School room exhibit
The teaching resources in this collection include a sampling of primary and secondary sources related to Arlington County’s history. These documents are arranged in the order that they might accompany a course in United States history to show the connection between local, state, and national history.
These documents can serve as opportunities to introduce or practice critical thinking skills. Where time is short, documents can be used to present local links to broader themes quickly.
The documents are presented as PDFs with citations, including. The images are in TIFFs. If you have the software, you can extract a TIFF from a PDF. However, making a screenshot or printing the document is probably the easiest way to access them.
Cornelia B. Rose’s Arlington County, Virginia: A History is helpful as a resource for more detail on Arlington’s history. For additional resources, Arlington Historical Magazine has articles on a wide range of local history topics. These magazine articles and their correlations to US history can be accessed on our website here.
Printing Tips
Many documents on this resource site, particularly the maps, have a lot of detail. Suppose you don’t have access to a plotter. In that case, Adobe Acrobat Professional has a feature (print->page scaling->tile all pages->tile scale [adjust to size preference]) that allows you to print a document over several pages. Each page or “tile” can be trimmed and glued together. Or, you can leave the tiles as individual pieces for students to piece together as a puzzle. Leaving tiles in pieces can also slow students’ document analysis and encourage them to make more observations before drawing conclusions.
AHS would like to thank the Social Studies Office of Arlington Public Schools for developing and sharing local history resources. Special thanks to Jesse Homberg for his efforts in finding these resources.