At Dow High School in Midland, MI, students in Michael Federspiel's social studies class pore over congressional transcripts from a 1913 water rights hearing involving Yosemite National Park. At Williamsburg Middle School in Arlington, VA, students analyze dozens of Civil War photographs by Matthew Brady. And at University Library High in Champaign, IL, students examine oral histories of Depression-era immigrants.

Thanks to the American Memory collections, the Library of Congress's new online archive (http://memory.loc.gov), students from all parts of the country and at all grade levels are working with the raw material of U.S. history right at their desktops. American Memory comprises more than 40 primary-source archives, each including thousands of documents, photographs, pamphlets, films, and audio recordings from U.S. history and culture.