Thursday, November 12, 2009
More Sources for Early American History
A good place to start for primary sources from the 18th century, including maps, documents, and portraits, is Archiving Early America . Also check out The Avalon Project, which has transcripts of legal documents – cool stuff, though (Colonial charters, treaties, Sedition Act). Colonial Williamsburg is a good source for items or everyday life such as clothing, recipes, and tools. Or, browse the many letters, diary entries and military records of George Washington from the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress that are available through American Memory. While consisting mainly of secondary material, Common-Place, an online scholarly journal, does have primary sources within most articles.
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Do you have specific recommendations for resources for YOUNGER children? I'm teaching second grade, and a lot of the written documents are too difficult for them to read. I'm thinking they would do better with photographs. We have done a lot of reading and making comparisons to our lives today, but I have not had much luck with primary sources.
ReplyDeleteI have actually used some of these with my 8th grade and they worked very well. Alot easier to work with than my 1998 American History book I have been given to teach with.
ReplyDeleteI recently read an interesting article in the September issue of Social Education titled "Tampering with History: Adapting Primary Sources for Struggling Readers." One of the authors is Sam Wineburg, who has done research on historical thinking and how adolescents interpret primary sources. I was skeptical of the article's premise of encouraging teachers to physically alter sources for different grade and reading levels, but I respect his work so I kept an open mind.
ReplyDeleteI will provide hard copies of this article at our next seminar. NCSS has past issues online for members to access.
I think this would be ideal for younger readers. They can still be exposed to the original source but also be provided with modifications with more grade-level appropriate vocabulary, sentence structure, spelling, etc. This would allow for study of significant individuals with diaries and letters such as can be found on the above websites (with photographs to supplement). Also, the artifacts and photographs available on the Colonial Williamasburg site would be appropriate for the Daily Life benchmark.
Map reading is an important skills for students to acquire at a young age.