Media Resources

Shatavia Elder, Vice President of Education at the Atlanta History Center (Atlanta, Georgia), offers advice on the importance of historical significance when writing about a topic, event, person, or era. The video includes materials available at the Atlanta History Center that show how researchers can evaluate historical significance across time.

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.

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.

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.” 

Dr. Rita Charon delivered the 2018 Jefferson Lecture, titled, "To See the Suffering: The Humanities Have What Medicine Needs," on Monday, October 15, 2018. In her lecture, Dr. Charon meditates on the relationship between art and medicine, and the ways in which the humanities can help us to "see the complex lived experience" of people facing health problems, to understand their suffering.

Walden, Henry David Thoreau’s classic meditation on self-reliance and nature, continues to offer students a valuable perspective nearly two centuries after its first publication in 1854. Now students can also experience the world of Walden Pond through a role-playing game funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Walden, a game lets students explore the woods where this transcendentalist thinker made his temporary home, and a new suite of supporting classroom materials helps teachers bring the experience into their English language arts or social studies curriculum.