By: Colleen Smith
For teachers looking for resources to celebrate and honor Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month, consider exploring a range of primary sources available through the Library’s digital collections.
This free to use and reuse set highlights images that show experiences and contributions of Asian American and Pacific Islanders, while living in the United States.
You might notice that one of the items in the set links to a collection of research guides that offer a wealth of resources across the Library, including related Topics in Chronicling America, ethnographic resources through the American Folklife Center, to materials in different formats on Asian American/Pacific Islander studies.
In addition to the free to use and reuse images set, teachers can also find a range of primary sources including images, documents, oral histories, and newspaper articles for the classroom in several primary source sets:
Veterans Stories: Struggles for Participation
- Dating back to the birth of the United States, women and people of color have always served the nation in times of conflict, whether by taking up arms or providing support for the war effort. However, over those same centuries, women, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Asian Americans had to undergo long years of struggle to achieve full participation in, and receive full recognition from, the U.S. armed forces.
Hawaii: Selected Library of Congress Primary Sources
- The primary sources in this set document key moments in the state’s story and provide opportunities for students to explore that rich history further.
- Between 1942 and 1945, thousands of Japanese Americans were, regardless of U.S. citizenship, required to evacuate their homes and businesses and move to remote war relocation and internment camps run by the U.S. Government. This proved to be an extremely trying experience for many of those who lived in the camps, and to this day remains a controversial topic.
- The Spanish-American War lasted only about ten weeks in 1898. However, the war had far-reaching effects for both the United States and Spain.
Teaching with the Library’s classroom materials also offers You can also find narratives and selected primary sources that examine experiences of Japanese and Chinese immigration to the United States.
Finally, don’t forget to take a look at previous blog posts from Teaching with the Library that share Library-wide resources, programs, and teaching strategies. We hope you find some of these ideas helpful! If you use materials from the Library to support your teaching about Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month, please tell us about it in the comments.