About
South Florida Primary Sources is a project of the FIU Digital Collections Center, generously funded by the Humanities Edge program (Mellon Foundation). This project seeks to highlight digital collections materials for K-12 students and educators with a focus on local South Florida history. Educators were consulted throughout the project, and our first set, “Virginia Key Beach and South Florida's Wade-ins” was published in Fall 2020. We anticipate creating more sets in the future, so stay tuned!
What is a primary source?
A primary source is an original first-hand record or piece of evidence about a time, person, or event. A photograph, document, oral history, video recording, journal, or blog are all primary sources that give clues and insight into historical persons, subjects, and contexts.
Why teach with primary sources?
Teaching with primary sources engages students and allows them to experience history as real and tangible. Analyzing and interpreting primary sources hones critical thinking skills, as students can ask their own questions, draw conclusions, construct meaning, and direct their own learning.
How to use these sets
Each set includes a narrative to give some background information on the time or historical movement, including in-text links to provide more information. Below the narrative, you will find the primary source set. Each source has a title and a description, as well as a link back to the original item record in it's original database. Videos are embedded on the right side of the screen or reachable through a link back to the contributing institution's collection.
While the sets are created with a recommended age group in mind, The teacher’s guide is intended to be open and flexible. We provide example questions you might ask in your classroom, as well as a suggested activity. We have also provided the relevant Sunshine State Standards for classroom reference.
Where can I find additional primary source sets and digital collections?
Much of the way we have constructed these sets is inspired by the amazing sets provided by the Digital Public Library of America and Florida Memory at the State Library and Archives of Florida.
We are very grateful for permission to use resources from the following local institution's digital collections:
- Miami-Dade Public Library Digital Collections
- The Lynn and Louis Wolfson II Florida Moving Image Archives
- The Miami Times Archive (at the University of Florida Digital Collections)
- Florida Memory
Other great local primary source resources include:
- The Sunshine State Digital Network in the Digital Public Library of America
- The University of Miami Digital Collections
- The Black Archives History & Research Foundation of South FL, Inc.
- The Digital Library of the Caribbean
Please also check out these additional resources on teaching with primary sources:
- DocsTeach from the National Archives
- Smithsonian's History Explorer
- Teaching with Digitized Primary Sources from the American Historical Association
- History Detectives from PBS.org
- Using Primary Sources from the Library of Congress