If you’re reading this, chances are that you’re a teacher. You’re also probably overworked, underpaid and seriously squeezed for time. You don’t have time in your classroom to teach the skills and strategies your students need to deal with primary source material unless you can link them directly to your curriculum. And you don’t have time in your life to spend hours and days finding primary sources that both fit your curriculum and have the content you need to teach those skills and strategies.
If you’re a high school teacher, especially an AP teacher, there are websites and services out there to help you. You have quite a few options for primary sources and activities geared to your needs (unless you teach World History, but we’ll come to that in a minute.) If you teach elementary or middle school, your situation is a lot more problematic.
You might start by checking out our Classroom Resources section. We have a selection of classroom posters, with suggested questions. The questions follow our Seven Strategies and are a starting point for your own questions and activities. You could also check out our multi-source units, which include a visual primary source, a text primary source and a secondary source on a single topic. We’re gradually adding to those small collections and hope that, in the near future, we’ll be able to offer a book or database of primary sources designed for elementary and middle school teachers. Our book, Examining the Evidence: Seven Strategies for Teaching with Primary Sources offers a lot of useful primary sources, all of which have URLs for accessing high resolution versions online.
In the meantime, here are some websites that offer good sources. First are sites that have both text and images, below that are sections with sites that just have images, sites that just have text, and sites for science, earth science, and geography.
To help elementary students with internet research, Doing Internet Research at the Elementary Level is a good, basic, one-page overview of how to help focus students.
Text and Image Sites
Smithsonian Institute
The Smithsonian Institute is enormous (963,000 online items), so basic searches can lead to huge numbers of results. However, the site allows narrowing of search terms, so you can click on “online media” and narrow your search to include only images and then go even further and click on “type” and narrow “images” to include only “photographs.” For example, at the time of this writing, the search term “penguin” produced 2,414 results. Narrowing the search to only images produced 147 results. Narrowing images down to “outdoor sculpture” produced 22 results. There are options for browsing various collections as well. The site provides an excellent zoom capability for looking at details but does not have high-resolution downloads available.
Also check out the Smithsonian Learning Lab!! This is a great search tool. For first time users, we recommend plugging in a search term and watching the first-time user video that pops up. It’s only 50 seconds long and is a good orienter. There are filters for searches, and access to individual items or collections of items based on your search.
National Archives
The National Archives search engine is called OPA and you can get very detailed in the types of searches you want to do. It’s not the easiest or most intuitive site. Use the “advanced search” option to narrow your searches to photographs or moving images or documents, etc. This is the place to go for Mathew Brady and Lewis Hine images as well as documents connected to the fight to end child labor. There is also a lesser-known series of photographs commissioned by the EPA in the 1970s, Documerica. This was a program to photographically document subjects of environmental concern inAmerica during the 1970s and, like the FSA collection at the Library ofCongress, it provides a picture of an era. As with other searches, it will be important for you to check the images to assume their appropriateness prior to sharing them with the class.
National Archives YouTube Channel
The National Archives YouTube Channel has a variety of videos, everything from a World War II era newsreel on how to recognize a Japanese Zero airplane to a half hour documentary on the Great Depression using Archive photographs and oral histories.
Digital History
This excellent site provides complete lessons and resources on American history. Users can explore the site in many ways, including by topic and by era. By clicking various tabs a user can find textual primary sources, images, and teacher resources. The “For Teachers” section provides lesson plans, handouts, learning modules, and resource guides. While the lessons are probably best for high school students, many elements of the site are certainly adaptable and useful for lower grades as well.
Internet Archive
This Internet library is free and has an enormous amount of content, everything from newspapers to video to music to oral histories. The only thing not offered is images. It was founded to provide permanent access to historical collections that exist in digital format. Now the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived webpages. It also provides specialized services for adaptive reading and information access for the blind and other persons with disabilities. One quick search in the audio section using the term “World War I” led to an interview with a World War I veteran made in 1968 as part of a junior high school history project.
Documenting the American South
This is an excellent site that contains texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture.
Famous Speeches in History—AudioOnline—The History Channel
This section of the History Channel website has recordings of major events throughout history from the first sound recording ever made to Amelia Earhart talking about women in flight to Rodney King’s statements during the Los Angeles riots. There are ads, however.
Digital Schomburg at the New York Public Library
When you’re looking for primary sources about African-Americans, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is the place to go. There are excellent exhibits on a variety of subjects and more than 11,000 items, including prints, photographs, and historical documents on African and African Diasporan history and cultures from the 17th to the 20th centuries.
New Deal Network
This is an excellent site containing primary source text and images on the New Deal.
Repositories of Primary Sources
This site provides a listing of over 5,000 websites describing holdings of primary sources from around the world. This is too large to be useful for most teachers, but if you want to track down something in your state, this might be the place to go.
Image Only Sites
Library of Congress – Prints and Photographs Division
The best place to go for images, in our opinion, is thePrints and Photographs Division (P&P) of Library of Congress. Most of the images we have used in this book are from here and while not all of the images on the P&P site are available in large sizes, many are. It is easily searchable, the attributions are excellent, and the “Ask a Librarian” feature is great for additional research.
Flickr
The photo sharing site Flickr is excellent, especially the section, The Commons. The Commons contains photographs from public photography archives all over the world. It includes the Library of Congress, National Archives, and Smithsonian Institute as well as smaller institutions, such as the Mississippi Department of Archives and History and international organizations, such as the National Archives of Estonia. These institutions have not placed all of their collections on Flickr, but the sheer number and variety of institutions participating provides interesting search results. Plus you can search within The Commons collection. For example, a search using the word “holiday” resulted in an image of Ronald Reagan and Coretta Scott King at a signing ceremony for Martin Luther King Day, images of Purim and Hanukkah from the Jewish Historical Society of the Upper Midwest, and a 1939 McCall’s magazine cover from the George Eastman House among many, many others. The attributions are excellent, but not all the participating institutions provide high-resolution copies the way the Library of Congress does. (Getty Images has some of its collection up on Flickr, but it is just as easy to search images directly on the Getty site.)
National Geographic
National Geographic is known for its fantastic photographs.Particularly for students in the younger grades, its photographs of animals, people, and landscapes from around the world can be excellent primary sources.Sadly, some of the galleries don’t have a very large number of photos, but it is definitely worth the time to check the site.
National Geographic Kids
This site also has good resources for students and teachers.
Denver Public Library
The Library’s Digital Collection contains thousands of images of Colorado and the American West. This is a larger collection of images than the DPL images in the American Memory collection.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met) contain artifacts from all parts of the ancient world. From the homepage click on “Collections.” Then click on “Search the Collections.” The Met also offers the Heilbrunn Timeline of World History, which can be explored by time period, region, and theme. The Timeline of World History is made up of 300 timelines, 930 essays, and about7,000 objects.
Art Resource
This organization is a licensing house for thousands of museums and archives from around the world. In other words, it provides photographs of the art to publishers for a fee. It is not meant as a research site.However, it does contain art from so many institutions that it can be an interesting place to start a search when looking for primary sources about the ancient world. Of particular interest are the photographs on the site of archaeological digs. For example there are pictures of Tutankhamen’s tomb as Howard Carter found it. Sadly, the images on this site are small and there are no free high-resolution versions available.
Bridgeman Art Library
Like Art Resource, Bridgeman is also a licensing house for thousands of museums and archives from around the world and is not meant as a research site. It does represent institutions that do not have their own digitized collections, such as the Iraq Museum, Bagdad. Bridgeman has photographs of many Sumerian and Mesopotamian artifacts from the Iraq Museum, including a bust of Sargon I. There are no free high-resolution versions available, but the images display at a decent size.
Text Only Sites
Internet History Sourcebook Project
This site contains primary source texts from ancient to modern history, but they are largely above the K−8 level.
Primary Source Materials & Document Based Questions: An Internet Hotlist on Document Based Questions
This site does not contain primary source documents, but rather provides links to over 40 sites that do. This site also has links to Document-Based Questions (DBQs).
Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, Primary Sources
The Gilder Lehrman Institute is an excellent resource for anything to do with American history. It’s free for students and teachers. The “Primary Sources” section provides images of the actual source as well as a typed transcription and excellent contextual information.
The University of Oklahoma Law Center: A Chronology of U. S. Historical Documents
This site provides historical documents from pre-colonial days to the present, including songs, speeches, and letters.
Science, Earth Science and Geography Sites
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
There are many, many parts to NOOA and its website is an excellent resource for photos and videos. However, videos and images from NOOA(the primary sources that are most relevant for a K−8classroom and most readily available) are not organized together in one searchable database. To find videos, enter the search term “video” and choose among the various sub-agencies’ pages of videos. Photographs are easier to search.
NOAA Photo Library
The NOAA Photo Library gathers together many images from the sub-agencies. It contains 32,000 images including thousands of weather and space images, hundreds of images of our shores and coastal seas, and thousands of marine species images ranging from the great whales to the most minute plankton. The Photo Library page also has a tab“Links” that connects the user to other NOAA image collections.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
The multimedia section of the NASA website has tabs for educators and for students, as well as links that provide access to images, videos, and NASA TV.