One question I'm often asked is "where can I find good primary sources?" Nationally, my first stops are the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and Digital Public Library of America, all of which have exhibits, curated primary source sets, and educator resources to make it easier to find useful material. For Montana, my first recommendation is always the Montana Memory Project, the Montana Historical Society, digitized newspapers, and your local museum, archives, or historical society.
Montana Memory Project Exhibits
The Montana Memory Project has a huge number of sources--so many that it can be overwhelming. To make it easier for educators to find material, it gathered a group of classroom teachers to create primary source sets. Many of these sets are now posted on their exhibit page. Its own staff has also been creating exhibits, all of which include selected primary sources on a particular topic along with a little bit of contextual narrative. Here are a few titles that caught my eye, but there are many more--and still more being added on the Memory Project's Exhibit Page.
- Bicycles for the Army: The 25th Infantry in Montana
- Construction of the Hungry Horse Dam
- Early Schools in Montana
- Hell or High Water: Floods in Montana
- Logging History in Montana
MTHS Annotated Resource Sets
A few years ago, we created eleven annotated resource sets that include links to photographs, maps, illustrations, and documents relating to Montana history topics from the gold rush and homesteading to World War I and the Great Depression. Many, but not all, of the images linked in these sets were also used to illustrate the textbook Montana: Stories of the Land. We didn't create a set for every chapter, but we did for most of the most popular ones.
Digitized Newspapers
My colleague, reference librarian Zoe Ann Stolz, likes to say that historic newspapers are the closest thing we have to a time machine. The Montana Historical Society has digitized over a million newspaper pages from over 230 newspapers. These papers are on two different sites: Montana Newspapers and Chronicling America. (There is no overlap between sites so you have so search both.)
Using Primary Sources
How do you use these sources? An old article published by the Library of Congress (no longer online) suggested four types of activities: Focus, Inquiry, Application, and Assessment.
Here are a few ideas that could fall into these broader categories:
- Build PowerPoints
- Create DBQs
- Analyze them using a primary source analysis tool from the National Archives or Library of Congress
- Create Historical Assessments of Thinking
- Create a Question Focus
- Get a feel for what it was like back then (one of my favorite exercises is to have students shop the ads in historic newspapers during a specific time period).
But I'd love to hear more from you! What are YOUR favorite ways to use primary sources?
P.S. No one has time to build every lesson from scratch. Check out some of our plug-and-play primary-source based lesson plans.
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