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HISTORY | Watch Full Episodes of Your Favorite Shows

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Watch full episodes of your favorite HISTORY series, and dive into thousands of historical articles and videos. To know History is to know life.

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Watch full films from TV's most-watched history series.

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Document analysis is the first step in working with primary sources. Teach your students to think through primary source documents for contextual understanding and to extract information to make informed judgments.
Follow this progression:
Use these worksheets - for photos, written documents, artifacts, posters, maps, cartoons, videos, and sound recordings - to teach your students the process of document analysis.

Don't stop with document analysis though. Analysis is just the foundation. Move on to activities in which students use the primary sources as historical evidence, like on DocsTeach.org.

The first few times you ask students to work with primary sources, and whenever you have not worked with primary sources recently, model careful document analysis using the worksheets. Point out that the steps are the same each time, for every type of primary source:

1. Meet the document.

2. Observe its parts.

3. Try to make sense of it.

4. Use it as historical evidence.

Once students have become familiar with using the worksheets, direct them to analyze documents as a class or in groups without the worksheets, vocalizing the four steps as they go.

Eventually, students will internalize the procedure and be able to go through these four steps on their own every time they encounter a primary source document. Remind students to practice this same careful analysis with every primary source they see.

Worksheet for Understanding Perspective in Primary Sources - For All Students and Document Types

This tool helps students identify perspective in primary sources and understand how backgrounds, beliefs, and experiences shape point of view.

Former Worksheets

These worksheets were revised in February, 2017. Please let us know if you have feedback. If you prefer the previous version of the worksheets, you can download them below.

Materials created by the National Archives and Records Administration are in the public domain.

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Español Document analysis is the first step in working with primary sources. Teach your students to think through primary source documents for contextual understanding and to extract information to make informed judgments. Use these worksheets - for photos, written documents, artifacts, posters, maps, cartoons, videos, and sound recordings - to teach your students the process of document analysis.

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Use a graphic organizer to help students analyze a historical document and determine its perspective or bias.

English & Language Arts

History

Social Studies

Using the strategies from Facing History is almost like an awakening.

- Claudia Bautista, Santa Monica, Calif

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Use a graphic organizer to help students analyze a historical document and determine its perspective or bias.

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Analyzing Primary Sources | Harry S. Truman

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The National Archives in Washington DC has established mini lessons on understanding and using primary sources. They have provided worksheets on line that show how to analyze documents, photographs, cartoons, posters, maps, artifacts, sound recordings and motion pictures. The list here will give you the links to these resources. Supporting materials for using primary sources in the classroom.

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Your professor may ask you to analyze a primary document. Here are some questions you might ask of your document. You will note a common theme-read critically with sensitivity to the context. This list is not a suggested outline for a paper; the wording of the assignment and the nature of the document itself should determine your organization and which of the questions are most relevant. Of course, you can ask these same questions of any document you encounter in your research.

What exactly is the document (e.g., diary, king's decree, opera score, bureaucratic memorandum, parliamentary minutes, newspaper article, peace treaty)?

Are you dealing with the original or with a copy? If it is a copy, how remote is it from the original (e.g., photocopy of the original, reformatted version in a book, translation)? How might deviations from the original affect your interpretation?

What is the date of the document?

Is there any reason to believe that the document is not genuine or not exactly what it appears to be?

Who is the author, and what stake does the author have in the matters discussed? If the document is unsigned, what can you infer about the author or authors?

What sort of biases or blind spots might the author have? For example, is an educated bureaucrat writing with third-hand knowledge of rural hunger riots?

Where, why, and under what circumstances did the author write the document?

How might the circumstances (e.g., fear of censorship, the desire to curry favor or evade blame) have influenced the content, style, or tone of the document?

Has the document been published? If so, did the author intend it to be published?

If the document was not published, how has it been preserved? In a public archive? In a private collection? Can you learn anything from the way it has been preserved? For example, has it been treated as important or as a minor scrap of paper?

Does the document have a boilerplate format or style, suggesting that it is a routine sample of a standardized genre, or does it appear out of the ordinary, even unique?

Who is the intended audience for the document?

What exactly does the document say? Does it imply something different?

If the document represents more than one viewpoint, have you carefully distinguished between the author's viewpoint and those viewpoints the author presents only to criticize or refute?

In what ways are you, the historian, reading the document differently than its intended audience would have read it (assuming that future historians were not the intended audience)?

What does the document leave out that you might have expected it to discuss?

What does the document assume that the reader already knows about the subject (e.g., personal conflicts among the Bolsheviks in 1910, the details of tax farming in eighteenth-century Normandy, secret negotiations to end the Vietnam war)?

What additional information might help you better interpret the document?

Do you know (or are you able to infer) the effects or influences, if any, of the document?

What does the document tell you about the period you are studying?

If your document is part of an edited collection, why do you suppose the editor chose it? How might the editing have changed the way you perceive the document? For example, have parts been omitted? Has it been translated? (If so, when, by whom, and in what style?) Has the editor placed the document in a suggestive context among other documents, or in some other way led you to a particular interpretation?

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Writing Resources - Analyzing a Historical Document - Hamilton College

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Your professor may ask you to analyze a primary document. Here are some questions you might ask of your document. You will note a common theme-read critically with sensitivity to the context. This list is not a suggested outline for a paper; the wording of the assignment and the nature of the document itself should determine your organization and which of the questions are most relevant.

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Document analysis allows for active learning of the documents. Examining the documents and making inquiries allows for deeper revelations about them.

Each document holds a lot more information than is assumed at first glance. By looking deeply at a document, asking questions, and making observations, you can mine an enormous amount of information to make historical discoveries.

Historians are detectives searching for evidence among primary sources to a mystery that can never be completely solved. Each primary source is a piece to a puzzle.

Historical thinking involves learning how to approach sources, criticize assertions, corroborate evidence, examine the intent of the author/creator, consider the audience, observe artifactual clues and contextualize documents.

Primary sources are not neutral; primary sources have a point of view; primary sources may not give an accurate account of a historical moment or trend. They make us realize that all accounts of the past are subjective. They are subjective at the time they occurred as well as to us studying about them.

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LibGuides: Topic: What is a Primary Source?: Conducting a Document Analysis

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Why bother doing a document analysis? The skills you develop are those most necessary for historians, history students and social studies educations. Here are some reasons to look deeply at your historical documents:

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Download the illustrated PDF version. (PDF)
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Meet the document.

Type (check all that apply):

Letter

Speech

Patent

Telegram

Court document

Chart

Newspaper

Advertisement

Press Release

Memorandum

Report

Email

Identification document

Presidential document

Congressional document

Other

Describe it as if you were explaining to someone who can't see it.
Think about: Is it handwritten or typed? Is it all by the same person? Are there stamps or other marks? What else do you see on it?

Observe its parts.

Who wrote it?

Who read/received it?

When is it from?

Where is it from?

Try to make sense of it.

What is it talking about?

Write one sentence summarizing this document.

Why did the author write it? Quote evidence from the document that tells you this.

What was happening at the time in history this document was created?

Use it as historical evidence.

What did you find out from this document that you might not learn anywhere else?

What other documents or historical evidence are you going to use to help you understand this event or topic?

Materials created by the National Archives and Records Administration are in the public domain.

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Download the illustrated PDF version. (PDF) Español Meet the document. Type (check all that apply): Letter Speech Patent Telegram Court document Chart Newspaper Advertisement Press Release Memorandum Report Email Identification document Presidential document Congressional document Other Describe it as if you were explaining to someone who can't see it.

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Welcome to American History

The museum's world class collections help tell the complex history of our nation. We are located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

Open today 10:00 a.m. - 5:30 p.m.

Plan Your Visit

Entertainment has the power to captivate, inspire and transform us. It brings us together. We share it when we spontaneously recite lines from a favorite movie, dance to the same groove or recreate a national sports moment on a neighborhood street. It can also spur critical conversations, expose divides, and foster important historical change.

Objects from the Collections

As the nation's history museum, we empower people to create a just and compassionate future by exploring, preserving, and sharing the complexity of our past.

Dive Into Exhibitions

Entertainment has the power to captivate, inspire and transform us.

Explore the power and impact of post-WWII magazine photography through iconic portraits.

This bilingual exhibition showcases the work of seven Latina journalists on Spanish-language television.

Women in Entertainment History

Donate Today and Make History

Help us to preserve, protect, and display America's historic treasures.

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The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History preserves our nation's collections and tells a full and complex history of the United States.