The Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) and the Historic American Landscapes Survey (HALS) collections document achievements in architecture, engineering, and design in the United States through a comprehensive range of building types and engineering technologies. As of March 1998, America's built environment has been recorded through surveys containing more than 363,000 measured drawings, large-format photographs, and written histories for more than 35,000 historic structures and sites dating from the seventeenth to the twentieth century.

Entered according to Act of Congress in the year 1886 (All rights reserved.)|Title appears as it is written on the item.|Forms part of: American cartoon print filing series (Library of Congress)

For too many Americans, the history class in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (remember the teacher’s plaintive question, “anyone, anyone?”) is all too familiar. Our approach is meant to challenge this false and familiar image of history: understanding and reconstructing the past requires ways of thinking, reading, and questioning much more engaging and challenging than mere memorization.
Teaching in a way that differs from your own schooling experience is not necessarily easy to imagine, let alone execute. Especially given the many pressures and demands on teachers today. This part of the Historical Thinking Matters website is devoted to providing instructional resources for teacher educators who want to challenge these iconic pictures of history instruction and start preparing their students to teach for historical thinking.

American history from 1876 to the present. Topics include industrialization, Progressivism, World Wars, Depression, the Cold War, the Civil Rights and Vietnam Era, and the 21st century. Emphasis placed on immigrant and racial groups, women, international relations, and contemporary topics. Total 54 hours lecture.

An oral history project based on a family's immigration history. Students are required to write a 5 page oral history paper and also present a 5 minute PowerPoint presentation in class. Students may choose to interview their own families or someone else's family. Interview questions are created by the students through group work. 

Let the power of imagination and inference serve as a ńtime machineî to bring Benjamin Franklin into the classroom! History and science come to life in a dialogue with Franklin the inventor, developed through lesson activities that incorporate research, imagination, writing, visual arts, and drama.

The History Engine is an educational tool that gives students the opportunity to learn history by doing the work—researching, writing, and publishing—of an historian. The result is an ever-growing collection of historical articles or "episodes" that paint a wide-ranging portrait of life in the United States throughout its history, available in our online database to scholars, teachers, and the general public.The History Engine project aims to enhance historical education and research for teachers, students, and scholars alike. It allows undergraduate professors to introduce a more collaborative and creative approach to history into their classrooms, while maintaining rigorous academic standards. The History Engine gives students a more intimate experience with the process of history. Participants who work with the History Engine project learn the craft of an historian: they examine primary documents, place these documents in a larger historical context using secondary sources, and prepare cogent analysis of their sources for the public eye. Finally, the History Engine provides a way for professors to take advantage of digital technology in their classrooms while maintaining rigorous academic standards. The cumulative database provides all the easy-access and searchability of other websites, but also subjects its contents to a careful academic screening process on the part of library staff, archivists, professors, and teaching assistants.

The lessons in this unit are designed to help your students recognize how people of different cultures and time periods have used cloth-based art forms (quilts) to pass down their traditions and history.

Director of the University of Texas - Austin's Center for the Study of Race & Democracy Peniel Joseph talked about the history of Juneteenth.

The curriculum materials in this packet are intended to provide middle- and high-school teachers with the background and basic tools they need to develop and incorporate lessons about Indian-white relations in Washington into existing lessons about the history of the United States and Washington. This packet focuses on the treaty negotiations and the establishment of reservations on the Olympic Peninsula that took place in the last half of the 19th century, but it also provides a broad overview of how relations between Indian nations and the United States government evolved in the first hundred years of the nation's history.

An illustrated sheet music cover for an antislavery song, dedicated to abolitionist spokesman Henry Ward Beecher. The illustration features a roundel illustration of the burning of the Free State Hotel in Lawrence, Kansas, by a proslavery mob in May 1856. The roundel is flanked by a standing Indian (left) and a settler, seated and holding a musket and Bible. The settler is probably meant to represent one of the emigrants recruited by associations like the New England Emigrant Aid Company to settle in Kansas in hopes of insuring its emergence as a free state.|A variant copy (cover only, with slightly different image) is in P&P LOT 10615-11; LC-USZ62-53600.|Boston. Published by Oliver Ditson Washington St.|Designed and engraved by Greene & Walker Boston.|Entered . . . 1856 by O. Ditson.|Title appears as it is written on the item.|Published in: American political prints, 1766-1876 / Bernard F. Reilly. Boston : G.K. Hall, 1991, entry 1856-10.

This lesson recounts efforts to improve homesteading laws and make land ownership possible for more settlers. The distribution of government lands had been an issue since the Revolutionary War. Preemption -- settling the land first and paying for it later -- became national policy; however, supporting legislation was stymied until the secession of Southern states. See one of the first applications for land under this law. Teaching activities are included.

A caricature of Abraham Lincoln, probably appearing soon after his nomination as Republican presidential candidate. The artist contrasts Lincoln's modest posture at the Illinois Republican state convention in Springfield in 1858 with his confident appearance at the 1860 Illinois Republican ratifying convention, also held in Springfield. The two Lincolns are shown joined at the back and seated on a stump. The 1858 Lincoln (facing left) addresses a small audience of men, including a young black man. He denies any presidential ambitions, his words appearing in a cabbage-shaped balloon: "Nobody ever expected me to be President. In my poor, lean, lank face, nobody has ever seen that any Cabbages were sprouting out." In contrast, the 1860 Lincoln (facing right) states, "I come to see, and be seen." There may be, as Wilson maintains, an implied criticism here of Lincoln's reticence about his political views during the 1860 campaign, when from May to November Lincoln made no speeches except for a brief address at the meeting in Springfield. This may explain the less-than-enthusiastic, puzzled look of several of his listeners here. The lithograph is particularly well drawn. Although clearly by a trained and able artist, it is not readily attributable to any of the major known cartoonists of the time.|Title appears as it is written on the item.|Weitenkampf, p. 124.|Wilson, p. 40-41.|Forms part of: American cartoon print filing series (Library of Congress)|Published in: American political prints, 1766-1876 / Bernard F. Reilly. Boston : G.K. Hall, 1991, entry 1860-25.

Campaign badge produced for the Whig National Convention held at Baltimore in May 1844. A bust-length portrait of Whig candidate Henry Clay appears in an oval, against a backdrop of American flags. The oval is surmounted by arrows, an olive branch, and a shield held by an eagle. Above the eagle, in a sunburst, is the title. Beneath the flags are palm fronds and a wreath with the words: "The Farmer of Ashland [Clay's Kentucky estate]. Honor to whom Honor is due."|Bannerman Sculpsit.|Title appears as it is written on the item.|Sullivan and Fischer, no. HC-46.|Published in: American political prints, 1766-1876 / Bernard F. Reilly. Boston : G.K. Hall, 1991, entry 1844-1.

An elaborate emblem to the memory of George Washington, illustrating the cover of a song in his honor composed by B. A. Burditt. The song, according to the text, was written "Expressly for the celebration of the 83d Anniversary of American Independence, and performed before the City Authorities of Boston, in the Music Hall, July 4th 1859." It is dedicated to former Massachusetts senator Edward Everett, whose public speeches in support of the Union made him a prominent figure during the antebellum period. His nationalistic oration on George Washington was particularly well-known. In May 1860 Everett was chosen the vice presidential nominee of the Constitutional Union party. A central roundel portrait of Washington in Roman toga is surrounded by military paraphernalia. These include a tricornered hat, a saber, and epaulets (below), rifles and cannonballs (right), and a cannon with broken wheels (left). Also below is a pen and inkstand with the Declaration of Independence. The roundel's laurel-wreath frame is flanked by rows of American flags. Above the portrait is an allegorical vignette, with the figures of Peace (left) and Liberty (right). Peace supports a shield decorated with stars and stripes, and bestows a wreath on the American eagle, who stands at left holding a streamer ("E Pluribus Unum"), arrows, and an olive banch. Liberty or Columbia holds a sword and points upward. Before her, on the ground, lies a sheathed sword. To the right is a railing.|Boston. Published by Oliver Ditson & Co. 277 Washington St.|Entd . . . 1859 by O. Ditson & Co. Mass.|John H. Bufford's Lith. |The Library's copy of the work was deposited for copyright on October 4, 1859.|Title appears as it is written on the item.|Published in: American political prints, 1766-1876 / Bernard F. Reilly. Boston : G.K. Hall, 1991, entry 1859-3.

The Hotchkiss Map Collection contains cartographic items made by Major Jedediah Hotchkiss (1828-1899), a topographic engineer in the Confederate Army. Hotchkiss made detailed battle maps primarily of the Shenandoah Valley, some of which were used by the Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson for their combat planning and strategy. Several of the maps have annotations of various military officers, demonstrating their importance in the military campaigns. The collection also includes maps made or used by Hotchkiss during his post-war years, including maps with information about railroads, minerals and mining, geology and history, most of which focus on Virginia and West Virginia, but also cover other states and even the world. The collection consists of 341 sketchbooks, manuscripts, and annotated printed maps, the originals of which reside in the Library of Congress' Geography and Map Division.

An extended and bitter indictment of Jefferson Davis and the Southern slave system. The work consists of a series of twelve vignettes with accompanying verse, following the scheme of the nursery rhyme "The House That Jack Built." The same nursery rhyme was adapted for some of the bank war satires during the Jacksonian era. The vignettes are as follows: 1. the "House," showing the door to a slave pen; 2. bales of cotton, "By rebels call'd king;" 3. slaves at work picking cotton, "field-chattels that made cotton king;" 4. slave families despondently awaiting auction; 5. slave auctioneer, "the thing by some call'd a man;" 6. slave shackles; 7. slave merchants; 8. a slave breeder negotiating in an interior with a slave merchant; on the wall appear portraits of Jefferson Davis and Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard; 9. a cat-o-nine-tails; 10. a slave driver flogging a bound female slave; 11. Jefferson Davis, "the arch-rebel Jeff whose infamous course / Has bro't rest to the plow, and made active the hearse." 12. symbols of slavery, an auctioneer's gavel, whip, auctionnotices, and shackles lying torn and broken with a notice of Jeff Davis's execution because " . . . Jeffs infamous house is doom'd to come down." |Drawn and published by David Claypool Johnston, Boston.|Entered . . . 1863 by D.C. Johnston . . . Massachusetts.|The Library's impression of the work was deposited for copyright on July 3, 1863. The Boston Athenaeum owns Johnston's preliminary pencil drawings for the individual scenes in this work.|Title appears as it is written on the item.|Citizens in Conflict, no. 40-43.|Johnson, no. 75.|Weitenkampf, p. 138.|Forms part of: American cartoon print filing series (Library of Congress)|Published in: American political prints, 1766-1876 / Bernard F. Reilly. Boston : G.K. Hall, 1991, entry 1863-9.

An imaginative portrayal (with overt propaganda value) of an event in the Texas war of independence --the surrender of Mexican commander Santa Anna and his brother-in-law General Martin Perfecto de Cos, to American leader Samuel Houston after the Battle of San Jacinto in late April 1836. Santa Anna (center) bows and offers his sword to Houston, saying, "I consent to remain your prisoner, most excellent sir!! Me no Alamo!!" His subordinate follows suit. Houston, clad in buckskins and holding a musket, says, "You are two bloody villains, and to treat you as you deserve, I ought to have you shot as an example! Remember the Alamo and Fannin!" The print reflects the intensity of anti-Mexican feeling in the United States after Santa Anna's massacre of American defenders at the Alamo mission in February 1836 and the slaughter at Goliad, Texas, a month later of American colonel James Fannin and his surrendered troops.|After Edward Williams Clay. Published by Henry R. Robinson, New York.|This print is the second of two prints which Weitenkampf lists as "Genl. Houston, Santa Anna & Cos" and "Houston, Santa Anna & Cos," both published by H. R. Robinson. The Library's impression is trimmed, however, and lacks the publisher's imprint. The first version was drawn by Edward W. Clay. |Title appears as it is written on the item.|Weitenkampf, p. 43.|Forms part of: American cartoon print filing series (Library of Congress)|Published in: American political prints, 1766-1876 / Bernard F. Reilly. Boston : G.K. Hall, 1991, entry 1836-24.

The artist charges the Republicans with electoral corruption and extremism in their efforts to defeat Democratic presidential nominee George B. McClellan. Oblique reference is also made to Lincoln's supposed advocacy of equal rights for blacks. A ragged black soldier points a bayonet at a maimed white Union veteran, preventing him from placing his vote for McClellan in an already stuffed ballot box. The former says, "Hallo dar! you cant put in dat you copperhead traitor, nor any oder 'cept for Massa Lincoln!!" McClellan ran on the Peace Democrat or Copperhead ticket. The one-legged, one-armed soldier replies, "I am an American citizen and did not think I had fought and bled for this. Alas my country!" A worried election worker wearing spectacles tells his heavy-set colleague, "Im afraid we shall have trouble if that soldier is not allowed to vote." But the second responds, "Gammon, Hem just turn round. you must pretend you see nothing of the kind going on, and keep on counting your votes." Two townsmen converse in the background beneath a sign "Vote Here."|Signed: J.E. Baker del. (Joseph E. Baker).|Title appears as it is written on the item.|Lorant, p. 269.|Weitenkampf, p. 146.|Forms part of: American cartoon print filing series (Library of Congress)|Published in: American political prints, 1766-1876 / Bernard F. Reilly. Boston : G.K. Hall, 1991, entry 1864-35.