DPLA Primary Source Sets

Just in time for instructional planning, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) reminds us that their 100 Primary Source Sets were designed  to help students develop critical thinking skills by exploring topics in history, literature, and culture.

If you work with middle or high school learners, you’re going to love these sets created by the teachers from the DPLA’s Education Advisory Committee

Curating digital materials from libraries, archives and museums across the country with topic overviews and teaching guides, these sets present valuable teacher tools.  The sets are searchable by subject, time period and how recently they were added to the collection.

Sure, your US and World History teachers will love these sets and you’ll find resources to support studies of social movements, ethic groups and minorities and law and government.  But DPLA’s Primary Source Sets make even deeper interdisciplinary connections.

In addition to the sets directly relating to theme or time period are primary source sets connected to popularly studied literary titles, like Sherman Alexie’s 2007 award-winning, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.  Indiana high school teacher Susan Ketcham’s primary source set includes two short, but poignant excerpted interviews with Alexie discussing his Spokane roots, as well as photographs, paintings, documents and this Teaching Guide: Exploring The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.

The literary connected primary source sets also include:

• Beloved by Toni Morrison
• The Crucible by Arthur Miller
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
• The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston
• Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
• A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry
• The Watsons Go To Birmingham—1963 by Christopher Paul Curtis
• The Poetry of Maya Angelou and The Poetry of Emily Dickinson
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
• The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
• Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs
• The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

While art is integrated throughout the primary source sets, your art and music colleagues may be particularly interested these sets and their connections to history and culture:

• Rock ‘n’ Roll: Beginnings to Woodstock
• Women and the Blues
• Social Realism
• The Golden Age of Broadway
• Jitterbugs, Swing Kids, and Lindy Hoppers
• The Hudson River School
• Visual Art During the Harlem Renaissance

And there’s something for your science friends as well. These sets allow learners to explore the social impacts of medical and technological challenges and innovations:

• Electrifying America
• There is No Cure for Polio
• Environmental Preservation in the Progressive Era
• The Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1878
• The Invention of the Telephone
• Full Steam Ahead: The Steam Engine and Transportation in the Nineteenth Century
• The Scopes Trial

As its back to school announcement notes, we may no longer need to specifically remember and individually visit every single primary source silo we love. DPLA is working to share its bounty–to allow it to sit beside and be discovered among other worthy OER content on such large portals as PBS LearningMedia, OER Commons, Amazon Inspire and the Learning Registry’s Open Node.

You may also be interested in DPLA’s impressive selection of apps and its openebooks project (a collaboration with First Book, NYPL  and Baker & Taylor), free for children from in-need households.

Filed under: critical thinking, digital libraries, DPLA, primary sources