Asking your students to engage in research with primary sources can help them to develop important skills such as recognizing gaps in their knowledge and seeking additional understanding through critical questioning and research. Here are two great collections that can give your students direct access to local Delaware History.
1) Delaware Oral History Collection
Named in honor of the project funder, the Robert H. Richards Delaware Oral History collection comprises nearly 300 interviews telling Delaware stories related to politics, education, race relations, life during the Great Depression, agriculture, and the urban growth of Wilmington through its diverse immigrant communities. Participants in the project include such well-known Delawareans as African-American attorney Louis Redding and journalist William Frank, but other remarkable voices such as Norman Thomposon Dean speaking Lenape, the Native American language of Delaware. A full description of the collection is available at https://library.udel.edu/static/purl.php?mss0179 with links to the digitized audio recordings and searchable PDF files of the interview transcripts, all of which are housed in UDSpace, the University’s digital repository.
A UD Dily article on the collection can be viewed at
http://www.udel.edu/udaily/2017/april/digitized-delaware-histories/
2) Delaware Digital Newspaper Project (DDNP)
The Delaware Digital Newspaper Project (DDNP), part of the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), began digitizing historic Delaware newspaper titles starting in 2015. Researchers can now freely access over 60K pages from 11 titles of Delaware newspapers using the Chronicling America database (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/). This freely accessible database contains nearly 12 million pages of content from 47 U.S. states and territories from 1690-1963 with additional content added daily. Researchers can access articles, obituaries, marriage/birth announcements, advertisements, cartoons, poetry, and more documenting pivotal moments in American history.
Additional information about the DDNP’s contributions to Chronicling America can be found on the project website: https://library.udel.edu/ddnp/
