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This source is a great overview for writing in history. This would be an excellent source to introduce the types of writing that we will do and demonstrate expectations for writing in the course. This guide would be great for students to complete the three close reads strategy. Each time, the hope would be that students gain clarity and writing in the class becomes a little less overwhelming. This text also includes non-examples for students so that they can start to develop a sense of what historical writing is through the development of critical attributes. This will bolster their ability to produce writing that speaks to the discipline and help them understand how this writing might be different then other types of writing they may be doing in other courses such as labs in science, proofs in math, or narratives in english.

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This source would be used as a guide for students alongside some practice political cartoons. This source would be a helpful hand-out for students who often struggle with these types of sources. Furthermore, it would be of assistance to students who are not as familiar with some of the symbols that as a teacher who grew up in the United States, I may not realize they do not have that implicit understanding. This text is good because it is not dense, and students could mark it up, and annotate or add to it, as they work through the examples.

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This resource would be used to work on the skill of evaluating quality evidence. This would be used as instructional input following an inquiry-based anticipatory set where students are completing a see-think-wonder about the validity of Tik-Tok as a reliable source through provided examples by the instructor. This would be a challenge text for students and I would pre-teach some of the vocabulary and provide a list of definitions for students to refer back to. However, this text uses the real language of professional historians and it is vital the students are exposed to this as it provides relevance.

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Evaluating Evidence – How History is Made: A Student’s Guide to Reading, Writing, and Thinking in the Discipline

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One of the preeminent guidelines of historical analysis is that all historians evaluate their sources to determine their quality and accuracy. Beyond determining whether a source is primary or secondary, it is imperative that historians use their knowledge to judge the nature of sources and how they…

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This resource would be great for students to refer back to when we are doing our primary source practices or they are producing written work. This resource provides students some questions for them to consider and apply when looking at the documents. This resource is a little bit challenging with some of the vocabulary, but it breaks down some of the more complex terms and defines it for students. This will help prepare them for collegiate academic language, while also assisting them in their current understanding level.

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When you analyze a primary source, you are undertaking the most important job of the historian. There is no better way to understand events in the past than by examining the sources - whether journals, newspaper articles, letters, court case records, novels, artworks, music or autobiographies - that people from that period left behind.

Each historian, including you, will approach a source with a different set of experiences and skills, and will therefore interpret the document differently. Remember that there is no one right interpretation. However, if you do not do a careful and thorough job, you might arrive at a wrong interpretation.

In order to analyze a primary source you need information about two things: the document itself, and the era from which it comes. You can base your information about the time period on the readings you do in class and on lectures. On your own you need to think about the document itself. The following questions may be helpful to you as you begin to analyze the sources:

1. Look at the physical nature of your source. This is particularly important and powerful if you are dealing with an original source (i.e., an actual old letter, rather than a transcribed and published version of the same letter). What can you learn from the form of the source? (Was it written on fancy paper in elegant handwriting, or on scrap-paper, scribbled in pencil?) What does this tell you?

2. Think about the purpose of the source. What was the author's message or argument? What was he/she trying to get across? Is the message explicit, or are there implicit messages as well?

3. How does the author try to get the message across? What methods does he/she use?

4. What do you know about the author? Race, sex, class, occupation, religion, age, region, political beliefs? Does any of this matter? How?

5. Who constituted the intended audience? Was this source meant for one person's eyes, or for the public? How does that affect the source?

6. What can a careful reading of the text (even if it is an object) tell you? How does the language work? What are the important metaphors or symbols? What can the author's choice of words tell you? What about the silences - what does the author choose NOT to talk about?

Now you can evaluate the source as historical evidence.

1. Is it prescriptive - telling you what people thought should happen - or descriptive - telling you what people thought did happen?

2. Does it describe ideology and/or behavior?

3. Does it tell you about the beliefs/actions of the elite, or of "ordinary" people? From whose perspective?

4. What historical questions can you answer using this source? What are the benefits of using this kind of source?

5. What questions can this source NOT help you answer? What are the limitations of this type of source?

6. If we have read other historians' interpretations of this source or sources like this one, how does your analysis fit with theirs? In your opinion, does this source support or challenge their argument?

Remember, you cannot address each and every one of these questions in your presentation or in your paper, and I wouldn't want you to. You need to be selective.

- Molly Ladd-Taylor, Annette Igra, Rachel Seidman, and others

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How to Analyze a Primary Source - Carleton College

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This document would be utilized in my classroom to help students have a visual that could help them identify the parts of a good thesis statement. Furthermore, this text also includes non-examples and as a class we could refer back to this to identify why some of the student produced attempts may share traits with the non-examples.