Digital Spotlight: Historic American Sheet Music

HISTORIC AMERICAN SHEET MUSIC is a digital collection featuring sheet music of the 19th and early 20th century.

Contents: A Duke University Libraries collection, this resource includes digital images of over 3,000 pieces of music. Users can locate sheet music by composer, date, subject, instrumentation, illustrator, lyricist, publisher, and title.

Classroom Connections: Connect the music and social studies teachers for an engaging interdisciplinary project. Ask students to connect a piece of music to the time period when it was published. Use the subject search option to identify songs related to women, landscapes, entertainment, fashion, animals, society, transportation, and other interesting topics.

Featured Digital Objects:
Indiana http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/hasm_a0093/
That Railroad Rag http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/hasm_a0013/
My Pony Boy http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/hasm_a1110/

To visit the collection, go to http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/hasm/.

Website Review: Teacher's Guides for Using Primary Sources

TEACHER’S GUIDES FOR USING PRIMARY SOURCES from the Library of Congress are an engaging way to help learners analyze historical documents and other materials.

Ten guides are currently available for analyzing primary sources including motion pictures, political cartoons, books and other printed text, newspapers, sheet music and song sheets, manuscripts, oral histories, sound recordings, maps, and photographs and prints. A general guide to primary sources is also available.

Each one-page guide encourages students to observe, reflect, and question. In addition, ideas are provided for further investigation.

A Primary Source Analysis Tool is also available. This online tool allows students to enter notes that can be downloaded, printed, and/or emailed.

Librarians will find these one-page handouts and easy-to-use tools to be useful when addressing standards related to the analysis of primary source documents and informational reading.

While many teachers are familiar with these tools, the Analyzing Newspapers guide is new. Use this guide with the Chronicling America collection available at http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/

To explore these Teacher’s Guides, go tohttp://loc.gov/teachers/usingprimarysources/guides.html.