HIST 640: History Portfolio

Replicating Wineburg's experiment from Chapter 5 of his book, What did George Think, students analyze George Washington's Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1789.  In this lesson, students first examined the document without context and were asked to answer the questions: "What was important to George Washington?​" and "What can this document tell us about the United States in 1789?"  After, students reexamined the document and completed the COMET framework for primary source analysis.  Emerging (#1) and exemplar (#2) work is represented here.  When discussing the essential questions again, conclusions improved in quality

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In his text, Wineburg traces the history of the Stanford History ​Education Group and their open access history lessons that teach students to "think like historians".  In this lesson, I slightly modified the essential question of the lesson after having students watch a segment of Adam Ruins Everything (Adam Ruins his Vacation) about the annexation of Hawaii by the United States.  In this lesson, students compare two contradictary primary sources about Hawaiian support of annexation.  In this lesson, students learn about the complexities of primary sources and the validity and limitations of primary and secondary documents.

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In an examination of visual primary sources, this lesson was created in the model of the Stanford History Education Group's "Beyond the Bubble" activities to analyze sourcing information, in this case, Robert Koehler and his painting, The Strike (der Streik) of 1886.  In this activity, students determine wether or not Koehler is a credible source of historical information regarding the labor movement of the nineteenth century before analyzing the symbolism of his work.  While most students ​come to the quick conclusion that Koehler's work has validity, they also must account for the fact that there is still bias that exists.

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The modification, primarily the anticipatory set of the video clip of Adam Ruins his Vacation, was designed to act as a secondary source of information for students.  For those that are unaware of the series, Adam Ruins Everything is a comedic but informative series about the common misconceptions that we hold and frequently live our lives by.  What sets this series apart from other similar series (and most documentaries) is that his program is heavily footnoted for the sources of information that he presents during the program.  This link will provide the student instructions and focus questions for our preliminary discussion

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