Citizen Historian: Submitting Chronicling America Newspapers

Lesson Activity One: Introduction to Remembering Lincoln
Begin class by showing student the Remembering Lincoln website. You help them become familiar with the search by giving them mini-quests, such as:

• Find a source from the Confederate states.
• Find a source from a woman.
• Find a source from the journey of Lincoln's funeral train.

Ask students why people would want to collect responses to Lincoln’s assassination. Also ask them why Lincoln’s assassination matters today. Explain to students that they will be adding to the collection.

Lesson Activity Two: Research and Submission
Students should go to http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/ and search for an article related to the Lincoln assassination. Please note that Remembering Lincoln only accepts sources from April 15, 1865 until June 1, 1866.
Students should use the search fields to limit their options to 1865 and 1866. They should use search terms to find information related to a subtopic of the assassination that interests them. You can also assign different search terms to get make sure multiple sides of the issue are represented.
Possible search terms:

• Lincoln Death
• Manhunt
• Seward attack

It might be helpful to have students pick different search times or months to search this will help get a larger range of responses. To limit kids from picking the same source, you can use a shared Google doc for students to list their sources.

Once students find an article that interests them, they should upload it to the Remembering Lincoln site through Google Forms: http://goo.gl/forms/SEbfTf80OuWLt2Yz1
They should use the Submission Guidelines (included below) to help them through this process. Neither students nor teachers will have access to their responses after they submit. It might be helpful to have students copy and paste the information in a Google doc that they can share with their teacher. It also might be helpful to have this information when the students participate in the Summary of Learning in Lesson Activity Three.

Note: Transcription is an optional field. If you would like students to transcribe the article, please refer to our Transcription lesson. Chronicling America has a system to automatically transcribe documents, but it needs human review because you will often find text like this: Meanwhile the armies directly south of the Pinsk marshes are lighting a pitched battle with the Austro-German forces of General von J.insingen along 4U" !?*?/* nf tho Cfnlrhml riv^r. It I UIC line MM. un, ...

Lesson Activity Three: Summary of Learning
The teacher should hang five chart papers around the room for corporative graphing.

• Date of Source (Page One): April 15, 1865 – April 1865 – May 1865 – June until December 1865 – January until June 1866
• Location of Source (Page Two): DC – Union States –Confederate States – Border States – Western States and Territories - International
• Tone of Source (Page Three): Celebration – Mourning
• Accuracy of Information (Page Four): Accurate – Inaccurate
• Topic of Source (Page Five): Assassination – Manhunt- Funeral – Other

After students have submitted their sources, they should mark when their sources falls on each of the chart papers. The teacher should lead a class discussion on what the students learned from researching the sources and comparing the sources. Example discussion questions could include:

• Did different parts of the country react differently to assassination?
• Why do you think that was?
• How is the news the similar to today? How is it different? Online vs. print? (It might be helpful to bring in a current newspaper for students to look at for comparison)

Assessment:
Teacher can use the One Minute Paper to assess learning. Students have one minute to respond to the following questions:

• What was the most important thing you learned?
• What important questions remain unanswered?

Before giving them one minute to write, give students a couple minutes to think about their responses.

Extension: If students enjoyed submitting original sources to Remembering Lincoln, they can also submit to U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s similar project to find how U.S. local newspapers reported the Holocaust. Find out more information here: https://newspapers.ushmm.org/