Primary Source Sets on the Web

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It can be time-consuming to find and prepare primary sources for your lessons. On each of the below sites, you will find primary sources that address multiple topics in U.S. History. Many of the sites provide sources that have been prepared for the classroom, from excerpting lengthy documents to providing clear headnotes and source information. Start at one of these sites to find primary sources to use in your next lesson!

Websites with Sets of Selected Primary Sources

Digital History Reader, from Virginia Tech University: These documents are organized into instructional modules, from 1492 to the Nixon administration. Each module contains selected primary documents, as well as a central investigative question and introduction to the topic, questions for individual documents and assignments.

EDSITEment, from the National Endowment for the Humanities: EDSITEment has roughly 400 lesson plans for the history/social studies classroom, sortable by grade-level and subtopic. Lesson activities are built around primary documents from various collections, including those of the Library of Congress.

Explorations, from Digital History: Explorations is divided into thematic units, organized chronologically from pre-Columbian America to the Vietnam War. Each unit has a teacher resources section containing a wealth of sources, including selected primary documents. Also check out the site’s Ethnic Voices section that also includes selected choice documents.

Historical Scene Investigation, from the Library of Congress and the Schools of Education at the College of William and Mary and the University of Kentucky: Thirteen sets of documents, organized by theme—from “Jamestown Starving Time” to “When Elvis Met Nixon—cover various periods in American history. Each thematic unit contains a number of primary documents, some of which are excerpted or adapted for easier classroom use. This site may be of particular interest to teachers of middle and elementary grades. 

Historical Thinking Matters, a project of the Stanford University School of Education and the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University:This site includes documents on four topics—the Spanish American War, the Scopes Trial, Social Security, and Rosa Parks—and are prepared for use in the classroom. Accompanied by teacher materials and strategies, documents address the varied ways historians have interpreted these topics.

History Now, by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History: Each of these quarterly journals focus on a central theme and contain a set of K-12 lesson plans that use primary sources. 

Primary Source Sets, from the Library of Congress: This collection, designed for teachers and accompanied by support materials, provides primary source sets for key topics and themes in American history, from Abraham Lincoln to Women’s Suffrage.

Reading Like a Historian Curriculum, from the Stanford History Education Group: This curriculum features lessons that revolve around central historical questions and feature sets of primary documents that have been modified for students with diverse skills and abilities. Spans U.S. history from Colonial times to the Cold War.

TeacherServe, from the National Humanities Center: This site brings together dozens of essays by leading historians around three themes—religion in U.S. history, the environment, and the African American experience. What makes TeacherServe unique is that primary source materials are embedded via hyperlinks in the essays themselves, providing context for understanding the documents in relation to the broader theme as well as in relation to each other.

You can also visit this entry for places to find online collections of primary sources.

Using Maps as Primary Sources

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This website shows a 4th-grade teacher in northern Virginia teaching a lesson focused on a map drawn by John Smith that was published in 1612. Source Analysis, a feature created for the Loudoun County (Virginia) (TAH) website, has three sections focused on this primary source: scholar analysis, teacher analysis, and classroom practice. The latter two sections show a standards-based lesson that asks students to answer the question: What is important to John Smith? The teacher carefully plans activities so students look closely at the map and consider how this primary source helps them answer the central question. The site provides examples of two promising practices:

  • Engaging young students in close, careful observation and reading of a primary source document (using student pairs and a comparative document); and
  • Using students' observations to inform and guide analysis and connect the source to larger questions and topics in the curriculum.
The Lesson in Action

In the Classroom Practice section, we see the lesson in action. The teacher introduces the lesson question and then takes time to ensure that students understand the question by introducing synonyms for "important" and reviewing word meanings. She passes out the maps to assigned student pairs and asks them, "What do you see?" Students have time to look carefully at the map and notice words (e.g., "Jamestown" and "Powhatan"), the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries, living structures, trees, how particular words vary in size and spacing, and so on. The teacher further facilitates the students' observation by juxtaposing the 1612 map with a contemporary textbook map of the same region. This juxtaposition helps students see the choices John Smith made in drawing this map that they might have missed without the comparative source. The teacher then uses what students notice about these maps to help them think about what the details and differences mean. Students start to identify what was important to John Smith and subsequently to the Virginia Company, given the evidence in front of them. Throughout this instruction, the teacher uses feedback, a logical sequencing of activities, and clear and accessible questions to ensure access to the learning activities for all of her students.

Thinking Like Historians

This teacher shows how carefully structured lessons that use primary sources can engage students in the process of thinking like historians. Students slow down and carefully read and look at the map, noticing things that they might otherwise have missed. They then consider what the contents of the map mean and what the map tells us about John Smith and the Virginia Company's worldview. The 1612 map becomes a window into the past that only reveals its slice of the landscape with close reading. Also on this site is a Teacher Analysis section in which the teacher explains some of what preceded this lesson and her instructional choices—a useful complement to the classroom videos. Each of these sections presents information in a set of videos that are clearly titled and visually interesting.

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