Digital Collections for the Classroom

New Look! More Classroom Materials!

19th Century, 20th Century, Classroom Materials, Collection Essays

United States Expansion, Migrants, and Transportation Technologies, ca. 1810-1930

Colored map showing roads and bodies of water. Surrounded by a border of black-and-white photos advertising the local area, including photos of forests, lakes, Native people, moose and bear, and homes,

Gabrielle Guillerm, PhD
September 14, 2022

18th Century, 19th Century, 20th Century, Collection Essays

Maps as Heritage: Commemoration and Travel in American Cartography

Hand-drawn map, showing the country from Lake Superior and the Mississippi in the east to Pacific Ocean in the west and the Kansas River in the south to the northern boundary of the Louisiana Territory in the north. The map shows the locations of many Indigenous groups along with natural features like rivers, lakes, and mountain ranges.

Nicholas Kryczka, PhD
August 31, 2022

16th Century, Collection Essays

The World According to Comenius: Seen and Unseen in the Orbis Sensualium Pictus

Single page an early printed book. Text is in English and Latin in black in an 17th-century font (some "s"s written as "f"s). On the left-hand page is a circular woodblock print image showing the land with people (numbered 9), animals (8), fields (7), hills (5), and trees (8); the sea with fish (4) in it, the sky with birds (3) and a band of clouds (2); above the clouds is darker sky with stars (1). Abov the image is the title "Mundus" and below it the title "The World."

Evan Dutmer, Ph.D., Culver Academies
April 20, 2022

Classroom Materials, Resources, Visual Literacy

Historical Thinking in Elementary Classrooms

Black and white newsboys posing in front of a stone building holding stacks of newspapers.

Hilary Mac Austin and Kathleen Thompson are the authors of Examining the Evidence: Seven Strategies for Teaching with Primary Sources. American historian James Harvey Robinson said, “In its amplest meaning History includes every trace and vestige of everything that man…

Hilary Mac Austin and Kathleen Thompson
April 7, 2022

19th Century, Classroom Materials, Full Lesson Plan, Grades 8 and Up

Perspectives on the United States

Title page of book printed on birch bark. Title readings "The Red Man's Greeting, 1492-1892 by Chief Pokagon." In the lower right corner is an image of a white man standing on a beach with many other white men behind him. They carry flags and crosses and are disembarking from a boat." The image is captioned "Landing of Columbus."

Hilary Mac Austin and Kathleen Thompson
April 6, 2022

20th Century, Classroom Materials, Full Lesson Plan, Grades 6 and Up, Grades 8 and Up, Visual Literacy

Women’s Suffrage

Hilary Mac Austin and Kathleen Thompson
April 6, 2022

Classroom Materials, Resources

Seven Strategies for Teaching Primary Sources

Partly hand-drawn, partly printed diagram of Böhme's image of the cosmology of the universe. The universe is represented through a large circle that takes up most of the page. Where the circle meets the four corners of the page are four key elements. Clockwise from the upper left, these are law (represented by a sword), Gospel (represented by a hand extending from a cloud and holding flowers), Resignation (represented by a man kneeling at an altar on which an offering is burning), and Self (represented by a man holding a quill pen and kneeling before an altar that is spewing clouds). Within the circle there is a XY axis with the human heart where the lines meet. Elements of the Christian Trinity are at the ends of three of the axes (the Father on left horizontal, the Son on the upright vertical, and the Holy Ghost on the right horizontal). Two large semicircles take up most of the plain. They mirror each other, both with their centers at the ends of the horizontal axes, and their edges running from the top of the vertical axis to the heart at the center of the axes to the bottom of the vertical axis. The left-hand semicircle is shaded. Within both are numerous numbered and labeled points representing various elements and aspects of the soul.

Hilary Mac Austin and Kathleen Thompson
April 5, 2022

Classroom Materials, Resources

Why Inquiry-Based Learning?

The first and simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind, is curiosity. Edmund Burke Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose. Zora Neale Hurston Getting a student to ask a question is possibly…