In celebration, the National Archives has teamed up with other federal agencies and cultural institutions to provide digital content, including resources for teachers. Along with the Library of Congress, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, we pay tribute “to the generations of Jewish [...]

Watching C-SPAN or using the old textbook flow chart can be a pretty boring way to teach the legislative process. As future voters, it is important for students to understand how lawmaking works and what role they will play in that process. But how can you do it without putting your students to sleep? Making [...]

From 1947 through 1952, the White House underwent a complete reconstruction within its original exterior walls. To get a better idea about the transformation of the White House, and ”witness” its 1950s renovation compared to the current look of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, you and your students can take a visual tour of the Blue Room on Historypin. Shortly after [...]

Have you ever used current events to pique students’ interest? Leveraged your students’ hobbies to guide which primary sources you offer up for analysis? Do you have baseball fans in your classroom? We’ve got a brand new resource full of primary source documents, photographs, video, audio, and more. It’s a free eBook we published just in [...]

“Primary Sources Rock.” I first read that tweet in October 2010, in reaction to the launch of DocsTeach.org, our then brand-new online tool for teaching with documents.  I used that phrase the next month as the title of my post on our sister blog, NARAtions, in which I shared some of the great feedback we were already hearing about the site. In [...]

When I taught United States history to middle schoolers, my fellow teachers and I grappled with figuring out how to teach the New Deal. We wanted to create lessons to help our students get a handle on all of the New Deal agencies that were created in response to the Great Depression—and in the limited amount [...]