High School Project: Evaluating Primary Sources
Amount of Time Needed
One fifty-minute class period.
Material Needed
Computers with internet access, a projector connected to a computer, screen for the projector, pens, and notebook paper.
Objectives
- Interpret the past within its own historical context rather than in terms of present-day norms and values.
- Distinguish historical fact from opinion.
Procedure
- Each student should be asked to bring in or be ready to discuss an object they would place in a scrapbook to the next class meeting. It should be an object the individual student would feel comfortable sharing with the class.
- The instructor should give a brief demonstration of the digital scrapbook, and show how to flip through and search the scrapbook.
- The students should divide into smaller groups.
- Each group should use a computer with internet access to explore the scrapbook.
- While exploring the scrapbook the students should record their group’s answers to the Scrapbook discussion questions below.
- The class should meet back together and discuss answers to the questions.
- Students should then introduce their objects and use the object discussion questions below to discuss the objects.
Scrapbook Discussion Questions
- Why did Bettie create this scrapbook?
- Did you find anything unexpected in the scrapbook? Why was it unexpected?
- What three things does the scrapbook tell us about Bettie’s interests and/or values?
- What stereotypes do you see in the scrapbook?
- What was happening in the world and the United States in 1933-1937?
- What items in the scrapbook reflect what was going on in the nation and/or world in the 1930’s?
- What items would you expect to find in the scrapbook that are not in the scrapbook?
- What items do you think Bettie’s classmates would have put in a scrapbook?
- How has the scrapbook affected your opinion of the 1930’s?
- What questions does the scrapbook raise?
- What primary sources would you use to answer some of these questions?
- What secondary sources would you use to answer some of these questions?
Object Discussion Questions
- What is the significance of the object?
- What does the item say about the larger world back then?
- How do you think students fifty years ago would have viewed the object?
- How do you think students in fifty years will view the object?