Surfing Goal  - Find at least one primary source that either you or a colleague could use with students to enrich their studies and add it to your Yahoo!® Bookmarks account (will open in new window).

Resource Sites

• American Memory Project: Perhaps the largest collection of digitized primary sources materials relating to the history and culture of the United States claiming over 7 million digitized items!
  • Browse / Search the Collections for a broad overview or search for specific resources
• American Memory Project Learning Page - Support materials for educators on the use of primary sources in the classroom.
  • 4-12 Lesson Plans - This site contains lesson plans for grades 4 - 12 that include the use of primary source materials. RECOMMENDED!
  • American Memory Timeline: selected primary sources on a variety of topics in United States History arranged by chronological period.
  • Today in History - This site posts new primary source content everyday on historical events that took place on the same date in the past.  
• Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938: "more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slave"
  • An Introduction to the WPA Slave Narratives by Norman R. Yetman
  • Voices and Faces from the Collection: Selected narratives from the above collection.
• Children of Yesteryear - Good introduction to primary source materials for younger children.  Students answer 1 question about each of 6 photographs of boys and girls from the early 1900's.
• Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library - contains over 7,000 historically significant advertisements from 1911 to 1955, historic American sheet music and scanned pages and texts of the writings of African-American women, etc.
• Eyewitness - History through the eyes of those who lived it: Featuring archived photos, documents, and both verbal and written eyewitness accounts of famous events in history.
  •  Eyewitness Account of 1906 Earthquake
• Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum: Check out the 'For Students' and 'For Educators' sections.
• History Matters: Good resources for both primary source material and student-published work. In the student-published work section, there are numerous examples of interviews students have conducted with their community members to document historical events in their area.
• The History of Jim Crow: "Explore the complex African-American experience of segregation from the 1870s through the 1950s".
• Hubble Telescope Gallery - Images and photos from the Hubble Telescope!
• National Archives and Records Administration Exhibit Hall - This site contains historical documents for a range of important (and not so important) events in American history, including the original Declaration of Independence
  • Educators & Students
• http://www.ourdocuments.gov/ - explore 100 milestone documents of American history.
• Uncle Tom's Cabin & American Culture - This extensive site contains primary source materials that relate to Uncle Tom's Cabin and the impact it had on American culture. Read the original handwritten text, newspaper articles and much more.
• Using Primary Sources on the Web - How to find, evaluate and cite primary source web sites.
• Voices from the Days of Slavery: Former Slaves Tell Their Stories: "interviews conducted between 1932 - 1975 [capturing] the recollections of twenty-three identifiable people born between 1823 and the early 1860s and known to have been former slaves".
  • Faces and Voices From the Presentation: Selected narratives from the above collection used in this RWLO.

Famous Individuals from the Past

• Albert Einstein - Online Archives
  • Letter from Albert Einstein to President Roosevelt discussing the possibility of an atomic bomb (easier to read version).
• Alexander Graham Bell - contains historical materials including his first diagram of the telephone, letters between Bell and other famous individuals, and photographs of his family (part of the American Memory project).
• The Emma Goldman Papers - Historical background information and primary sources on Emma Goldman, a radical and feminist of the late 1800's. Lesson plans included.
• Eleanor Roosevelt- Read the letters that American children wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt during the Great Depression.  Lesson plans included.
• Galileo's Sunspot Drawings - see Galileo's actual sketches used to determine the rotational rate of the sun and which were used by the Church to indict him
  • Real time images of the Sun produced by Solar & Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO)
• Journeys of the Ingalls Family - Excellent companion piece to Laura Ingalls Wilder's popular "Little House" books (part of Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum).
• Jack London - Includes letters, postcards, telegrams, photos and of course samples of his writing. Lesson ideas included.
• Mark Twain/Samuel Clemens
  • Mark Twain/Samuel Clemens: Known to Everyone - Liked by All: PBS
  • Mark Twain in His Times
  • Mark Twain Photo Gallery
• Thomas Edison
  • Thomas Edison's Documents - design and development of motion pictures and sound recordings (part of the American Memory project)
  • The Thomas A. Edison Papers:  is a documentary editing project to organize and publish archived records