Whether this is accurate or not, whenever I think of a historian, I can’t help but think of a man or woman in a tweed suit, with big glasses poring carefully over yellowed documents in the backroom of some library or government office, using tweezers to turn the pages so as not to disrupt the integrity of the primary sources they’re investigating. However, thanks to an increasing amount of resources being put online and the increased knowledge of restoration and preservation of artifacts, you don’t need that PhD and tweed suit to investigate the past in a hands on way! Students, even students as young as primary grades can have encounters with the past through primary documents.
Primary documents are an interesting and fun way to make history come alive for students. Rather than reading about events that happened through a textbook (and thus a historian’s interpretation of that event), students can piece together for themselves what happened and even assess multiple resources about the same event to try to find “the truth” or at the very least figuring out what most likely happened.
teach study learn 