Teaching Center · Primary-Source Sets

Real documents your students can hold.

The heart of this museum is its sources, and these seven sets put them straight into your classroom. Each one gives you the actual records, an election result, a statement from the House floor, a blues lyric, a painted code, a federal brochure, the order read at Galveston on Juneteenth, with what each document is, where it comes from, and how strong it is. Every set carries text-dependent questions and a teacher answer key, and prints as a clean student handout.

K-12, by set Civics, History, ELA, Arts, Public Health Most are 1-2 class periods

How a set works

Open any set to read its documents on screen, then use the two print buttons: "Print student handout" gives students the documents and questions, and "Print teacher copy" adds the answer key and standards. Every claim carries one of the museum's four confidence tags, so students learn to weigh evidence, not just absorb it.

Set 1Ready to teach Civics & U.S. History · Gr. 6-12 Sent to Washington Five documents on Gerry Studds and Barney Frank: a 1,118-vote election, the 1976 fishing law and the dollars it still lands, a statement from the House floor, and the local archive that holds it all. 1-2 periods5 documents Open the set → Set 2Ready to teach Local History & Media Literacy · Gr. 5-12 Reading a place: 20 Kenyon Street Read one real building like a historian, and watch a museum be honest about a thin record. The cleanest true example of the confidence ladder you will find: Verified 1982, exact date Unknown. 1-2 periods5 documents Open the set → Set 3Trauma-informed U.S. History, Civics & Ethics · Gr. 9-12 Puzzles, 2006 How a community answers violence, and the ethics of remembering it. Includes the museum's own decision not to feature the attacker, a primary source on the ethics of how history gets written. 1-2 periods5 documents Open the set → Set 4Ready to teach ELA, Arts & History · Gr. 6-12 Reading Between the Lines Two real coded works to decode: Ma Rainey's daring 1928 blues, and Marsden Hartley's 1914 painting that is secretly a love letter. A close-reading lesson in the stated and the implied. 1-2 periods3 documents Open the set → Set 5Trauma-informed History, Public Health & Art · Gr. 6-12 Remembering: the AIDS crisis A 1988 federal brochure, a memorial sewn by hand, the care built on the South Coast, and a documented silence the museum refuses to fill. How a community keeps its own memory, and how history gets lost. 1-2 periods5 documents Open the set → Set 6Ready to teach U.S. History, Civics & ELA · Gr. 8-12 Freedom, Delivered Late Work straight from the founding documents: the Emancipation Proclamation, the order read at Galveston on Juneteenth, and the Thirteenth Amendment, and the exception it kept. Then William Dorsey Swann and the Combahee River Collective. 2 periods5 documents Open the set → Set 7Advanced · Gr. 6-12 History & Media Literacy · Gr. 6-12 Interrogating Claims The upper-grades capstone: the five kinds of claim (documented, unverifiable, attributed, a modern label, and honestly withheld), worked on real museum cases. Not every claim is the same kind of true. 1-2 periods5 documents Open the set →