The Rush County Historical Society operates the Rush County Historical Museum. The museum presents the history of Rush County, IN and its people.
The museum offers exhibits, and is open to the public April through October.
The National Archives has created this vast database of electronic records (85 million records on the date visited) from federal agencies and from collections of donated historical materials. Search and browse functions extend throughout the database, and the collection can also be browsed by pre-set subject categories or by time spans. All records are electronic texts. There are no scanned images of documents, photographs, or microfilm.
A very small sampling of the records: Ships and passengers who arrived in New York during the Irish Potato Famine, 18461851; Red Cross records of WW2 Allied POWs; descriptive indexes of flood photographs from FEMA (19892004); helicopter air sorties flown in Vietnam (19701975); documentation from the Historic American Buildings Survey (19331997); and records about worker-initiated strikes and employed-initiated lockouts (19531981).
I'm trying to teach my secondary students how to read documents from the 18th century (such as letters) and notice how bogged down they get because of the complexity and length of the sentences. What tools or advice could I give that would help them develop this skill?
Ah yes…your question captures a problem many history teachers face. First, let us congratulate you on engaging your students in the raw materials of the discipline and persisting even when the going proves difficult. Syntax can be a major stumbling block for students when reading older texts: we recommend scaffolding and careful preparation of the documents to help your students meet the challenge.
Careful Preparation of Documents
See our guide on adapting and modifying documents for ways to make difficult documents more accessible for students. Keeping those documents short, defining difficult vocabulary, and even simplifying syntax (while letting students know that you’ve done so) can help. See the Reading Like a Historian curriculum from the Stanford History Education Group for examples of carefully prepared 18th century documents. The Hamilton vs. Jefferson plan includes two 18th century letters that have been modified. Find our entry about this curriculum here.
One thing to remember is that students need to experience some success with reading difficult documents to want to persevere with them. Carefully prepared documents, especially at the beginning of the school year, can be critical to this.
Scaffolding
There are many ways to support students’ reading of difficult documents. Here are a few strategies.
Background knowledge about what students are reading can help them make sense of the text. Consider what they need to know about the times and the event before they read and then use a short lecture, a headnote, a textbook excerpt, or another method to help them gain that background knowledge. Going a step further, for a very difficult document you may want to give them a short summary (1-3 sentences) of what the author is talking about.
Modeling how you read the document can be helpful too. This allows students to see how you also struggle with the language and the strategies you use to make sense of it, like rereading, monitoring your understanding, and asking questions. See this entry for an introduction to Reading Apprenticeship, an approach that focuses on reading and thinking aloud together to help students become better readers. Also see historicalthinkingmatters.org for examples of “think-alouds” where students and historians are shown making sense of historical documents using specific historical reading strategies. (find one example here.)
Teaching some explicit strategies can also help. This guide has ideas for teaching students to annotate documents, something that can help them learn to monitor their own understanding and seek out help when needed. Also see work done at the Oakland Unified School District in California for examples of guiding students to figure out what an excerpt says before any analysis. See an example here: scroll down to the question, “Was the creation of the U.S. Constitution good for the people of the United States?” Then look at the assessment and support materials for that question and you will find, on page 4, one example of how they do this.
A short introductory activity where you focus on the difficulties of making sense of unfamiliar syntax can be helpful. Use difficult syntax from our own times (a song or poem) to help students recognize their task and specific strategies for pushing through to understanding.
More Resources
In our lesson plan reviews, find plans that can inspire ways to work with text that is difficult for students. See this one on the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution or this one on the Declaration of Independence. Both of these are for younger students, but both show the necessities of slowing down to read the documents and focusing on short pieces of text.
You may want to also check out this response that reiterates some of what I've said here.
And remember, it’s the beginning of the year. You will, hopefully, have these students for many lessons and helping them learn to slow down, monitor their reading, and strategize when they are stuck will happen with multiple and varied chances to practice these skills.
Created as a companion to the PBS series of the same name, this well-produced site traces the history of Africans in America through Reconstruction in four chronological parts. The site provides 245 documents, images, and maps linked to a narrative essay.
"The Terrible Transformation" (14501750) deals with the beginning of the slave trade and slavery's growth. "Revolution" (17501805) discusses the justifications for slavery in the new nation. "Brotherly Love" (17911831) traces the development of the abolition movement. "Judgment Day" (18311865) describes debates over slavery, strengthening of sectionalism, and the Civil War. In addition to the documents, images, maps, and essay (approximately 1,500 words per section), the site presents 153 brief (150-word) descriptions by historians of specific aspects on the history of slavery, abolition, and war in America. The site provides a valuable introduction to the study of African-American history through the Civil War.
These multimedia resources for teaching American history focus on slavery, ethnic history, private life, technological achievement, and American film. There are more than 600 documents on the history of Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and slavery, from "first encounters" through the Civil War.
A complete U.S. history textbook is presented, along with historical newspaper articles and more than 1,500 annotated links, including 330 links to audio files of historic speeches, and nine links to audio files of historians discussing relevant topics. Ten essays (800 words) address past controversies, such as the Vietnam War, socialism, and the war on poverty. Seven essays present historical background on more recent controversies and essays of more than 10,000 words each address the history of American film and private life in America. Exhibits offer 217 photographs from a freedmen's school in Alabama and seven letters between 18th-century English historian Catharine Macaulay and American historian Mercy Otis Warren.
The Stanford History Education Group produced these lessons and materials as part of the Reading Like a Historian (RLH) curriculum. Three introductory lessons draw upon familiar, real-life situations to help students understand historical thinking and prepare them to do inquiry using primary and secondary sources. For example, one lesson positions students to understand sourcing by having them reason through why witnesses to a lunchroom fight might tell different stories about what happened. Also included here are resources for teaching the historical thinking skills of sourcing, contextualization, and corroboration. These include handouts that remind students what questions they should ask as they analyze documents and a helpful skills chart with useful prompts and descriptions (see "Classroom posters).
Students and Smithsonian National Museum of American History curators give a tour of the exhibition "America on the Move," which looks at how immigration and migration impacted American history and at the role of various forms of transportation.
To view this electronic field trip, select "America on the Move, Part One: Migrations, Immigrations, and How We Got Here" under the heading "Electronic Field Trips."
The Museum of Discovery presents explorations of science, mathematics, technology, and history—including an exhibit on Arkansas's native peoples.
The museum offers exhibits, exhibits for rent, self-guided and guided tours for school groups, in-class outreach presentations, and recreational and educational activities.
According to its website, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum is "the only museum in the nation devoted exclusively to historic and contemporary design."
The museum offers exhibits, tours and workshops for school groups, and recreational and educational events.
Director of Teacher Development Tab Broyles describes Colonial Williamsburg's Teacher Institutes and their emphasis on introducing educators to using primary sources in the classroom.