The Library of Congress's excellent website includes many primary sources including important US documents and photographic collections. Primary sources expose students to multiple perspectives on great issues of the past and present. History, after all, deals with matters that were furiously debated by the participants. Interpretations of the past are furiously debated as well, among historicans, policy makers, politicians, and ordinary citizens. By working with primary sources, students can become involved in these debates.
Primary sources help students develop knowledge, skills, and analytical abilities.
By dealing directly with primary sources, students engage in asking questions, thinking critically, making intelligent inferences, and developing reasoned explanations and interpretations of events and issues in the past and present. Developing a lesson around primary sources can mean a single activity, a team project or a unit. Contact your district office for sample exemplary lessons related to the standards. The subtopics emphasized are Industrialization in New England and Early immigration. There are six major History standards.