Teaching with documents, and documents, and more documents: the National Archives digital partnerships.(Teaching with Documents)

What if ...

... you were teaching a lesson on the French Revolution, and rather than assigning your students to read a section in their textbook on the subject, they could read Thomas Jefferson's letter to John Jay describing what he witnessed in Paris during early July 1789, including the storming of the Bastille?

... you were teaching a unit on ratification, and rather than asking your students to simply read Article V of the U.S. Constitution, you could invite them to study the documents that detail the ratification of Amendments 11-27, and see for themselves how the process actually works?

... you were teaching a lesson about the assassination of President Lincoln, and rather than telling your students about conspiracy theories, they could read the actual correspondence received and sent by the military commission investigating the assassination; summaries of evidence of possible use in the trial; proceedings of and exhibits used in the court martial; and a record of the trial published in the newspaper the Daily National Intelligencer?

Well, they can!

New Online Resources

For decades, the Papers of the Continental Congress, documents that detail the ratification of Amendments 11-27, and the Lincoln Assassination Papers have been in the holdings of the National Archives and available to researchers on microfilm. But now, due to a new partnership with Footnote.com, all of these documents and thousands more are available online free of charge. Millions more are available through a paid subscription. A partial list of the available collections is included in the sidebar to this article, and a complete list is online at www.footnote.com/documents.