The Newberry Library is home to a world-class collection of over one and a half million books, five million manuscript pages, and five hundred thousand maps—a wealth of primary sources for English and history teachers. Yet finding the time to research the collections can be a challenge for busy educators. To facilitate access to this archive, the Newberry teacher programs staff is collaborating with scholars and university faculty to develop a digital library of materials from our holdings specifically for use in the classroom.
The digital library consists of themed collections, with sets of five to seven documents organized around topics such as “Responses to Political Radicalism in Chicago” and “Race and Slavery in the Atlantic World,” which complement our professional development seminars for teachers. The documents are selected based on their thematic relevance and their high impact with students, and are intended to augment currently available curricular materials in such courses as American and European history and literature. The collections include maps, songs, political cartoons, provocative textual documents, and engravings. Each item is digitally reproduced, organized by theme, and will be posted on a web site for easy access and download by teachers.
Along with the digitized documents, teachers can access an overview of the topic or theme, suggested discussion questions, and bibliographic information for each document. The digital collections offer teachers an easy way to incorporate primary sources into the humanities classroom and to engage their students in the exciting, challenging process of interpreting history and literature.
Access the PDF documents at Digital Collections for Classroom Use.
For questions or more information contact Hana Layson, Digital Collections Coordinator, at laysonh@newberry.org.