Archives Spotlight: US National Archives
Many high school students know what a good source looks like for their history papers—they just have trouble finding these sources. This post is a start to a new Circa series, Archives Spotlight, where we will highlight some great online collections that can be used for teaching and writing about history.
Our first stop is at the US National Archives! Read below to learn more.
The US National Archives is charged with preserving US governmental records. This means that the US National Archives hold an amazing amount of material. According to the Archives:
There are approximately 13.28 billion pages of textual records; 10 million maps, charts, and architectural and engineering drawings; 44.4 million still photographs, digital images, filmstrips, and graphics; 40 million aerial photographs; 563,000 reels of motion picture film; 992,000 video and sound recordings; and 1,323 terabytes of electronic data. (https://www.archives.gov/publications/general-info-leaflets/1-about-archives.html)
Of this enormous amount of material, some of the content is very famous: the Declaration of Independence, for example, is under the purview of the Archives, as are the papers relating to the Kennedy assassination. At the same time, most of the material is not generally famous but is important for historians and citizens. Historians use these records to reconstruct what the past was like and to help answer their historical questions.
Because there is so much material and most of this material was produced in an era before the widespread use of electronic data, much of the archival collections remain accessible only in physical formats. Researchers usually have to travel to the archives to read these texts in person.
Travel to the Archives can be difficult, especially for high school students. Therefore, the Archives have begun digitizing massive amounts of documents and making them available online.
These sources are excellent for history research papers. They are primary sources. They come from a known source. And an archivist has already vouched for the veracity and historical significance of the documents.
Students and teachers can check out digitized copies of archival collections in two main places:
DocsTeach has compiled important US history government documents, organized by time period. The real documents are scanned, so you can see what the document looks like in real life. Not only is this cool, it can also be informative—are there any notes on the side? Was it quickly scrawled or carefully typed? These kinds of visual clues can also give you historical insight.
Online Exhibits display curated collections of significant documents to US history. If you are lucky, you might find an entire collection of sources relating to your paper, already collected for you.
Final Thoughts
The US National Archives are a great place to start when writing US history papers. However, there are some caveats. First, not all of the documents in the archives are available online, so you might not be able to find all of the sources on a topic. Second, since these are the US federal archives, they are most useful for researching national US history. Local history, institutional history, and international history would all be better researched in other archives that specialize in different kinds of materials.
Start Your Journey into the Past
Circa teaches high school students how to research history themselves.