Search & Compare — Simultaneously or separately search and compare contemporary news articles with historic documents from the Adlai Archive. An opportunity to explore how people, events, and issues from the past continue to impact the world today. An excellent resource for student projects, discussion, and research! Use the keyword list to browse for topics. Have your students use the Adlai Archive and Today's News features together or separately.

Adlai Archive: Text Documents, Images, and Audio — The archive contains 12 annotated speeches and articles by and about Adlai E. Stevenson II, and an expanding collection of digitized text, audio, and images. Each annotated article/speech contains study elements to assist students in understanding and interpreting these primary source texts: Adlai's core idea category, quote excerpt, historic background introduction, full text of the original document, discussion questions, and keywords.

Sample Guided Study Comparison — A step-by-step example of how to search and compare articles from the past and present, including springboard questions for discussion and comparative analysis. Access this in the Search and Compare section of the Adlai Archive.

Tips for Struggling Readers — Assist your students in reading primary source documents and news articles written at more advanced reading levels. Downloadable PDFs: Suggestions for Teachers and Suggestions for Students (adapt this handout for your own students).

Today's News — Up-to-the-minute search for contemporary news articles from world-wide news sources. Direct students to the "suggestions" link in the Today's News introduction. Use the Adlai Archive keyword list to browse for topics or enter your own search terms. A great tool for helping students develop a daily "news habit." Try a search for "Adlai Stevenson" himself — over four decades since his death, and he is still in the news today!

Adlai's Core Ideas — The unique approach of AdlaiToday.org is its emphasis on the ideas and values of Adlai Stevenson, rather than a biographical focus. The interpretive analysis offered in this site identifies three core ideas or values that were a persistent thread in Adlai's life and work: THINK, CARE, and CONNECT.

Explore each of the three themes. Notice there are four concepts — "4 ways Adlai put this core value into action" — related to each of these three core themes. A sample article or speech from the Adlai Archive is paired with each concept, displayed under the heading rubric "Adlai's Ideas in Context: core values in action." Use the sample document to help students recognize the concept and how it relates to Adlai's core ideas. Discussion Questions are included at the end of each article and are also accessible in the lower right of each concept page. (Also see the Discussion Questions section under Teacher Features below.)

Use Adlai's Core Ideas to explore contemporary issues. Help your students develop a "news habit" by reading daily news articles and identifying key concepts within each article. Compare contemporary articles to the historic ones in the Adlai Archive.

What Did Adlai Say? Quiz Game — Interactive game testing the player's ability to identify the viewpoints and words of Adlai Stevenson II. Winners can download an Award of Excellence certificate. Current version includes two rounds of play with five questions per round.

Use the online game as a motivational challenge at the beginning of a class or study session, prior to any class study of Adlai Stevenson. Then have students explore Adlai's Core Ideas, read various sections of the website itself, use the search tools to do a past/present analysis of two articles, do a research paper or creative project, etc. Have students return to the online quiz after their study sequence to see if they can improve their score.

Adaptations:

Play it live! Divide the class into teams and read the game questions aloud as a live game quiz. Create additional rounds by researching more quote pairs. Find additional quotations in the Adlai Quotes section. Use the Search & Compare search tools and browse list or a general Internet search to find quotes by other historic figures.

What WOULD Adlai Say? Create a variation of the game that theorizes about Adlai's perspective on contemporary issues: "If Adlai were alive today, what would Adlai say?" Or "what would Adlai think?" Have students research contemporary quotes about various issues (such as education, poverty, war, the Middle East, health care...). Play the game by pairing two contemporary quotes at a time, one that is similar to Adlai's viewpoints, and one that clearly differs from Adlai's viewpoints. For each pair, have students choose the quote they think most closely aligns with Adlai's, and make a case for why they made their selection. Preliminary study of Adlai's Core Ideas would provide a good precursor for this activity.

Adlai's Life — This section offers a brief biographical overview of Adlai Stevenson II, including a Timeline and Family Tree. Numerous digitized photos spanning Adlai's life are available in the Timeline.

Resources — This section offers useful explanations and examples of primary and secondary sources. Introduces additional Online Resources and Books for further study. A great section for students to review before they begin research projects.

Project idea: Using Primary Sources in a Personal Biography

To help your students grasp the idea of "primary sources," consider asking them to do the following activity:

Write a biography of your own life using the "3rd person" perspective, as if you are someone else writing about you. To do this, begin by gathering and identifying a personal archive of "primary sources" that tell about yourself. Try to assemble as many different kinds of documents as possible — letters, drawings, photographs, school projects, family heirlooms, etc. Consider how each one tells something about your formative years — where you lived, your interests, significant events or accomplishments, etc. Try to rely on these primary sources, rather than your memory, to write a history of your life.

Variations on this project: Have students work in pairs, sharing their personal archive with one another; then each writes a biography about the other student based on their observation and study of the other student's primary sources. Or, have students do a biography of an elder family member, such as a grandfather or great aunt. Oral history interview skills could also be utilized for this project.

Exhibits — Consider a field trip to one of these Adlai-related exhibits, collections, and historic sites.

Adlai Quotes — A sampling of how Adlai expressed his core beliefs and a glimpse at his sense of humor