University-based Academic Institute Providing Free Resources for High School and Middle School Students

Ashland, OH – While families across the country still don’t know for sure whether their chil­dren will be attending class in person, online or a mix of both when the new school year be­gins, one thing they can count on is this: If their children are studying American history, gov­ernment or civics they’ll have easy access to the resources they need to do well in their studies.

The historical documents, books, study guides and online exhibits all can be found at the web site TeachingAmerican­History.org (TAH.org), a proj­ect of the Ashbrook Center, an independent educational cen­ter specializing in U.S. his­tory and government located at Ashland University in Ohio.

The curated resources, all of which can be accessed for free, have been used by nearly 30,000 middle and high school U.S. his­tory, social studies, civics and government teachers to provide their students with a better un­derstanding of the people and circumstances which molded our country. They also have been widely used by home-schoolers, academic research­ers, journalists, history buffs and others. When the corona­virus pandemic forced the clo­sure of schools, they became invaluable, many have said.

Rather than providing informa­tion that merely summarizes the particulars of history in a (typi­cally bland) narrative, TAH.org gives students and teachers di­rect access to the words and thoughts of those who shaped American history, with more than 2,500 primary source docu­ments, searchable by era, theme, genre (speech, court case, letter, etc.), keyword, title or author.

“The TeachingAmericanHis­tory.org website opened my eyes to the wealth of primary sources I could share with my students,” said Julia Rae Fuette, who has taught high school social stud­ies in California, Montana and elsewhere. “[It] helped me to pull away from the textbook, which simply bombards students with names, dates and facts.”

According to David Widen­hofer, a social studies teacher at North Catholic High School in suburban Pittsburgh, after sharing primary documents available at TeachingAmeri­canHistory.org, “students started to see Americans mak­ing their own history in a sense that textbooks don’t convey.”

In addition, some of the pri­mary source documents have been compiled into annotated Core Document Collections, covering a wide range of topics in American History and U.S. Government. To date, 16 col­lections have been published, including collections on the American Revolution, causes of the Civil War, Reconstruc­tion, The American Presidency and the Cold War, among others.

These TAH.org collections, which can be downloaded for free, are helping Ray Mertz, an American government teacher at Meadowbrook High School in Byesville, OH, prepare his stu­dents for college. “These volumes are cutting-edge. Once word spreads, teachers will be using them all the time,” he predicts.

Lisa Sudfield, a teacher at Pis­cataway High School in New Jersey, also uses an online TAH Core Document Collection, 50 Core American Documents. As­signing the often- difficult texts, she challenges students, “Would you rather others hear you talk about yourself, or get a second-hand story from someone else?”

TAH.org currently attracts 2.5 million visitors annually – 80,000 of whom visit the site monthly or more often. Since the first Covid-19 stay-at-home order took place (March 19 in California), the site has received over 800,000 unique visitors.