Education Websites
Library of Congress Teacher Site
The Library of Congress offers classroom materials and professional development to help teachers effectively use primary sources from the Library's vast digital collections in their teaching.
NAfME Teaching with Primary Sources Curriculum Units for the 2014 Music Standards
Curriculum units from the National Association for Music Education focus on helping music educators connect to the Library of Congress' digitized archives and incorporate primary sources into the classroom.
Music Means
Music Means explores the complex artistic, social, commercial, political, and material histories of American music. Launched as part of the Many Musics of America project, a special event series organized by the American Musicological Society, Music Means publishes original narrative and commentary, alongside multimedia features, educational resources, and more. It provides a wealth of information to help users understand how different forms of music – simple and multi-layered, harmonious and dissonant, traditional and innovative – are woven into the story of America and its peoples.
Lesson Plan: The History of American Music
This lesson from C-SPAN Classroom provides an overview of the history of American music from the late-1700s through the mid-1900s. The lesson, which features the Library of Congress Music Division's Susan Vita, James Wintle, Carol Lynn Ward-Bamford, and Nicholas Brown, opens with reflective questions that ask students to consider what their favorite genre of music is and what music can tell someone about a society or specific era of time.
TeachRock
TeachRock is a standards-aligned, arts integration curriculum that uses the history of popular music and culture to help teachers engage students.
Voices Across Time
Voices Across Time was created to help teachers harness the power of song as primary sources to supplement any secondary American Social Studies, Language Arts, and Music curriculum. It is a project of the Center for American Music, part of the University of Pittsburgh Library System.
Song Collections
The American Folklife Center
The American Folklife Center Archive, established in the Library of Congress Music Division in 1928, is one of the largest archives of ethnographic materials from the United States and around the world, encompassing millions of items of ethnographic and historical documentation recorded from the nineteenth century to the present. These collections, which include extensive audiovisual documentation of traditional arts, cultural expressions, and oral histories, offer researchers access to the songs, stories, and other creative expressions of people from diverse communities.
The American Folk Song Collection
The American Folk Song Collection from the Kodaly Center at the University of Redlands is a unique resource for music teachers, parents, choral conductors, and composers. All songs in the collection include lyrics, a musical score and song analysis showing how it can be used to develop children’s musical and cultural understanding. Many also include recordings, background information, illustrations, and game or dance directions. The collection is searchable by any combination of twenty musical, cultural and educational categories.
The Global Jukebox
The Global Jukebox offers pathways to learning and a place to ponder our deep heritage. It is a means of exploring old and contemporary forms of music, dance, conversing, phonating and phrasing; and of finding out how our shared preoccupations as culture members may reveal themselves in song and poetry.
The Library of Congress Celebrates the Songs of America
The Songs of America presentation allows you to explore American history as documented in the work of some of our country's greatest composers, poets, scholars, and performers. From popular and traditional songs, to poetic art songs and sacred music, the relationship of song to historical events from the nation's founding to the present is highlighted through more than 80,000 online items.
Library of Congress - National Jukebox
The Library of Congress makes historical sound recordings available to the public free of charge. The Jukebox includes recordings from the extraordinary collections of the Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation and other contributing libraries and archives.
Library of Congress - America Singing: Nineteenth-Century Song Sheets
The collection of 4291 song sheets spans the period from the turn of the nineteenth century to the 1880s, although a majority of the song sheets were published during the height of the craze, from the 1850s to the 1870s. For most of the nineteenth century, before the advent of phonograph and radio technologies, Americans learned the latest songs from printed song sheets. Not to be confused with sheet music, song sheets are single printed sheets, usually six by eight inches, with lyrics but no music.