Archive Teaching Ideas

1. Foster individual or group extended reading. Example: after reading a Greek or Shakespearian play, or Wordsworth poem, or Twain novel as a class, have everyone read a play / poem / novel on their own. Create reading circles focused on works from an historical period, particular writer, or genre.

2. Create your own literature anthologies and/or textbooks. These can be annotated in many ways, with specific information about authors, movements, traditions. A good group project. Can lead to reflection on how anthologies are created in the first place.

3. Examine original manuscripts and compare modern versions. Example: on-line versions of the Canterbury Tales, Caxton version: Ellesmere Manuscript

4. Read texts with on-line glossaries or with original / translations in line by line format. Examples: Canterbury Tales, Beowulf with old English & modern line by line, Odyssey with glossing links to places and persons.

5. Compare different translations of classic works, have students make their own translation via a process of interpolation. Example: The Odyssey, many translations are available on line from different authors and historical periods. George Chapman, Samuel Cowper, Alexander Pope, Samuel Butler, etc. (MIT Classics)

6. Examine texts and original illustrations, write about the relationship of illustrations and text. Examples: Blake or Rosetti Archive. Original illustrations of Huck Finn. Alice in Wonderland. Dickens Illustrations.

7. Search in etexts for specific characters, terms, or key words to write analysis papers. Find every occurance of the word "sin" in Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, or "hell" in Dante's Divine Comedy."

8. Cut and paste text from archives and create hypertext with commentary (or footnotes) on specific words/ characters / ideas.

9. Cut and paste and gloss texts with students making comments in different colors to indicate thoughts of characters, adding to descriptions of settings, etc.

10. Cut and paste text and then cut and paste pictures to create an illustrated work. Do this in sections and create a class text. Great with visually strong pieces such as the Odyssey. Combine this with the site Literary Locales.

12. Cut and paste and reorder the text to tell a different story. Add to the text writing in your own words. Rewrite passages to create specific effects-change a character description to make it less racist, or to up date it, or make it humorous. Put the Odyssey or some other work in chronological order, or jumble the order of a work to make its reading more interesting.

13. Cut and paste text and change genres, turn poetry into prose or vice versa.

14. Collapse texts and use the word quarry to create their own poems or works, analyze vocabulary, grammar, and meaning.

15. Have students read commentary on different books and add their evaluations. Use Amazon.com--enormous audience.

16. Study the history of classic manuscripts. Look at classic texts and compare presentations. Example: University of Wisconsin Milwaukee Classic Text Archive

Literature Archives

Google Books is available in over 35 languages, from Japanese to Czech to Finnish. Over 10,000 publishers and authors from 100+ countries participate in the Book Search Partner Program. The Library Project includes digitizing texts at 28 major research libraries in America and abroad.

Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations.

The MIT Library: Literature Resources page organizes a huge (annotated) list of useful links according to genre and period. Excellent place to start researching sites.

American Literature Archive tries to gather together all the interesting links on American literature and organize them according to author, period, type of American lit. course, and criticism. It also has a gallery of photos links to some full-text resource. This isn't really a resource by itself but its clean organization makes it easy to quickly find useful links for whatever author/movement/etc. you are researching. Good place to start when preparing a new unit or course.

Canadian Literature Archive attempts to gather all the information on Canadian authors together in one place" Depending on how famous (and/or technically savy) the author is that you are looking for, this may be a useful site. For example, there are several useful links to materials on Margaret Atwood (including a link to her own website) but Michael Ondaatje only has a biography and bibliography of secondary sources.

Internet Classics Archive allows you to "Select from a list of 441 works of classical literature by 59 different authors… Mainly Greco-Roman works (some Chinese and Persian), all in English translation." This site, which is maintained by MIT, usually also has a search function and user-provided commentary, but due to technical difficulties those two functions are unavailable for a couple weeks until they have time to resurrect them. Even without those, it is very easy to browse by author and the simple design of the site is easy to use and very fast to load.

Perseus Digital Library contains primary and secondary sources for the study of selected groups and time periods. Each area of study has a browsable list of sources. Although the navigation of the sources isn't the cleanest (instead of relying on page numbers they have a "progress bar" showing how far in the source you are) this site does have many interesting and unusual sources that would support literature and history studies. For example, autobiographies, diaries and new reports from the time/location. The collections on this site include ancient Greece and Rome; Non-literary papyri, Greek and Latin, from the Ptolemaic and Roman periods; English Renaissance literature; the Edwin C. Bolles collection on the history of London from its founding to the 19th century; books on California; Upper Midwest; Chesapeake Bay and Washington, D.C., ca. 1600-1925.

Language of the Land: Journeys into Literary America was an exhibition organized by the Library of Congress but which can be viewed online now. It partners photos and drawings of places with excerpts from famous pieces of literature about them (e.g. Nebraska cornfield and Willa Cather, a birch tree on Mackinaw and Hemingway). Excellent for visually bringing a piece of literature alive, but even better for helping students understand how they can write from wherever they are.

Yellow Pages literature page explains that "presently, a variety of different organizations, ranging from large publishing houses to universities, maintain on-line libraries. Combined, they contain untold thousands of works of American fiction (as well as literature from other fields of study). On the downside, people might spend hours or even days trying to find a particular e-text if they have to access each site individually. In order to help alleviate this problem, the website provides a brief list of the major e-text search engines which allow users to access many of the major on-line archives simultaneously. In addition, this section of the "Yellow Pages" provides information concerning some on-line collections of American fiction that will appeal to scholars in specialized fields of study."

Bartleby.com publishes literature, reference books and verse free of charge. Excellent for searching within a work or just browsing, it has dictionaries, thesauri, books of quotations, the King James Bible, Gray's Anatomy, Strunk's Elements of Style, and many classic novels and poems - all out of copyright, of course.

Project Gutenberg has over 25,000 free books in the Project Gutenberg Online Book Catalog and over 100,000 titles.

African American Writers Page is part of the Internet School Library Media Center (ISLMC). Organized by author, it links to both biographical information as well as texts by that author available online AND sample lesson plans.

Modern American Poetry is a companion to the Anthology of Modern Poetry published by Oxford University Press but it works well on it own for finding information and links for contemporary poets. Some sections are huge (for example, tons of excerpted interviews with Sherman Alexie) but others are pretty basic (such as the section on Sandra Cisneros). Also useful as it links to sample syllabi from around the country.

Poets.org invites you to "browse our collection of over 500 poet biographies, 1400 poems, and 100 audio clips" This superbly organized site also has "exhibits" of poems organized according to period or theme and prefaced by a critical introduction.

Additional Poetry Archives: Academy of American Poets, Poetry Archive, American Verse Project, Library of Congress Poetry Resources, University of Toronto Poetry On-Line, Contemporary Poets, British and Irish Poetry, Poetry Magazine, Poets House.

Short Story Archives: Short Story Archive, Nice Stories.com, SciFishorts, Short Story.net, Abilogic, Short Stories.

Teen Reads.com: Links and resources for teen readers.

Teen Writing: Teen Ink, TeenLit, Scholastic, Pongo Publishing, Writing Contests, NaNoWriMo.

Storytellers: Native American Authors Online organizes information about authors as well as writings by them, reviews about work over the last century, and current events in Native American literary circles. Although the site appears simple, its links have been carefully vetted for usefulness and the authors themselves have contributed to many of the pages on this site.

American Rhetoric indexes 5000+ full text, audio and video(streaming) versions of public speeches, sermons, legal proceedings, lectures, debates, interviews, and well-known speeches from movies, popular songs, and sensational media events by famous (and infamous) politicians, actors, preachers, athletes, singers, and other noteworthy personalities. There are also clips designed to illustrate various rhetorical devices used in specific rhetorical situations to induce an audience to cooperate with a speaker's persuasive purpose(s). VERY easy to use and incredibly useful.

Internet Sacred Text Archive is the largest freely available archive of online books about religion, mythology, folklore and the esoteric on the Internet.

Voice of the Shuttle is an archive of archives. Its Literature in English page has a great many annotated links to literary resources including the following sections: general English Literature, Anglo-Saxon & Medieval, renaissance & 17th Century, Restoration & 18th Century, Romantics, Victorian, Modern Literature, Other Literature in English, English Literature by Genre, Creative Writing, English & Comp. Lit. Departments, and Courses in English & American Literature.

About.com: Contemporary Literature Page (with extensive links to contemporary literature, arts, etc.) & "Classic" Literature Page allow you to search works by authors, and provide review, book recommendations and blog archive.

Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts collects documents from American and English Literature as well as western philosophy. Currently works (incomplete) by 129 authors are archived.

British Poetry 1780-1910: A Hypertext Archive of Scholarly Editions is at the Electronic Text Center Alderman Library, University of Virginia.

University of Toronto English Library contains an electronic version of "Representative Poetry" and various renaissance texts.

Great Books Home Page allows you to make selections by authors, periods (antiquity, medieval, renaissance, baroque, classical, romantic, and modern) and by subjects (science, art, theater, literature, music, history, and cinema). If you click on an author page, for example, Alive Walker, you can find a brief introduction to the author, a list of her works, and some external links. It is said to be "based on Mortimer Alder's How to Read a Book".

Literature Webliography is an extensive and valuable archive of archives. It has links to university library catalogs, bibliographies, newsgroups, hypertextual dictionaries and periodicals. It also includes a list of general archives and hypertext and web publications.

Electronic Poetry Center contains E-poetry, sound poetry and blog lists.

The Online Books Page lists over 20,000 free books on the Web. It also has a great many briefly annotated links (26 are in English), including links of web sites in other languages.

The Oxford Text Archive develops, collects, catalogues and preserves electronic literary and linguistic resources.

Humbul Humanities Hub aims to be UK higher and further education's first choice for accessing online humanities resources"

PAL: Perspectives in American Literature describes itself as being "A Research and Reference Guide : An Ongoing Project" but it really is a blessing to the teacher or grad student tackling an author or period which with they have only a passing familiarity. It's bibliographies of secondary sources, chronologies, lists of themes, issues, study questions organized around authors and periods allows the already educated reader to become a more expert and better prepared teacher. Easy to use and very useful.

Electronic Archives for Teaching the American Literatures contain essays, syllabi, bibliographies, and other resources for teaching the multiple literatures of the United States" and is maintained by the Georgetown University. This site seems particularly useful for the professor of American Literatures who wishes to see what his colleagues are going (and why) or the high school teacher who wishes to see sample expectations of what is happening at the college level.
* A similar site (although not identical) is the American Studies Crossroads Project -- it also has some ideas for using technology in the teaching of literature.

EServer is a nonprofit, loosely organized group of writers and scholars that have put some eclectic collections online on such diverse topics as contemporary art, race, Internet studies, sexuality, drama, design, multimedia, accessible publishing and current political and social issues. In addition to written works, we publish hypertext, audio and even video recordings. The site is easy to browse and use, although some areas seem less up-to-date than others (such as the "Call for Papers" section which still has calls posted for conferences which happened last year)

Fun for those interested in literary theory (including trading cards for theorists like Foucalt and Said).

Mythology Archives

Encyclopedia Mythica tries to provide a basic reference for mythologies, folktales and legends of the entire world. Very easy to use, more comprehensive than some but not exhaustive. Can browse or search by continent, culture, bestiary or genealogy tables. Very nice gallery section as well.

Mythography gives basic overviews of Greek, Roman and Celtic gods and myths, but despite the easy layout, most of the text isn't anything new. What makes it a useful site is its extensive art gallery: they've collected images of famous sculptures, paintings, etc. and organized them according to the mythical character or story they reference.

Classical Myth: The Ancient Sources has images, texts, timelines and lists of iconographical attributes for Greek and Roman gods. Images are "presented roughly chronologically… to enable you to see how the representation of a figure changes" and texts are also dated so that "you can see how perceptions of a figure or situation change over the years." Many of the pictures and texts are links to other sites (like Perseus) but the easy layout makes this a nice index site.

Aesop's Fables Online has multiple translations of the fables, has an index, and is searchable.

Imagist Poetry Archives: Pound, Williams, Doolittle

Ezra Pound

1. Internet Public Library a) --- literature --- Gale's Literary Index contains a list of his works only with two sections: Gales Series and Works by the author. b) --- literature --- Glossary of Literary Theory has the sections of Notes on Life and Works, Selected Poetry of the Poet including 13 poems and notes.

2. Bartleby.com --- (right column)verse --- American Poetry archives three poems by the author: 104" Ballad for Gloom", 105 -[Greek], 106 "In a Station of the Metro".

3. The Poetry Archives archives 66 poems by the author.

4. Poets' Corner http://www.theotherpages.org/poems/authors.html/
--- (Author search) has 10 collections of poems with a brief introduction to the author.--- (Faces of the Poets) has one painting and two photos of the poet.

5. Poetry Exhibits contains introduction to the poet, one portrait, bibliography (poetry, prose and anthology) and a few briefly annotated useful links.
It's a good archive for Ezra Pound study.

6. Modern American Poetry contains an introduction to the life and career of the poet, Pound's "A retrospect", photocopy from the poem "Blast", essays on some poems, bibliography, 13 additional poems by the author and some external links. There is a video clip of the poem "Canto LXXXI" in "Spotlight on Ezra Pound" in the external links. It is a good archive for the comprehensive study of Ezra Pound.

7. Kobe U. Page contains notes on Pound's life, time table, bibliography of criticism on Pound, and other links.

8. Electronic Poetry Center is archived at State University of New York at Buffalo, with sections of manuscripts, audio, discussion list, introduction to the author, and Pound web sites.

9. Modern and Contemporary American Poetry contains one poem - "The Encounter" by the author, audio of Pound reading from "The Cantos", essay "Ezra Pound and Bollingen Prize Controversy", and a baseball poem praised as Poundian by Babette Deutsch in Poetry in Our Time (1956).

10. Plagiarist.com Poetry Archive has 21 poems by the author. Click on first letter of author's last name.

11. American Poems contains biography of the poet and links to some of the works. Each poet is listed both in alphabetical and chronological order. Archives Pound's "The Cantos" (11 poems) and one link to AmericanPoems Home- Poets.

William Carlos Williams

1. Internet Public Library --- literature --- Gale's Literary Index has a list of his works only, including two sections: Gales Series, and Works by the Author.

2. The University of Virginia Electronic Text Center --- collections ---authors
includes "Six Poems" (1920) and "Three Poems" (1921).

3. Online Books has 51 poems in "Sour Grapes" (html at Poets' Corner).

4. Poets' Corner ---author search, contains 7 collections of poems---faces of the poets, has a portrait.

5. Poetry Exhibits includes introduction to the poet, portrait, bibliography and links It's a good archive for the study of the poet.

6. Modern American Poetry contains an introduction to the life and career of the poet, essays on some poems, bibliography (poetry, selected prose, drama and fiction), some additional poems by the author, and external links. It is a good archive for the comprehensive study of the poet.

7. Electronic Poetry Center is archived at State University of New York at Buffalo, with Williams' writings (forthcoming), sound files (Ron Silliman on William Carlos Williams) and three links.

8. Modern and Contemporary American Poetry contains 13 poems by Williams,
criticism on the author, parody of Williams, and recording of a live webcast symposium on "To Elsie".

9. Plagiarist.com Poetry Archive has 58 poems by the author.

10. American Poems contains biography of the poet and links to some of the works. Each poet is listed both in alphabetical and chronological order. Nine poems by the author are archived. There is also one link to the AmericanPoems Home - Poets.

Hilda Doolittle (H. D.)

1. Internet Public Library --- literature --- Gale's Literary Index
has a list of her works only, including only one section - Gales Series.

2. Humanities Text Initiative (or American Verse Projects) has "Sea Garden".

3. Poets' Corner archives eight poems from "Sea Garden" and the poem "At Ithaca".

4. Poetry Exhibits contains introduction to the poet, portrait, and bibliography and links. It's a good archive for the study of the poet.

5. Modern American Poetry contains a portrait, the life of the poet, essays on some poems, selected criticism, bibliography and some external links.

6. H. D. Homepage contains a brief introduction to the author, two portraits, and many useful links of three main sections: H. D., Herself, H. D. Resources and Events, Other Resources of Interest to H. D.'s Readers. There is a teaching site - Teaching H. D.

7. Modern and Contemporary American Poetry has two poems by the
author - "Sea Rose" and "Red Rose and a Beggar", and a link to H. D. site.

8. Plagiarist.com Poetry Archive 18 poems by the author. Click on letter "H."

9. American Poems contains biography of the poet and links to some of the works. Each poet is listed both in alphabetical and chronological order. Fourteen poems by the author are archived. There is also a link to AmericanPoems Home _ Poets.

History Archives

UCLA Online Campaign Literature Archive is a fascinating resource containing a century's worth of political campaign material distributed in Los Angeles. For instance, there are dozens of examples from the ad campaigns put out by the Democrat and Republic parties during presidential elections during the Great Depression. Pair the ads with literature from the time period, analyze them as forms of communication by themselves, or just decorate your room with conversation starters.

Making of America (MoA) is a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. The collection currently contains approximately 8,500 books and 50,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints" From "The whisky war in Adrian; or, The trials and triumphs of prohibition in Lenawee county, Mich. A discourse delivered at the M. E. church in Adrian, Michigan, July 17, 1870, by Rev. J. S. Smart", to a complete biography of David Crockett, this website is enormous. Easy to browse, it also does allow searching of the full text of the sources, but the search engine is a bit clunky. Very useful for finding primary source material, but not quickly unless you already know of a specific phrase (or author or title) in the work you want.

American Memory is a gateway to rich primary source materials relating to the history and culture of the United States. The site offers more than 7 million digital items from more than 100 historical collections." Maintained by the Library of Congress, this site could be overwhelming, but its easy layout and - best of all - a "Learning Page" specifically designed to help teachers make the best use of the site, makes this an awesome resource. It even has sample lesson plans for using the site: imagine having students look through artifacts (photos, advertisements, pamplets, sheet music, etc) from the Great Depression while reading Grapes of Wrath.

Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection has both historical and current maps for regions and countries around the world and is very easy to use. Find everything from maps of Africa from 1885 to maps of Ground Zero in the aftermath of September 11th, 2001.