Andrew Jackson Elected President in 1828 (American Memory)
Posted on | December 3, 2009 | View Comments
Andrew Jackson was elected the 7th U.S. President 181 years ago today. Since Jackson is one of the most famous of Presidents and because there is so much information on him, I thought I’d just do a simple post showing the ease of using the Library of Congress’ American Memory website to quickly find various types of primary sources in a variety of formats.
First step is to go to the American Memory website.
You’ll then see a search box with the words “Search all collections” above it. Enter in “Andrew Jackson” here and click the search button. You will then get a large list of available items related to Andrew Jackson.
If you’re looking for pictures or other media click on the “Gallery View” button towards the top of the site within the baby blue rectangle. This will filter out non-media related search items. This is the quickest way to immediately find some primary sources to work with. You will now see a table of thumbnails of images you can click on to view.
This way of searching is not simply for pictures either but as you can see from the results, there’s scans of manuscripts and other related items. It’s really very easy and you can see how quickly you can find primary sources to include in your lesson plans.
Please note, however, that in most cases the pictures fall under the Fair Use, meaning you can use the pictures in your classroom or lessons but not necessary all images are. Please check all copyright restrictions if you’re unsure.
I hope this quick lesson helped you get some quick and initial success in finding things to enhance your teaching.
Are You Using Google Reader Yet?
Posted on | November 5, 2009 | View Comments
Today I wanted to talk a bit about the power of Google Reader and it’s sharing and social networking capabilities. If you’ve never used Google Reader you are missing out on the of the most powerful tools you can use while online. You can read about it on the Wikipedia page, which I highly recommend doing, especially after I show you what can be done with it.
Here at TPS-Colorado, we have a Google account which gives us access to our own Google Reader. After subscribing to a few website feeds we can then scroll through hundreds and even thousands of articles all related to a certain theme or topic.
A screenshot of our Google Reader page is below, with the folder “Education” clicked on, that shows us all of the articles available to us within.
You can see under the Education folder that there are a variety of sub-headlines. Each one of these subheadings are individual content feeds from around the web. Some of them include: The New York Times Education feed, U.S. Department of Education, NPR Topics: Education, and Washington Post Education. Each one of these are called RSS feeds and can be found directly on their respective related websites.
Now here’s the great part about Google Reader or any RSS reader. In this example I will focus on the “NPR Topics: Education” feed. So I click on its name in the left hand column and it displays all the articles within that feed in the main panel. Screenshot below:
Now each one of these headlines are “clickable” articles with actual content. I’ll go ahead and open up the article “College Graduates Struggle To Repay Loans”. We then get this screenshot of the article open and displaying a brief summary of the article, “The abysmal job market is making it hard for some to start making student loan payments, which come due this month for May graduates. A new law could ease the pain for some: It limits monthly payments to 15 percent of a graduate’s income.”:
You can see this is just a summary of the article but where is the full content of the article? All you have to do is click on the bolded main heading above the summary (“College Graduates Struggle To Repay Loans”) and it will take you to the actual article found on NPR’s website. Here is what that looks like:
You can then scroll through the entire article. But this is just the beginning of what Google Reader can do. In the next screenshot I’ve highlighted what makes Google Reader so powerful:
These options are the social networking features of Google Reader. First there is the “Add Star” button. This is the same as bookmarking or adding it your favorites. Google Reader actually creates a page called “Starred Items” which conglomerates all your starred items into one page for future usage, which is very, very handy.
Next are the “Like”, “Share”, and “Share With Note” options. These allow you to share items with people who are subscribed to your Google Reader feed. I will talk about that in another post because it’s a bit more advanced. Clicking on the “Share” button also updates the HTML website that Google Reader creates for you to share your content across the entire web. Here is TPS-Colorado’s Google Reader webpage that is updated every time we find an article that we choose to “Share”.
http://www.google.com/reader/shared/tpscolorado
We can then use this URL to share our feed within our blog or on any other website who may want it. It’s truly an exciting feature.
Next up is “Email”. Clicking on this opens up a little info box were you enter in the person’s email address you want to send the article to and click send. Basic, convenient and very powerful.
Another powerful option is the “Send To” feature. When enabled, this allows you to send the current article to a variety of social networking accounts you may have. You can have Facebook enabled and click the Send To button, then click on Facebook and it will add it to your Facebook account for your friends and colleagues to read. I will share how to do that in another blog post as well because it’s in the settings page.
Hopefully you got a rough estimate of what Google Reader can do. I hope to do a videocast of Google Reader in the future as I can tell it’d be a lot easier to go through the step rather than typing it all out.
If you’re a Google Reader, share with us the ways in which you use it as well.
You can also become a fan of the TPS-Colorado Blog on Facebook.
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Sam Houston: First President of the Republic of Texas
Posted on | October 22, 2009 | View Comments
173 years ago today, Sam Houston was elected as the first president of the Republic of Texas. He served from October 22, 1836, to December 10, 1838, and served a second term from December 12, 1841 to December 9, 1844.
After Texas was annexed by the U.S. in 1845, he was elected to the U.S. Senate. He served from February 21, 1846, until March 4, 1859.
Here is a link to a quick biography of him.
The Library of Congress also has an interesting document from a J. Bovee Dods to Abraham Lincoln recommending Houston be appointed as Secretary of War. A definite must read. And since it’s mostly unreadable here’s a transcription of the letter.
I also found a giant presidential campaign poster that features Sam Houston. His is the bottom picture in the middle of the poster.
Here is another, but a lot longer, primary source on the life of Sam Houston. From the periodical, “Putnam’s Monthly Magazine of American Literature, Science and Art”. Click on the “view the page images” to see the document.
And another longer primary source which is also a fascinating read.
Here is a rather fun primary source song titled “Sam Houston and The People”.
And finally, a Harper’s Magazine article titled “Last Years of Sam Houston”.
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Tags: Abraham Lincoln > Library of Congress > Republic of Texas > Sam Houston
How a Little Girl Grew a Beard and Changed History
Posted on | October 15, 2009 | View Comments
Thanks to Keith for finding the topic of today’s post.
According to the “On This Day” section of The New York Times, in 1860 a girl named Grace Bedell wrote a letter to Abraham Lincoln stating that she believed Lincoln could improve his appearance if he grew a beard.
I thought this was interesting story so Keith and I began searching the entire Internet and came across some really interesting primary sources regarding this event. Our results are below.
Keith immediately went to the Library of Congress and found some direct sources, including the actual letter Grace wrote to Lincoln.
The above link is a snippet from the The Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Exhibition focusing on his time as a Presidential candidate, titled “Candidate Lincoln.“ On this page you can view Lincoln pre- and with-beard, which is pretty entertaining and interesting.
Today in History: Chicago Fire of 1871
Posted on | October 8, 2009 | View Comments
On this day, 138 years ago, a massive fire ripped through the city of Chicago, killing 300 people and leaving 90,000 homeless. It caused $200 million worth of damage and destroyed 4 square miles of the city. Using the website Measuring Worth to calculate the amount adjusted for the worth of today’s dollar, the damage would be equal to $3,636,875,000.00. That’s almost $3.7 billion dollars.
Below are some primary sources from The Library of Congress regarding the Fire:
A panoramic map showing the burnt district.
Another panoramic picture of the devastated city, titled: The Great Conflagration of Chicago. October 8th and 9th, 1871.
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