Best Practices

What messages are hidden in art and architecture? Explore the Library of Congress’s Jefferson Building in this online activity.

Integrate these two guides into your curriculum to help students develop visual and textual analysis skills.

In this series of exercises, students are presented with Native American masks and must contextualize them.

Improve your historical analysis skills by learning about different types of causes and evidence.

Discover historic landscapes with this guide to reading the land produced by the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Transform film from a source of entertainment to a piece of historical evidence.

Learn how to teach your students historical thinking with this informative video from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

Explore the SOCC analysis technique with this great website.

So you don’t live near Gettysburg or the Alamo—can you still teach with historic place? Of course!

See this Flash movie for a peek at how historians read and question sources.

Check out these sites for excellent primary source material.

Check out these sites for primary sources grouped into sets by topic, grade-level appropriateness, and other factors.

This website by the Smithsonian Portrait Gallery will help students analyze artistic works.

This source from Cornell University’s Olin and Uris Libraries includes guidelines for assessing primary source material.

Teach students how to utilize primary sources with this game from Annenberg Media

Find the National Archive’s worksheets for analyzing a variety of primary sources.

These worksheets from the Library of Congress help students analyze primary sources.

Incorporate art into lesson plans with this resource from The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Analyze art in the classroom with these resources from the Picturing America initiative.

When visiting historical sites, sometimes you need a visual/emotional “hook” to get students interested.

Every town has a scattering of historical markers and statues. Discover what they really mean!

The Bracero Archive’s tutorial shows how to conduct successful interviews.

Use the Stanford History Education Group’s curriculum to teach historical investigation.

Virginia Tech’s short video shows how to analyze primary sources and put them in context.

Looking for new ideas on how to teach with the historic places in your community?

Use this guide developed by PBS and the Antiques Roadshow to teach about material culture.

National Park Service lesson plans, teaching materials, and vibrant images reveal what historical objects tell us about history.

National History Day identifies secondary sources along with suggestions for their use.

The National History Day’s guidelines for defining and locating primary sources.

Watch a scholar interpret letters from labor activist and reformer Sarah Bagley.

Textbook illustrations are often overlooked as historical evidence.

Don’t overlook song as a way of understanding the past.

Advertisements have surrounded us for years. How can you interpret them? Where can you find them?

Source and approach letters and diaries with historical thinking.

Quantitative data, although seemingly daunting and impersonal, can help you understand the past.

What questions should you ask when viewing maps as historical evidence?

Work with early twentieth-century film as historical evidence. What questions do you need to ask?

Work with oral history interviews as historical evidence.