A collection of topical reading lists, primary sources, and classroom activities for building analytical and research skills.
JSTOR Daily Pedagogical Essays
Methodologies and practical guides for introducing research and scholarship in the classroom.
Learning about Language: An In-Class Activity
October 10, 2025
A scholar of the medical humanities shares ideas for helping students discover how language shaped past cultural attitudes—and still shapes them in the present.
Lies, Damn Lies, and…Primary Sources?
July 15, 2025
An instructor shares her approach for teaching students how to evaluate historical materials and claims of veracity made by their originators.
Tips from a Librarian on Using JSTOR for Research
April 21, 2025
Follow these first steps toward success with your new research project.
Scaffolding a Research Project with JSTOR
May 6, 2024
Use JSTOR resources and this five-step process to help students learn how to complete a scholarly research project.
JSTOR Daily Reading Lists
Annotated bibliographies of essential texts in a particular discipline or on a timely topic, written by experts in the field.
Rights of Nature: A Reading List
January 13, 2026
What would it mean for rivers, forests, and animals to have legal rights? A global movement is rethinking law’s relationship to nature.
Speculative Fiction: A Reading List
September 10, 2025
Speculative fiction, from Afrofuturism to Star Wars, offers students tools and methods for analyzing social movements, power structures, and utopian thinking.
Black Midwestern Studies: A Reading List
July 17, 2025
This primer on Black Midwestern Studies examines the factors shaping communities of color in America’s “flyover country,” long mistaken as a place of normative whiteness.
Transatlantic Studies: A Reading List
April 29, 2025
Using the Atlantic Ocean as a guiding metaphor, transatlanticism emphasizes the fluid nature of contrived national boundaries and identities.
JSTOR Daily Annotations
Major historical documents—including Brown vs. Board of Education, the Emancipation Proclamation, The Federalist No. 1,and more—annotated with links to peer-reviewed scholarship that helps explain the documents’ historical context and impact.
The Bill of Rights: Annotated
August 25, 2025
Proposed as a compromise to ensure the ratification of the new US Constitution, the Bill of Rights has become a critical protector of civil liberties.
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850: Annotated
May 19, 2025
The Fugitive Slave Act erased the most basic of constitutional rights for enslaved people and incentivized US Commissioners to support kidnappers.
The Treaty of Paris 1783: Annotated
November 14, 2024
The Treaty of Paris marked the end of the Revolutionary War and the hostilities between Great Britain and the newly independent United States—at least temporarily.
Webster’s Dictionary 1828: Annotated
April 19, 2024
Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language declared Americans free from the tyranny of British institutions and their vocabularies.
JSTOR Daily Syllabi and Roundups
JSTOR Daily syllabi and roundups collects previously published JSTOR Daily stories on topics in the news, pop culture, and historical events. Search these thematic collections for inspiration for a research project or class discussion.
Voting in American Politics: A Syllabus
September 18, 2024
From battles to expand the franchise to the mysteries of turnout, voting is one of the most important things to understand about US politics.
A True Crime Syllabus
December 31, 2023
How did we become so obsessed with “true crime”? This multidisciplinary syllabus shows how we view crime as a whole and how those views have changed over time.
A Reader’s Guide to Poetry for National Poetry Month
April 2, 2026
Read poems, learn poetic forms, and discover writers in this National Poetry Month roundup.
Teaching Comics: A Syllabus
August 11, 2022
So you want to teach The Sandman? Or William Blake? Or Art Spiegelman’s Maus? A guide to using comics and graphic novels in the classroom.
Visual Literacy: Learning to Look
Research and Instruction librarian Virginia Seymour takes readers progressively deeper into the skills essential to being a visually literate person.
Browsing for Images? Search Filters Are Your Friend
June 29, 2023
The images that stick with us the most tend to be those we find by chance. That’s where search filters come in.
How to Look at Art and Understand What You See
April 13, 2023
There are dozens of ways of looking at visual art. None of them are wrong, but certain methods facilitate deeper connection and understanding.
How to Interpret the Meaning of an Image
March 25, 2023
This week, we practice using our skills of visual analysis and learn how to "read" deliberately constructed images.
What is a Symbol?
March 2, 2023
A symbol can be any object, character, color, or even shape that represents an abstract concept without explanatory text. But wait, there's more!
Media Literacy: Media, Democracy
Media studies scholar and former broadcast journalist Geoffrey Baym explores how media relate to and impact democracy and democratic practices.
Public Media and the Infrastructure of Democracy
August 23, 2023
Federal support for broadband expansion reflects the understanding that communication is as vital as roadways to the republic.
The Media’s Bottom-Line Problem
June 15, 2023
The health of our democracy depends on a free press. What happens when the thirst for profits, eyeballs, and clicks drives political coverage?
How Media Stifles Deliberative Democracy
January 17, 2023
As outlets that welcome rational exchanges of ideas dwindle those that serve as echo chambers are exploding. What does that mean for free speech and the health of the US?
What Makes Us Vote the Way We Do?
November 23, 2022
According to some political scientists, it's more about group identity than personal interests.
You can find a comprehensive listing of all the instructional resources published by JSTOR Daily here.