Primary sources such as the letters and diaries of Civil War Nurse Mary Ann Bickerdyke offer rich insights into the lives of real people. The fragmented, personal nature of these sources requires careful reading in context and comparison across multiple accounts to glean information and construct understanding.
In the January/February 2018 issue of Social Education, the journal of the National Council for the Social Studies, our “Sources and Strategies” article features an image of a Maya miniature flask. The flask, like much of the Maya civilization, remains somewhat mysterious but can offer insights into daily life in Central America.
Ms. Woodson offered many thoughtful responses during the Q&A session, but her advice about feedback and whether student writers should submit their work to friends for critique intrigued us.
Our previous post on a recent Mars-related program in the Young Readers Center of the Library of Congress described how students studied historical and current primary sources to prepare them to discuss whether they'd want to visit and possibly to live on Mars.
Ponder this: would you want to go to Mars? Would you want to live on Mars? What might you do there? Who would you want to go with you? We posed these questions to student visitors during a program called “Life and Community on Mars” held in the Library of Congress Young Readers Center.
Analyzing primary sources using mathematical reasoning can help students quantify historical changes over time, giving them a concrete sense of scope and scale, while providing meaningful historical perspective.
William Gropper’s America, its folklore offers a unique visual representation of the United States, combining folklore, history, and geography. This map presents an opportunity to teach students strategies to decipher the difference between fact and fiction within the same primary source.