Program Components
The Norton Anthology
The most widely adopted teaching anthology of American literature in colleges worldwide, The Norton Anthology of American Literature provides the core literary texts for American Passages. With thirty-three complete longer works in the full edition, and fifteen complete longer works in the shorter edition, the Norton Anthology offers a teachable balance of classic and emergent works accompanied by introductions, headnotes, footnotes, maps, timelines, and bibliographies written for introductory students.
Both the full and the shorter versions of the Sixth Edition have been revised in coordination with American Passages.
Read more about the full edition
Read more about the shorter edition
The Videos
Produced by Oregon Public Broadcasting, this sixteen-part documentary series incorporates original interviews with authors and scholars, archival interviews, footage, still images, music, and readings by the authors themselves or by actors. Each thirty-minute segment focuses on a single literary period by exploring the work of two or three authors in depth.
The Study Guide
A linchpin of American Passages, the Study Guide gives students imaginative and practical help with reading literature in social and historical context and drawing active connections among the works in the Norton Anthology, the content of the videos, and the rich resources of the American Passages Web site.
For each of the sixteen units, the Study Guide includes:
- Unit Overview
- Learning Objectives
- Video Overview and Activities
- Timeline
- Core Contexts
- Extended Contexts
- Author Connections
- Creative Response Projects
- Problem-Based Learning Projects
- A List of Additional Books, Films, and Web Sites
- Glossary
The Instructor’s Guide
In addition to the complete Study Guide content, each unit of the Instructor’s Guide includes these materials specifically for survey instructors:
- Instructor’s Overview
- Using the Video Overview
- Suggested Author Pairs and Groupings
- Teaching Tips for 10 featured authors
The Instructor’s Guide is available both in a print version and in an online version, which is hyperlinked to materials on the Web archive at learner.org.
The Web Site
The American Passages Web site is available to all users free of charge through the Annenberg/CPB site, learner.org.
- The Online Archive
The Archive provides searchable access to primary source materials—about 150 to 200 items for each of the sixteen units-for student research, including visual art, newspaper articles, musical recordings and spoken—word sound files, government documents, diaries, maps, and photographs of cultural artifacts. All Archive materials will be on the site itself, rather than appearing as URLs linked to other sites. In addition, the Archive will provide limited links to stable sites offering high-quality content. A special effort has been made to include collections that support newer voices in the Norton Anthology, with links to such sites as The Henrietta Marie Exhibit, The Wounded Knee Massacre Memorial, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. - The Media Composition Software
This software allows students and teachers to compose audio and visual presentations using materials in the archive. The "point and click" interface lets teachers create class presentations with multimedia and design their own multimedia assignments.
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