative to transcribe primary source documents. The new initiative simply called Crowd has contains collections of documents that the Library of Congress wants the public to help transcribe. Anyone can participate in the LOC’s Crowd project. To get started simply go to the site and click […]
5 Good Places to Find Public Domain Video Clips
There are plenty of places to find public domain images online. But finding public domain video clips isn’t quite as easy as finding public domain images. Part of the reason for that is the cost associated with hosting videos. Should you find yourself or your students in need of public domain video clips to mix […]
A New LOC Online Collection – Theodore Roosevelt’s Papers
I have always found Theodore Roosevelt to be one of the most fascinating characters in U.S. History. That is why I was excited this morning when I saw an email from the Library of Congress announcing the online publication of Theodore Roosevelt’s papers. The LOC’s collection of Theodore Roosevelt’s papers is divided into sixteen sections. […]
The LOC Launches the National Screening Room Online
The Library of Congress has a new online collection called the National Screening Room. The National Screening Room currently contains 287 videos. The videos are digital copies of films made in the 19th and 20th centuries. You can browse the collection by date, location of the filming, and subject. You can also search for videos […]
An Archive of Historic American Buildings and Landscapes
There was a time when navigating the website of the Library of Congress was a bit of a chore. Collections of digitized artifacts were mixed with collections that simply listed availability of artifacts. Thankfully, in recent years the LOC has made a marked improvement in the ease which you can find digitized artifacts that are […]
Chronicling America – An Archive of 2,600+ Digitized Newspapers
Chronicling America is a great resource provided by the Library of Congress. On Chronicling America you can find more than 2,600 digitized copies of newspapers printed in the United States between 1789 and 1963. You can search through the collection according to date, state in which the newspaper was published, and keyword. All of the […]
Poetry 180 – A Poem for Every Day of the School Year
Poetry 180 is a Library of Congress project that was created when Billy Collins was the U.S. Poet Laureate. The purpose of the project is to provide high school teachers with poems for their students to read or hear throughout the school year. Collins selected the poems for Poetry 180 with high school students in […]
Photo Roulette – A Library of Congress Game
Photo Roulette is a fun little game from Library of Congress. The game shows you a randomly selected pictures from the LOC’s digital collections and you have to guess the year in which the picture was taken. You have ten guesses before you’re out of luck. After the submission of each guess you’re given a […]
The Life of a City – Early Silent Films of New York City
The Library of Congress has some neat playlists on YouTube that history teachers should explore. One of those playlists is titled The Life of a City: Early Films of New York. This playlist includes 24 silent film clips of events like the opening of the East River bridge, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Parade, and the […]
Headlines and Heroes – A New Resource from the Library of Congress
The Library of Congress offers many excellent online resources for teachers and students. Even just following the LOC’s Twitter account will provide you with fun history facts. In fact, it was through that Twitter account that I learned about a new Library of Congress blog called Headline and Heroes: Newspaper, Comics & More Fine Print. […]
From the Catbird Seat – A Poetry Podcast
Just in time for the end of National Poetry Month the Library of Congress has launched a new podcast series about poetry. The podcast is called From the Catbird Seat. The podcast will feature conversations with Rob Casper and Anne Holmes from the Poetry and Literature Center at the LOC. In the first eight episodes […]
Caring for Comics – And Other Ideas for Video Projects
Earlier this week the Library of Congress Twitter account posted a link to the LOC’s reference page about the deterioration of paper. From that page I stumbled into the library’s Collections Care reference pages. Those pages are full of information about how to care for and preserve a variety of physical media including newspapers and comic […]
2000+ Recordings of Poets and Fiction Writers Reading and Discussing Their Work
A few years ago the Library of Congress published an online collection of audio recordings of poets and fiction writers reading and discussing their works. At the time of its launch the collection contain 124 recordings. Since then the collection has grown to include more than 2,000 recordings. The Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature contains recordings […]
Reminder – The Library of Congress Seeks a Teacher-in-Residence
Last month the most visited post on this blog was the announcement that the Library of Congress is seeking a teacher-in-residence for the 2018-19 school year. Applications for the program are due by next Monday, April 9th. The 2018-19 Teacher-in-Residence program is open for applications from visual and performing arts teachers in the United States. […]
Seward’s Folly Lesson Plan
Thanks to this Tweet from the Library of Congress I was reminded that today in 1867 was the day that the United States purchased Alaska from Russia. At the time it was referred to as Seward’s Folly. The discovery of gold thirty years later changed that perception. The Library of Congress offers a free lesson […]
Echoes of the Great War – Online WWI Exhibition
Echoes of the Great War is a fantastic collection of videos, audio recordings, and pictures about WWI. This online exhibition created by the Library of Congress. Echoes of the Great War is arranged thematically. Those four themes are Arguing Over War, Over Here, Over There, and World Overturned. Within each of those themes you will […]
The Library of Congress Seeks a Teacher-in-Residence
The Library of Congress has a great opportunity for a performing arts or visual arts teacher in the 2018-19 school year. The LOC is seeking a performing arts or visual arts teacher to be a teacher-in-residence at the LOC in Washington, DC. The selected teacher will be able to do some or all of the […]
18 Sets of Free to Use and Reuse Pictures and Videos
The Library of Congress is a great place to find a lot of media that is in the public domain. The only problem with finding material on the LOC’s website is just that, it’s often hard to find. In an attempt to begin to remedy that situation the Library of Congress has started to publish […]
6,500 Vintage Travel Photos – Free To Use
The Library of Congress website is a great place to find historic images to use in presentations. The free images housed by the Library of Congress are organized into many collections. One of those collections, Photochrom Prints, was recently featured in a LOC blog post. The Photochrom Prints collection offers 6,500 vintage travel photographs of […]
Library of Congress Congressional Data Challenge
The National Data Challenge from the Library of Congress is a competition that is asking “citizen coders” to develop creative ways to use technology to analyze, visualize, and interpret data sets from congress.gov as well as other platforms. The idea is to create a product that helps others discover, use, and explore the massive collection of legislative […]
Library of Congress: Papers of Ulysses S. Grant Now Online
The Library of Congress has just put the papers of Ulysses S. Grant online for the first time in their original format. The collection of over 50,000 items that date back to 1819, was digitized from microfilm scans. The papers from the 18th president of the United States, include family correspondence, reports, military records, scrapbooks, […]
Beyond Words – A Library of Congress Lab Experiment
The Library of Congress Labs is a website that hosts online experiments based on collections of digital artifacts housed by the Library of Congress. One of the experiments that should be of interest to US History teachers is the Beyond Words project. Beyond Words is an online project designed to identify illustrations in WWI-era newspapers. […]
The Library of Congress Puts Hamilton’s Papers Online
The Library of Congress has put their collection of Alexander Hamilton’s papers online for the public. The collection of papers includes some of Hamilton’s letters to family and friends, a draft of Washington’s farewell address, and documents from Hamilton’s law practice. Additionally, the Library of Congress has put together a simple timeline of Hamilton’s life. […]
A Great Journal for History Teachers
The Library of Congress has quite a number of great resources for teachers and students. The Student Discovery Sets are favorite amongst my favorite resources that I’ve featured in the past. That collection of resources was recently updated by the LOC. The recent additions to the Student Discovery Sets include iBooks about the New Deal, scientific […]