Where can you look if you think you’ve run out of information about a person or place? How can we encourage students to be persistent researching in the face of a “dead end”? And how do we equip students with the knowledge of databases and archives, so that when they run into a historical dead end, they know where to keep looking?
Analyzing primary sources, just like sharing my personal pictures, has provided students with first hand information from the past. This allows students to build connections between the concept being learned and the primary source and leads to powerful learning.
It is thrilling to see all of the ways researchers can approach artists' prints--as visual poetry; as primary documents that uniquely reflect history, culture, and society; for pure appreciation of beauty, technical mastery, or eloquence; and in ways yet to be discovered.
My hope is that my work to create source materials on Civil War nurses situates nurses in the heart of the Civil War and proves their importance in the growing war historiography.
Alexander Graham Bell's notebooks capture the effort he put into designing and testing aerial possibilities. He was able to identify what worked - and what did not - through the engineering design process.