With over 12 billion documents in the National Archives, our records have countless stories to tell. Even with just three types of documents—a passenger arrival record, census record and a naturalization record—one can learn quite a bit about a person’s life.  And students have the opportunity to uncover these stories during a hands-on field trip at [...]

“Mr. President, It is my Desire to be free.” Thus wrote (another – not me!) Annie Davis to Abraham Lincoln, 20 months after he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Writing from Belair, Maryland, she continued, “Will you please let me know if we are free.” But she was not. The Emancipation Proclamation affected only those states [...]

Teaching units about the Great Depression include the Works Projects (also Progress) Administration (WPA). The records of this government program that put millions of unemployed Americans to work in public works projects are held in the National Archives. They reveal fascinating stories about local history: the building of the school cafeteria, curb cuts, road improvements…and [...]

I co-wrote today’s post with Stephen Wesson at the Library of Congress. It is also posted on the Teaching with the Library of Congress blog. In 10 words or less, it’s what we’ve got and how we got it. But we’ll go on. Because we get asked this question a lot. Both of us do. And because both [...]

Today’s post comes from Jenny Sweeney, education specialist at the National Archives at Fort Worth. This Friday, April 12th, the biographical movie 42 about Jackie Robinson is set to be released. Millions of people will flock to theaters to relive or learn for the first time the baseball icon’s story. In 1947, Robinson crossed the color line [...]

Welcome! Here we’ll regularly share new document-based teaching tools, lesson plans, learning activities, student field trip ideas, professional development opportunities, newly available primary sources, and multi-media and web content. The National Archives holds all kinds of permanently valuable documents–written documents, images, maps, audio, video, charts, and more–from all three branches of our government. Just a [...]