With this digital collection, students will examine documents that include maps of varying styles and purposes made by the diverse peoples that created colonial North America. Together, these documents illustrate the utility of maps as historical sources and, more specifically, illuminate colonial North America’s multicultural and contested origins. Students will consider the following questions as they review the documents: 1. How do maps challenge our perceptions of European and American Indian relations during the colonial period? 2. What role did cartography, or mapmaking, play in the power struggles between Europeans and American Indians? How did maps allow both European and indigenous people to gain, administer, legitimize, and codify power in colonial North America? 3. How did mapmakers adjust their maps to suit different needs and audiences during the colonial period? 4. How did the multicultural origins of cartographic knowledge of North America alter contemporary ideas about space, or the course of colonial expansion? 5. How can maps help us understand the past in ways that other historical documents cannot?

With this digital collection, students will examine documents that offer differing views of the Mississippi in the early part of the nineteenth century.

With this digital collection, students will learn how European merchants sought out spices from Asia, traveling dangerous routes through the Middle East and Africa. Students will consider the following essential questions as they review the documents: 1. Why were spices so valuable in medieval Europe? Who determined the value? 2. How is the value of spices different from the price of spices? How did the value impact prices? 3. How were spices used by medieval Europeans? How does this differ from the use of spices today?

With this digital collection, students will examine documents exploring several New Deal programs, highlighting how Chicago and Midwestern-based workers negotiated new welfare reforms. It provides a snapshot of how new agencies reshuffled family relations, mobilized immigrants, and sometimes reached across racial barriers. With a particular focus on labor and employment, these documents represent a broad range of responses to President Roosevelt’s policies, demonstrating the praise and protest elicited as policymakers established a growing welfare state. Students will consider the following essential questions as they review the documents: 1. Who benefited from New Deal labor reforms? 2. What effect did new social programs have on Chicagoans across class, racial, and ethnic divides? 3. How did the politics of the New Deal change ordinary Americans’ relationship to the federal government?

With this digital collection, students will review primary sources that develop the historical context for the debates over Africa and the slave trade. Students will consider the following questions as they review the documents: 1. How did eighteenth-century European and American writers portray Africans? How are these representations shaped by the writers’ own experiences and convictions? 2. What arguments did eighteenth-century writers make in support of and in opposition to the slave trade? How are these arguments shaped by each writer’s understanding of African civilization? 3. How does Olaudah Equiano contribute to these debates? How does he portray his own experiences of slavery and freedom? How does he define his identity as African, British, and Christian?

With this digital collection, students will review documents that serve to illustrate various perspectives on the causes and effects of the American Revolution. Students will answer the following essential questions: 1. How did the American Revolution affect different groups of people? 2. What are the various arguments put forth as to the cause of and reasons for the American Revolution? How do the arguments reflect the group that made them? 3. What are the different interests of each group? What stake do they have in the war? 4. Think about a definition of the word Americans. What groups of people are considered Americans at this time? Who is considered American today?

With this digital collection, students will review documents that offer different perspectives on the meaning and experience of the revolution. Students will be asked to consider the following essential questions: 1. What social conditions and conflicts contributed to the revolution? How do the writers and artists represented in this collection explain their support of or opposition to the revolution? 2. How did the United States seek to influence events in Mexico? How did Americans in Mexico represent their experience of the revolution? 3. How did Mexican artists respond to the revolution? What visual record did they create of the people who led and participated in the war?

With this digital collection, students will review documents depicting Chicago's second world's fair, A Century of Progress International Exposition. Essential Questions 1. What was unique about the 1933-34 Chicago World’s Fair? 2. How did the creators of the Century of Progress illustrate and enact the fair’s theme of progress

With this digital collection, students will review a small sample of the different ways in which religious change drove the development of print culture. Through them, students will gain a better understanding of the immense challenges caused by religious change in this period, and the different ways in which print culture was shaped and re-shaped in order to meet them. Students will keep the following questions in mind as they review the documents: 1. Why did so many religious thinkers and leaders seek to solve the problems they encountered through the printed word? 2. What is the intended audience for these works? How did the authors and creators try to interact with that audience through the materials they produced? 3. How does the changing nature of print culture reflect the changing nature of religion during this period? 4. How does the religious printing market reflect the increasingly globalized world in the early modern period? 5. What parallels are there between early modern print culture and modern mass media?

With this digital collection, students will examine documents that explore representations of the American Revolution from its earliest moments through the 125 years that followed. The documents include visual representations—maps, illustrations—as well as a variety of written texts—political, literary, musical—created by people of different social status for different audiences. Taken together, these documents encourage students to think in new ways about the history and meaning of the Revolution. Students will consider the following questions as they review the documents: 1. How did people interpret the events of the Revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? 2. How did the meaning of the Revolution change over time? 3. What conflicts or contradictions exist between different representations of the Revolution? 4. What are the reasons for the differences between various accounts of the Revolution?

With this digital collection, students will examine documents that develop the context for Shakespeare’s Roman plays. They include excerpts from his primary source on classical Rome, representations of Rome by other Renaissance writers, and, finally, interpretations of Shakespeare’s characters by artists from later centuries. Students will consider the following questions as they review the documents: 1. How did Shakespeare’s contemporaries represent classical Rome? What relationships do they suggest between ancient Rome and Renaissance England? Which issues does Rome seem to raise for Renaissance writers or allow them to explore? 2. In what ways do Shakespeare’s plays reinforce or differ from other Renaissance representations of Rome? Which issues does he call attention to, revise, or adapt in his retelling of Roman history? 3. How did artists portray Shakespeare’s characters in the centuries that followed the original staging of Julius Caesar and Coriolanus? What about these plays seems to have mattered most to subsequent audiences?

With this digital collection, students will examine documents that demonstrate some of the ways in which Renaissance writers and artists imagined the New World and its utopian possibilities. Students will keep the following questions in mind as tthey review the documents: 1. How does the exploration of the Americas contribute to the European imagination of an ideal society? 2. What qualities do these writers identify as the basis of an ideal society? 3. How do these writers use representations of Native American and utopian societies to critique their own European societies? What social problems do they perceive to be most urgent? 4. Are native people idealized or denigrated in these representations? Do they inhabit a world that is preferable to the Europeans’ world?

With this digital collection, students will examine documents that bring together arguments for emancipation written before, during, and after the Civil War. The collection allows students to trace the evolution of abolitionist arguments as well as to examine conflicts among writers over what emancipation would entail. Students will keep the following questions in mind as they review the documents: 1. What arguments did writers make before the Civil War for the abolition of slavery? How did they frame their appeals in moral, social, political, and economic terms? 2. How did the war’s purpose shift from “saving the union” to destroying slavery? 3. What would freedom mean for former slaves, for Southern society, and for the nation as a whole, according to various writers both before and after the war?

With this digital collection, students will review documents exploring relationships between the Great Migration and the civil rights struggle in northern cities and, especially, Chicago from the 1920s through the 1960s. Students will consider the following essential questions as they review the documents: 1 What does de facto segregation in the urban North look like? How is it similar and different from de jure segregation in the South? 2. How did African Americans respond to the segregation and racism they faced in the North? 3. How did the civil rights movement in the urban North connect to the movement in the South?

With this digital collection, students will examine sources that speak to some of the ways French people brought about—or resisted—the transition from monarchy to republic and from subject to citizen. Students will consider the following questions as they review the documents: 1. How did French writers and artists represent the king and the country’s traditional hierarchy before and during the Revolution? 2. What did citizenship mean in the new republic? 3. How did ordinary people as well as the government use print publications to influence events during the Revolution? 4. What impact did the political ideals of the French Revolution have on social customs?

With this digital collection, students will examine documents representing some of the milestones in Chicago’s history of political radicalism from the Haymarket Affair of 1886 through the Palmer raids of 1920 into the McCarthy era of the 1950s. Students will consider the following questions as they review the documents: 1. What were the goals of the political radicals represented here? How did they try to accomplish those goals? Did their actions increase or weaken public support of their ideals? 2. What were the goals of the officials and organizations that sought to police or monitor political radicals? What were their methods? Was their treatment of radicals a form of persecution or not? 3. How do writers throughout these documents define the concepts of freedom, justice, and security? In what ways do these ideals conflict with each other? 4. Who or what constitutes a threat to the community, the city, or the nation? On what grounds does a person, idea, or group constitute a threat? How should such threats be handled? 5. How do definitions of and responses to political radicalism evolve from the 1880s through the 1950s?

With this digital collection, students will review maps, correspondence, editorial cartoons, and other materials to explore the interplay between foreign trade and diplomacy in China, as well as how China’s economic and diplomatic ties to the outside world have shaped its modern history. Students will consider the following essential questions as they review the documents: 1. How did China seek to control its place within international systems of trade? 2. How have China’s domestic politics influenced its foreign affairs? 3. How have Western traders and diplomats interacted with China?

With this digital collection, students will learn about the Copperheads. The provided documents offer perspectives on the Northern wing of the Democratic Party, which opposed the Civil War. The collection documents were both published in New York and indicate the Copperheads’ prominence in that city. Students will consider the following questions as they review the documents: 1. Describe the characters and symbols in the Harper’s Weeklycartoon. Who do they represent? 2. Explain the cartoon’s title. How does the title contrast with the image in the cartoon? According to the cartoonist, how are the Copperheads’ attempting to achieve peace? 3. Examine The Copperhead Catechism. What is a catechism? How is it used? 4. What are the beliefs of the Copperheads, as outlined in this catechism? 5. Does the author of this catechism support the Copperhead cause? Explain.

With this digital collection, students will explore the visual culture of Tudor England, a rich blend of Continental Renaissance Classicism and native English Medieval traditions. It encompasses the visual arts like painting and architecture, as well as new developments in print culture, performance, and pageantry. It is colored by dramatic swings between Catholicism and Protestantism, expanded educational opportunities, and by new discoveries across the Atlantic. Students will consider the following questions as they review the documents: 1. Why was the sixteenth century such a tumultuous time in English history? 2. How does studying visual culture help us to understand history better?

With this digital collection, students will review documents which develop the historical and cultural context for the novels My Antonia by Willa Cather and The Street by Ann Petry. It includes representations of women on the move, both socially and spatially, in such different contexts as transportation, dance, literary culture, and the Great Migration. Students will consider the following questions as they review the documents: 1. In what ways do these documents associate mobility with freedom? What kinds of freedom does movement provide? 2. In what ways do these documents associate mobility with setting aside social mores or subverting established norms? 3. How do these documents explore the relationships between physical and social mobility? When do the two forms of mobility, one literal and one figurative, correspond? When do they diverge or come into conflict? 4. How do understandings of gender influence these representations of mobility? Does women’s mobility have the same stakes or consequences as men’s?