Abstract
The Library of Congress’s vast holdings contain incredible musical primary sources that shed light on the past, prompt contemplation of the present, and spark imagination of possible futures. Bringing these materials to secondary students around the nation is a primary goal of the Lewis-Houghton Civics and Democracy Initiative, a new grant-making program embedded within the Library’s Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS) Consortium.
Established by the Legislative Branch Appropriations Act of 2023, the Lewis-Houghton Initiative honors the service of Representatives John R. Lewis (D-GA) and Amo Houghton (R-NY) by distributing grants to support digitally enabled learning about history, civics, and democracy at the secondary level using creative arts materials from the Library’s digital collections. The inaugural six grant recipients are City Lore, Culture Works, FableVision Studios, Rock and Soul Forever Foundation, Snow & Co., and Songmasters. Each of the six organizations received $100,000 in October 2023 for an initial year, with the possibility of up to two additional years of funding. Each also belongs to the TPS Consortium, a group of partner organizations that collaborate to design and deliver programs promoting learning with Library of Congress resources throughout the United States.
Each grantee takes a unique approach. For example, FableVision Studios is creating an educational podcast highlighting a traditional folk song from the Library’s collections and a contemporary artist’s response to said piece. Snow & Co.’s Music of Us project is developing a music exploration and teaching tool that can be used to create multimodal educational “episodes” combining different types of library materials in an interactive web-based experience.
The primary goal of all Lewis-Houghton Initiative projects is to use music and the arts as a vehicle for student learning about civics, history, and democracy. As with all TPS projects, they begin with digitized materials in the Library of Congress online collections. Ones that have inspired the grantees and might also be of interest to you and your students include:
Sea shanties, such as “Poor Old Man,” alternatively known as the “Dead Horse” shanty (https://www.loc.gov/item/2017701731/), in the Captain Pearl R. Nye collection in the American Folklife Center (https://www.loc.gov/collections/captain-pearl-r-nye-life-on-the-erie-and-ohio-canal/about-this-collection/)
The voices of Americans representing diverse cultures and occupations in the Songs of America collection (https://www.loc.gov/collections/songs-of-america/)
A wide variety of folk songs recorded by Alan Lomax and made available as the Southern Mosaic collection (https://www.loc.gov/collections/john-and-ruby-lomax/)
Efforts to preserve the Hawaiian language through song (https://www.loc.gov/item/jukebox-133175/) and prominent blues songs, such as “Far Away Blues” (https://www.loc.gov/item/jukebox-671792/), in the National Jukebox (https://www.loc.gov/collections/national-jukebox/)
Lullabies and other Cuban American music in the Florida Folklife from the Work Projects Administration (WPA) collection (https://www.loc.gov/collections/florida-folklife-from-the-works-progress-administration/)
Interviews with Van Morrison and Joni Mitchell, among others, in the Joe Smith collection (https://www.loc.gov/collections/joe-smith/)
It is not just audio recordings that tell the history of music in the United States. Lewis-Houghton grantee Teach Rock (part of the Rock and Soul Forever Foundation) draws extensively on diverse primary sources that help contextualize the materiality, historicity, and impact of a particular song, performance, or genre, including the following:
Newspaper articles from the Chronicling America database (https://www.loc.gov/collections/chronicling-america/)
Photographs of musicians, such as the Fisk Jubilee Singers, who toured in both the United States and Europe after the Civil War, in the William Gladstone Collection of photographs (https://www.loc.gov/collections/gladstone-african-american-military-collection/)
Portraits of performers captured in the George Grantham Bain Collection (https://www.loc.gov/collections/bain/)
Columbia Phonograph Company label for “Far Away Blues”
“Far Away Blues” record (1923), featuring Clara Smith, Bessie Smith, and Fletcher Henderson; music and lyrics by George Brooks. Library of Congress, National Jukebox, https://www.loc.gov/item/jukebox-671792/.
Jubilee singers, Fisk University, Nashville, Tenn
Studio group portrait of the Fisk University Jubilee Singers (1872), with (from left to right) Minnie Tate, Greene Evans, Isaac Dickerson, Jennie Jackson, Maggie Porter, Ella Sheppard, Thomas Rutling, Benjamin Holmes, and Eliza Walker, taken by photographer James Wallace Black. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-39589, https://www.loc.gov/item/2015650289/.
The grantees know what research has shown: that learning in and through the arts can increase student empathy, can enhance agency in a variety of learning environments, and can even facilitate learning in other content areas in culturally relevant ways. 1 Many Lewis-Houghton grantees are integrating arts-based approaches into their teaching and learning experiences for students. For example, the City Lore team connects the practices of present-day teaching artists and performers to historical topics to show how dance and performance comprise a series of “living histories” that are not transmitted exclusively through fixed media but rather belong to rich sets of cultural practices passed down over time. Similarly, the unique pedagogy of Culture Works’s Time Out of Joint project pairs spoken-word monologues written and performed by formerly incarcerated teachers with plays written by William Shakespeare, thereby painting timeless themes, such as jealously, betrayal, love, and reconciliation, in a visceral and interpersonal light.
The grant projects are demonstrating many rich possibilities for inquiry at the intersection of the arts and civics, especially when combined with the power of primary sources. The Library’s teacher’s guide to analyzing audio recordings (https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/teachers/getting-started-with-primary-sources/documents/Analyzing_Sound_Recordings.pdf) is a great tool for starting similar inquiries in your classroom. Borrowing from the guide, you might ask your students when listening to a piece of archival music some of the following questions:
Do you know the song, or do you recognize any instruments?
What was the purpose of this recording?
Who do you think recorded it?
Was it the same person who was being recorded?
What do you wonder?
You may choose to build on this by prompting student thinking about the connections between the arts and civics:
Has a piece of music, art, dance, or theatre ever moved you personally? If so, has it ever motivated you to take action?
Can you think of a time when either witnessing or performing a song, artwork, or performance changed the way you think?
How do you express yourself? Do you have a preferred form of expression?
How are different time periods associated through song?
We are delighted to announce that the Library plans to distribute additional Lewis-Houghton Initiative awards through TPS regional subgrants. If you are an educator with ideas for how to integrate music and fine arts materials in secondary civics instruction, please consider submitting a Lewis-Houghton Initiative grant proposal! Keep an eye on https://blogs.loc.gov/teachers/ for updates.
Footnotes
Notes
Eileen J. Manchester (