Dear Teachers:
Are you looking for a jackpot of primary source documents that your students can explore online? Here is a fantastic opportunity for students and teachers to look at over 5 million pages of historic newspapers without leaving the classroom.
Click the above image to open the PDF flyer about Chronicling America, a digital library of historic American newspapers now available through The National Endowment for the Humanities and The Library of Congress. All the web sites in the flyer can be clicked to open their prospective web pages.
The Chronicling America web site (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov) provides free access to over 5 million pages of select digitized historic newspapers published between 1836 and 1922. It is produced by the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), a long-term partnership between NEH and the Library of Congress to digitize representative historic newspapers from all 50 states and U.S. territories. Chronicling America currently has digitized newspapers from 28 states and the District of Columbia, with new content added regularly, including newspapers published in foreign languages starting with Spanish and French.
Primary sources are not limited to newspaper articles, but also include advertisements, images, literary prose, and other content that appears in historic newspapers. In addition to providing basic factual details about an event or topic, historic newspapers can shed light on local perspectives about a major historical event, insight into social or cultural practices, traditions, political opinions, economic circumstances, and a wealth of other historical information.
To encourage use of these rich resources, the National Endowment for the Humanities is sponsoring a new special prize at the 2014 national contest. Learn about the criteria here: http://www.nhd.org/SpecialPrizeinfo.htm
Download the flyer, share it with your students, and take advantage of this digital historic resource!
For more information on NEH please visit: http://www.neh.gov/
Also be sure to check out NEH's digital outreach for K-12 educators:
http://edsitement.neh.gov/
http://edsitement.neh.gov/feature/chronicling-america
