“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 [...]

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 [...]

We are now accepting applications for Primarily Teaching—our summer institute on using historical documents in the classroom. Information and the application is available on our website. Workshops will be conducted at the following National Archives locations: Kansas City (Kansas City, MO) June 17–20, 2013 Atlanta (Morrow, GA) July 15–19, 2013 Boston (Waltham, MA) July 22–26, 2013 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

“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 [...]