Extreme SkillBuilders

If you’re taking the course for honors credit, or you’d like to go a little deeper with the Skill Builder assignments, please use this list as a starting point for your primary source investigations. Since the items you’ll find in them aren’t from your textbook, you will need to 1) ask a clear historical question about them, 2) establish context early on in your paper, and 3) cite your source(s) thoroughly and correctly. Any of these would be suitable digital collections in which to find a source to use – just remember to use the *actual* raw historical sources, not the editors’ essays or other introductory material you might find on these sites. Many of these are collections of images (photographs, posters) or documents (letters, diaries, reports), but some include audio or video files also.

Why am I calling these “extreme” SkillBuilders? Because you need some more advanced skills to navigate, understand, and analyze them – but the reward is that they provide a less structured, more freestyle way for you to explore the past.

Ideas for how to use these in a SkillBuilder paper:

  • compare/contrast two items
  • use an item to support or refute a claim made in your textbook
  • use an item as an example of a historical trend or as a window onto an event, era, or place

Homesteading a Sod House in Nebraska (Source: Women of the West Museum)

Documents and Evidence from the Haymarket Affair, 1886 (Source: Library of Congress)

Lewis Hine photographs (Source: New York Public Library)

Ellis Island photographs from the Commissioner of Immigration (Source: New York Public Library)

Dime Novels and Penny Dreadfuls (Source: Stanford Library)

Films from inside American Factories, 1904 (Source: Library of Congress)

Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, 1911 (Source: Cornell University)

World War I’s Homefront in North Carolina (Source: Documenting the American South)

Votes for Women (Source: Library of Congress) – use material from after 1877 only

New Deal Document Library (Source: New Deal Network)

A Day on Radio in 1939 (Source: University of Virginia)

Newsreels (Source: Internet Archive)

Ansel Adams’ Photographs of Manzanar Japanese Internment Camp (Source: Library of Congress)

The Watergate Files (Source: Gerald Ford Presidential Library)

9/11 Digital Archive (Source: Center for History and New Media)