Covering the years from 1848 to 1921, Votes for Women: Selections from the National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection, 1848-1921 presents materials from the suffrage movement in America, including 167 books, pamphlets, handbooks, reports, speeches, and other artifacts totaling some 10,000 pages. Explore other women’s history resources here.

This video from the Strategic Literacy Initiative shows students engaged in the process of reading primary source documents as a means of better understanding the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. See examples of two promising practices in action: putting students in pairs to conduct "read aloud/think aloud" work and providing students with strategic vocabulary for reading primary sources. More…

The two features that we like best about this lesson are the interesting primary source materials and the framework that is provided for group work related to the texts. The readings are presented as a packet of letters, documents, stories, and speeches. The group guidelines establish clearly defined roles. These roles compel students to look at specific features of the texts like source, context, and audience. Continue reading the review here.

The call to use primary documents to teach history comes from many quarters. While teachers are urged to use multiple documents in their classrooms, they are rarely told how to use them. To understand how students learn from multiple documents, researchers observed how students approached different sources to make sense of a controversial historical event. Read more here.

Our goal throughout Peopling the American Past—a Teaching American History (TAH) project partnership of seven small and rural Virginia school districts and George Mason University—was to support teachers in developing TAH skills, especially in teaching effectively with primary sources. To accomplish this goal with each of three teacher cohorts we provided feedback on classroom observations and on their written work. Read more from Eleanor Greene here.

This workshop, which begins on June 28th, combines scholarly presentations with on-site investigations of the canals, mills, worker housing, and exhibits of Lowell National Historical Park and of other sites in Lowell's historic district. Sessions draw on scholarly monographs, primary sources (such as "mill girl" letters), and works of literature and historical fiction. Registration deadline is March 16th. View an overview of the workshop here.