News Hour Classroom, PBS News Hour’s website devoted to news in the classroom, has developed a new interactive learning resource called Journalism in Action designed to help middle and high school students examine the ways the free press has covered historical events as they happened.

Through fun, engaging activities, students explore historical documents and make their own judgments using news articles, broadcast segments, political cartoons and photographs curated from Library of Congress databases.

“Students will read Frederick Douglass’s news articles on slavery and learn about journalists like Nellie Bly whose undercover investigation exposed serious problems in state mental institutions,” said Victoria Pasquantonio, the News Hour education producer and head of News Hour Classroom “

Exploring ways reporters have done their jobs in the past helps us understand how current events are filtered through the media today.”

Journalism in Action consists of 10 separate case studies from the Revolutionary and Civil Wars to Muckrakers, Watergate and up to the present day, and explores how those historic moments were covered in real time by investigative journalists, cartoonists, publishers, news broadcasters and more.

Top-notch reporting by PBS News Hour is featured throughout the website on Watergate and gender equality, including stories about Jim Lehrer, Judy Woodruff, Gwen Ifill, Robert MacNeil and Charlayne Hunter-Gault.

The website is open to everyone to explore for free.