Mary, The Primary Source Librarian | March 30, 2009
Today’s New York Times has the intriguing first part of a series titled “Whose Father Was He?” Written by filmmaker/author Errol Morris, the story reads as a sort of CSI-Civil War, and it is based on a photograph found on the corpse of a Union soldier at Gettysburg: The soldier’s body was found near the [...]
Mary, The Primary Source Librarian | March 24, 2009
Pictorial Americana–a 1955 publication of the Library of Congress–is mostly available today in an online version. This is a great place for students and teachers to find some of the most famous images from American history for multimedia projects, primary source analysis, and more. Many of the images are prints, but the collection also includes [...]
Mary, The Primary Source Librarian | March 16, 2009
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has an excellent new online exhibit for exploring sophisticated Nazi propaganda campaigns and their legacy. One student activity explains the development of the “People’s Radio” that was mass produced and sold to millions of German citizens. The radio allowed the Nazi regime to control the information that all Germans [...]
Mary, The Primary Source Librarian | March 11, 2009
I loved this article–Libraries’ Surprising Special Collections–from Smithsonian.com author Kristin Ohlson. In the article, Ohlson highlights eight libraries that hold special collections of such variety and richness that they hint at hundreds more yet to be discovered by amateurs like me. A chess collection at the John Griswold White Reading Room in Cleveland. Over 30,000 [...]