Primary Source Set Informational Text
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Account by Haruo Shimizu, "The Atomic Bomb, Impression of the Doomed Days, August 6th, at Hiroshima." -
Speech by Amelia Earhart on women and science -
Front-page newspaper coverage of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, 1911 -
Ann Caracristi interview on her work as a WWII codebreaker -
The National Woman Suffrage Association's Declaration of Sentiments, 1876 -
Chart, "Occupations of Negroes and whites in Georgia," ca. 1900 -
Interview with John W. Fields on his experiences during slavery -
Child labor exhibit panel, ca. 1913 -
U.S. Forest Service film, "The Adventures of Junior Raindrop," on watershed management -
Horatio Nelson Taft diary on the night Lincoln was assassinated, 1865 -
Meme warning about cheese injuries, from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission -
Newspaper page promoting Candy Day, 1917 -
Daily Mail "World Map of War and Commerce," ca. 1917 -
A civil war soldier's reminiscence of the war, 1866 -
Interview with Philip Marcus on his life as a newsboy, 1939 -
Newspaper article, "Mars Peopled by One Vast Thinking Vegetable," 1912 -
Children's book on the U.S. government, 1824 -
Broadside, "Indian Land for Sale," 1911 (download TIFF to access)
The resources in this primary source set are intended for classroom use. If your use will be beyond a single classroom, please review the copyright and fair use guidelines.
Teacher’s Guide
To help your students analyze these primary sources, get a graphic organizer and guides: Analysis Tool and Guides
Background
Informational text is a broad category of nonfiction that includes diverse formats such as books, letters, diaries, newspaper articles, posters, speeches, and factual films. Analyzing informational text allows students to practice their critical reading and thinking skills, while developing an understanding of what has been communicated in the text. It also gives them the opportunity to reflect on how content creators crafted their messages. Using Library of Congress historical primary sources as informational texts offers students texts that are authentic, engaging, and historically significant, and that represent a range of perspectives.
Personal narratives, for example, are informational texts that offer an individual's own recollections of key moments in history. They can be recorded in diaries, written reports, interviews, oral histories, and more. Because such narratives provide students with accounts of events through the lens of different individuals, they humanize history and offer students the opportunity to identify and analyze multiple perspectives. While most of the hand-written sources in this set come with a typewritten transcription, encouraging students to engage with the original document as much as possible can provide them with insights that a transcription can't.
Other informational texts come in the form of newspaper articles and advertisements. Throughout much of U.S. history, newspapers were an important way for people to receive new information. Therefore, examining newspaper articles and advertisements is one way for students to reflect on what kind of information was communicated to the public, as well as how information was conveyed. Several newspaper pieces in the set feature biased, misleading, or false information, and these might provide students with a good opportunity to practice their information literacy skills.
Of course, written text is not the only format in which informational text can be found in the Library's primary source collections. Posters, broadsides, exhibit panels, maps and graphs use both text and non-text visual elements to convey information. These types of primary sources give students the opportunity to examine how text and non-text elements were presented together to convey key ideas at different moments in history. The set also includes informational text delivered via audiovisual formats, in the form of speeches, interviews and factual films.
Suggestions for Teachers
- Ask students to use the primary source analysis tool to make observations, draw inferences, and formulate questions regarding one of the primary sources. Once students have finished, challenge them to identify any central themes or points being made in the source. Finally, encourage students to document specific ways that the content creator developed these points, for instance referencing the use of language, examples, visual elements, or other techniques.
- Invite students to compare and contrast two or more primary sources from the set. Students might compare and contrast the ways in which various items develop similar or contradictory main ideas, the rhetorical techniques or formats they use, or the perspectives they contain.
- Ask students to examine one or several of the primary sources together with a related piece of fiction or nonfiction they are reading in class. For example, how might a particular primary source add meaningful historical context to a novel, short story, or poem, or present alternate viewpoints on that creative work's topic?
- Encourage students to select a primary source and create a new informational text of their own, responding to or extending the ideas expressed in the source. In doing so, students can use one of the various formats from the set as a model. For example, they can create a personal narrative, newspaper ad, broadside, meme, or other format of their choosing.