Investigating a Story with Evidence: Using the Archive

The Archive at AwesomeStories is your portal to investigating topics, events, characters and stories.

Over 5,300 topical guides to non-fiction and fiction stories with the evidence of 100,000+ primary sources await your exploration.

Each story presents the primary sources "in context" and the primary sources give depth, interest and multiple ways to extend exploration to related fields and questions. Learn more about what is there from the video in the Media Stream above, by founder Carole D. Bos.

So, how to find what you want? Many of the best archives in the world are hard to search, according to teachers and students we know. So we have worked to make the AwesomeStories Archive easy to search and flexible in how you search.

There are 7 basic ways to search-- try them all and see what is best for you.

Below is a short list describing these modes, the video in the Media Stream on the right will walk you through them and the QuickGuide in the Media Stream is a handy PDF you can look at onscreen or download and print. We hope you enjoy your exploration!

1.  Type a few words in the search window above and see the “top hits” for those words.

2.  Type the complete name of what you seek and hit the magnifying glass.

3.  Type the complete name of what you seek and hit the magnifying glass.

4.  On the Discover Stories tab: generate the Dynamic Directory, view new stories first, or "jump to full directory."

5.  On the Discover Stories tab: find the story you want by topical “Collection."

 6.  On the Discover Stories tab: search by media type (video, storybrief, chapter?) or origin (book, film, event?)

7.  Click AwesomeSearch^TM to use the innovative and powerful search that lets you filter by academic criteria as well as media type and keywords.

In addition to the AwesomeStories Archive, we provide the  clickable  AwesomeStories Source Archives Database of over 100 world renowned archives. These are the reliable archives which we use to create our stories. This database is also linked from inside our StoryMaker^TM app to  support your story creation.