American History is a comprehensive resource that spans our nation’s history, with a user-friendly interface and award-winning content. The home page offers many ways to begin exploring the material, from the videos, slideshow overviews, and Topic Centers to the lists of key content handpicked by our editors to help users find a starting point for their research. By providing the most comprehensive range of information in one complete resource—subject entries, biographies, primary sources, videos and slideshows, images, timelines, and maps and graphs, plus full cross-searchability across all the Infobase history databases—American History offers a virtual library of American history for educators, students, and researchers.
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If you’ve been following the news, you’ve more than likely heard about brainrot (or “brain rot”), a buzzword that is currently so omnipresent, it was named Oxford’s Word of the Year in 2024. We’re all guilty of it—doomscrolling on social media, watching short and low-quality video clips out of boredom, etc.—and there’s a lot of debate over how much of a problem brainrot is for children and young adults, with opinions ranging from “can have far-reaching effects on young adult mental health” to “this moral panic is unfounded.” Regardless of how much of a problem brainrot really is for young people, K–12 school educators and homeschooling parents with public library access alike can take steps to help them mitigate the worst aspects associated with it. Here are three ways those educators can help, with some recommended tools that can help them do it. Encourage Digital Hygiene K–12 educators and homeschoolers can encourage young people (and other adults, too!) to practice digital hygiene, teaching them best practices they can follow to avoid the exhaustion and reduced attention span associated with brainrot. Good digital hygiene includes things like: Setting time limits on how much students’ devices or certain apps are used (this […]
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How much do we love poetry? Let us count the ways! April is National Poetry Month, and we have lots of fun activity ideas to help you celebrate. Here are suggestions for contests, projects, papers, assignments, and videos that are sure to get students excited and deepen their appreciation of poetry. Engage Students with Bloom’s Literature Bloom’s Literature, an essential go-to source for poetry assignments and projects, features 3,000+ full-text poems, each with a corresponding analytical entry that allows students and researchers to enhance their understanding of a poem’s power by reading the poem alongside criticism of it. Bloom’s also features a Literary Classics eBook shelf with the full text of many books of classic poetry, including ones written by Emily Dickinson, Geoffrey Chaucer, H.D., John Keats, Lord Byron, Charles Baudelaire, Robert Frost, Christina Rossetti, Robert Browning, William Butler Yeats, and more. Ideas for project, papers, library, and classroom use: Ask students to select a poem and “rewrite” or update it for today’s audience. Use poems to illustrate or emphasize events in history, such as Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” on the Crimean War, Dickinson’s “I Like to See It Lap the Miles” about the Industrial Revolution, Howe’s […]
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When was the last time you got lost in a reference book? While many researchers today are drawn to the speed and precision of a Google search, database search, or AI query, some still enjoy the experience of exploring a comprehensive encyclopedia or fact book to uncover bits of information that invigorate or even transform their research journey. Credo Reference recently added over a dozen titles from Reaktion Books, which is celebrating its 40th year as an independent publisher, and whose books are custom built for exploratory search. Each title offers a thorough history of its topic and includes little nuggets throughout that would often get lost in the fringes of most traditional search queries. We’ve included some of our favorites below. Credo Reference subscribers will find access links below. Not a subscriber? Take a free trial. Biscuits and Cookies Perhaps you’ve had fortune cookies and Fig Newtons, but what about nankhatai, from India? Have you ever eaten Finnish avioliittopikkuleipä? Check off every cookie you’ve tried on this Biscuit Bucket List and go on a sugary scavenger hunt to sample the rest. Jam, Jelly, and Marmalade Jam has an unexpectedly radical history! Workers in jam factories in the early 20th century were predominantly women. […]
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