Hi!
I'm student teaching this semester and I've been tasked with creating a learning station about how to read primary documents. What I'm looking for are events that may or may not be often studied in American history classes and have good examples of primary documents that the students can read and then make an attempt to tell me what happened.
I remember that in my college American History Post 1949 class, we read two memos and were asked to then tell the professor what happened. I think the two we read were "The Long Telegram" from George Kennan and another telegram from Nikolai Novikov. I remember it as one of my favorite assignments from a history class.
So the eras we're studying are US Expansion and Imperialism, the Industrial Revolution, The Great War, and the Great Depression (I'm only here eight weeks). Does anyone have any sources that would be good for this?
I am very partial to the Stanford History Education Group. They have tons of lessons for World and US History that involve analyzing primary sources. And the best part is they are all free. The only downside is that they can be pretty paper-intensive though you can easily turn them into digital lessons.
Explore the site, let me know if you need any more help with it.
Definitely try googling "us history primary sources [topic]"! On imperialism, for example, I turned up this awesome collection.
I'd also suggest you include an image or two (contemporary map, photograph where applicable)--that can really influence how people understand an event, and it's good to make students really think about the role of visuals. Like, have you ever seen those colorized World War I/World War II photos? It feels like a whole new level of immediacy and reality when they look like modern photos instead of "old" ones.