Media Resources

Anne Petersen, Executive Director of the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation (Santa Barbara, California), addresses why multiple perspectives are important to developing a rich understanding of historical events and topics. The video includes how maps and primary documents available at the Santa Barbara Trust can be used to analyze multiple and competing perspectives in history.

Long Road to Freedom is an NEH-funded digital humanities project that documents the transformative journey of Biddy Mason from enslavement in Georgia to becoming a landowner and community organizer in Los Angeles.

This resource provides access to classroom materials available at the Helen Keller Archive Digitization Project and resources for including the Americans with Disabilities Act within discussions about civil rights in the United States. 

The NEH-funded website, Voices of Democracy (VOD), includes a wealth of resources for studying the role of women in the civil rights movement—from the early nineteenth century through the 20^th century. This resource focuses on the life and transformative political influence of civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer.

In this episode of the NEH-funded BackStory—“Another Burden to Bear”—learn about the history of racial health disparities in the United States. The segments discuss the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, mental health care, efforts to combat tuberculosis within Native American communities, and the Madrigal Ten.

This episode of BackStory explores the history of gay rights in the U.S., with segments on the career of Harvey Milk and a look at movements for change in California, New York, and the Midwest. Supplemental materials for studying gay rights are also provided. 

This media resource highlights the NEH-funded project, Unladylike2020, and includes questions to guide students through the viewing of the one-hour special and short videos, along with resources for independent research.

This media resource features three videos that address a series of questions about The Papers of the War Department, a collection that provides insight into a broad range of issues, events, and trends that occurred during the Early Republic. It also includes additional research questions and resources to help students delve deeper into the documents. 

The NEH-funded PBS documentary series Latino Americans chronicles the long history of Latinos in what is now the United States. Episode 3: War and Peace focuses on the contributions of Latino Americans during the second world war and the experience of returning servicemen who faced discrimination despite their service. This resource highlights companion lessons from Humanities Texas.  

With funding from NEH, the Virtual Martin Luther King Project, or vMLK, offers an innovative resource for teaching one of King’s important but unrecorded speeches. Delivered on February 16, 1960 in Durham, North Carolina—just over two weeks into the now historic Woolworth lunch counter sit-in a few hours away in Greensboro—Dr. King’s speech, “A Creative Protest,” came to be known as “Fill Up the Jails” because, for the first time, he encouraged activists to disrupt and break the law through nonviolent confrontation, even if it meant “filling up the jails.”