Social Studies Programs
Exhibitions, Featured Activities and Research Centers at the LOC
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The Gettysburg Address
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Herblock's History: From the stock market crash in 1929 through the new millennium beginning in the year 2000, editorial cartoonist Herb Block chronicled the nation's political history, caricaturing twelve American presidents from Herbert Hoover to Bill Clinton. He has received three Pulitzer Prizes for editorial cartooning (1942, 1954, and 1979) and a fourth with Washington Post colleagues for public service during the Watergate investigation (1973). Herblock's History celebrates his gift to the Library of Congress of more than one hundred works, spanning seventy years of world history and the astonishing breadth of his distinguished career. |
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A joint project of the Library of Congress and The British Library, the John Bull and Uncle Sam exhibition brings together for the first time treasures from the two greatest libraries in the English-speaking world in an exploration of selected time periods and cultural movements that provide unique insights into the relationship of the United States and Great Britain. |
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Rivers, Edens and Empires: On April 7, 1805, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark left Fort Mandan for points west, beginning the process of "filling in the canvas" of America. This exhibition features the Library's rich collections of exploration material documenting the quest to connect the East and the West by means of a waterway passage. |
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This exhibition focuses on the extraordinary legacy of Thomas Jefferson--founding father, farmer, architect, inventor, slaveholder, book collector, scholar, diplomat, and the third president of the United States. It traces Jefferson's intellectual development from his earliest days in the Piedmont to an ever-expanding realm of influence in republican Virginia, the American Revolutionary government, the creation of the American nation, and the revolution in individual rights in America and the world. |
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"With an Even Hand": Brown vs. Board at Fifty On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court issued a decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, declaring that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." This decision was pivotal to the struggle for racial desegregation in the United States. This exhibition commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of this landmark judicial case. |
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Women Come to the Front: The women featured in this exhibit were chosen because of the strength and variety of their collections in the Library of Congress. Like their colleagues, the women followed various paths to their wartime assignments.
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| 1492. An Ongoing Voyage examines the rich mixture of societies coexisting in five areas of this hemisphere before European arrival. It then surveys the polyglot Mediterranean world at a dynamic turning point in its development. The exhibition examines the first sustained contacts between American people and European explorers, conquerors and settlers from 1492 to 1600. During this period, in the wake of Columbus's voyages, Africans also arrived in the hemisphere, usually as slaves. All of these encounters, some brutal and traumatic, others more gradual, irreversibly changed the way in which peoples in the Americas led their lives. |
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"America's Story from America's Library" wants you to have fun with history while learning at the same time. We want to put the story back in history and show you some things that you've never heard or seen before.This site was designed especially with young people in mind, but there are great stories for people of all ages, and we hope children and their families will want to explore this site together. |
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Today in History mines the American Memory historical collections to discover what happened in American history today…and every day. |
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. . .Fill up the Canvas . . . What was the historical significance of the Lewis and Clark expedition? What impact did it have on the growth of the nation...and on its Native American inhabitants? This feature contains primary source materials that document the stages of the Lewis and Clark expedition |
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This feature presentation links educators to primary sources from the Library of Congress' online collections. These Web resources can make history come alive for students! The feature provides an introduction to the study of immigration to the United States. It is far from the complete story, and focuses only on the immigrant groups that arrived in greatest numbers during the 19th and early 20th centuries. |
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This resource was developed to help teachers and students use the vast online collections of the Library of Congress. The links to the right will lead you to sets of selected primary sources on a variety of topics in United States History. The sets are arranged by chronological period. The primary source excerpts were chosen because they deal with important and interesting topics in U.S. history. Each excerpt is linked to the complete primary source in American Memory from which is has been drawn. The excerpts are thus also intended to help students and teachers delve more deeply into the primary sources provided online by the Library of Congress. |
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On the Homefront - Even though World Wars I and II did not take place on American soil, both wars were fought in multiple ways on the American homefront. This activity showcases a sampling of American Memory resources that illustrate homefront contributions during both wars. By studying these primary source historical documents, students can begin to understand how citizens of all ages, families and businesses pitched in to help fight for freedom abroad. They can also consider these actions as possible models for community contributions to peace efforts today. |
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The United States is home to a diverse population that celebrates its cultural richness and variety through local festivals, community events, and other grassroots activities. These community gatherings demonstrate Americans' pride in where they come from, who they are, and where they live. Community Roots, drawing on the Local Legacies project provides a "snapshot" of American Culture as it was expressed in spring of 2000, in communities from every state in the nation. |
The Prints & Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC) provides access through group or item records to about 65% of the Division's holdings, as well as to some images found in other units of the Library of Congress. Many of the catalog records are accompanied by digital images--about one million digital images in all.
Acting under the directive of the leadership of the 104th Congress to make Federal legislative information freely available to the Internet public, a Library of Congress team brought the THOMAS World Wide Web system online in January 1995, at the inception of the 104th Congress. This link goes directly to historical documents and additional resources related to Social Studies.
The Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress holds more than 4.5 million items, of which Map Collections represents only a small fraction, those that have been converted to digital form.