Media Resources

This Media Resource introduces students to Eatonville’s history and Zora Neale Hurston’s life and work. Guiding questions, video interviews, and other digital materials offer insight into Hurston’s life and Eatonville’s significance as an early and lasting pillar of Black Southern culture and folkways.

The NEH-funded Free and Equal project offers a digital way for students to explore the Rehearsal for Reconstruction in the Sea Islands of South Carolina in 1861. The site uses primary sources and dynamic images and illustrations to walk visitors through how this early attempt at reconstruction affected Black families. 

Museums and archives that focus on telling local stories can offer important insight for researchers. In this video, experts from the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, and the New York Public Library discuss how local stories and perspectives inform their collections. Part of a series of videos made in collaboration with National History Day.

Ken Burns delivered the 2016 Jefferson Lecture on May 9, 2016.

Drew Gilpin Faust, historian and first female president of Harvard University, delivered the 2011 Jefferson Lecture.

Professor James O'Hara, a Trustee of the Supreme Court Historical Society, discusses an NEH-funded project to digitize the Society's library of rare, out-of-print, and fragile books about Supreme Court justices from the Washington administration to today.

Learn about an NEH-funded program for veterans and college students in California, which places classical literature and the Greek-Trojan wars in dialogue with letters, articles, literature and documentaries about more recent conflicts and provides veterans a space to speak about their experiences.

Wendell Berry delivered the 2012 Jefferson Lecture on April 23, 2012. He speaks of the importance of place in cultivating responsible relationships to the world: only if we are able to imagine our places in the world can we feel affection for those places, for the world, and so begin to create the "possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy."

In this "Ask an NEH Expert" interview, Margaret Hughes, Associate Director for Education at Historic Hudson Valley, discusses crafting an argument and working with primary sources to support your claims.

Leslie Hayes, the New York Historical Society's Director of Education, discusses how to engage with primary and secondary sources in historical research projects—and how to proceed when sources say very different things.