We are thrilled to announce that we have been awarded a Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS) Regional Grant! The TPS Regional program promotes the widespread, sustained and effective use of primary sources from the Library of Congress by increasing access to the Library and to TPS program resources. Our award is from the Eastern Region Program, coordinated by Waynesburg University.

This grant will support our 2023 exhibition Building Up: Community Stories from the Urban Atlases Collection. Fire insurance and real estate atlases of the late-19th and early-20th centuries—what we collectively call urban atlases—form one of the most extraordinary sources of richly detailed historical information about local change during a period of dramatic industrialization, immigration, and social change in US cities. The exhibition will showcase how these resources can be used to narrate community-driven stories about the past. In addition to urban atlases from the Leventhal Center’s collection, the exhibition will also showcase atlases from the Library of Congress’s extensive collection, interactives from Atlascope, and other historical ephemera and non-cartographic primary sources such as photographs, deeds, land records, newspaper clippings, and manuscripts that help to tell the stories of local change.

In addition to a free in-person public exhibition, the project will incorporate public talks, K-12 teacher workshops, classroom visits, digital resources for teachers, and curation and interpretation from high school student in Boston Public Schools. It will also offer opportunities for community organizations to develop their own interpretive materials.

We look forward to working with our partners from Boston Public Schools, local community and historical institutions, and BPL Branch Libraries, and are grateful to the Library and TPS for this opportunity.

The Library of Congress, the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution, is the world’s preeminent reservoir of knowledge, providing unparalleled integrated resources to Congress and the American people. Founded in 1800, the Library seeks to further human understanding and wisdom by providing access to knowledge through its magnificent collections, which bring to bear the world’s knowledge in almost all of the world’s languages and America’s private sector intellectual and cultural creativity in multiple formats. The TPS Regional program grants awards to organizations and collaborations of organizations that design and deliver projects using Library of Congress materials for specific educational goals in formal or informal settings. Learn more about the Library’s TPS program and other resources available to teachers at www.loc.gov/teachers.