Library of Congress Educator's Summer Institute 2005
Learning About Immigration Through Primary Sources
Cawood Cornelius ( Gordon County ), Nancy
Bowyer ( Camden County ), and Rebecca Amerson ( Cherokee County
) joined educators from across the country at the 2005 Library
of Congress Educator’s Summer Institute. The focus this
year was to develop strategies that will integrate primary sources
into the teaching of immigration. We were able to get a behind-the-scenes
look at some of the extraordinary collections in our nation’s
library and tap the expertise of historians and preservation
specialists.
This, the largest library in the world, has more than 130 million
items on approximately 530 miles of bookshelves. The collections
include more than 29 million books, 2.7 million recordings, 12
million photographs, 4.8 million maps, and 58 million manuscripts.
Tours of the Law Library, the Map Division, and Prints and Photographs
were an extra bonus!
The Library of Congress is making more and more of its maps,
prints and photographs available online at www.loc.gov .
The Learning Page is the educator’s portal into the American
Memory Collection and features digital images of these items
in this amazing collection of documents, photographs, audio recordings,
and maps on United States history. Teacher created lesson plans
are there to get you started! http://memory.loc.gov/learn/ Show
your students a picture of a real sod house when reading Sarah
Plain and Tall or Little House on the Prairie.
Show an image of Japanese immigrants on the west coast when reading Grandfather’s
Journey. Make a real world connection when reading historical
fiction or doing historical research by using primary sources.
In Georgia , we have a wealth of primary sources available to bring
history alive. In addition to the LOC, explore the Digital Library
of Georgia (
http://dlg.galileo.usg.edu/ ),
and pay a visit to the Southeast Division of the National Archives
in Morrow (
http://www.archives.gov/southeast/ ).