Primary Source Analysis
History in Context: The Foundation of Primary Source Analysis
The use of primary sources in my classroom has become, at its core, a foundational practice that illustrates the rich, complex, and nuanced nature of history through purposeful and deliberate examination and analysis. Primary sources allow students, through historical analysis and reasoning, to have a more sophisticated understanding of not only the past, but of the present. This understanding of our histories, primary and secondary narratives alike, have value and limitations that all must be placed within context so they might be examined critically. The challenge, then, is for me to provide my students frequent opportunity and a consistent framework for that critical analysis.
My experience as an AP United States History teacher was the first that truly helped me refine my practice and understanding of the importance of primary documents. The focus of the College Board on the use of primary documents helped me (albeit forcibly at first) reframe and reexamine how I use them in the classroom. Even though Wineburg accurately notes that the Document Based Question in its current assessment format is “flawed” and that students tend to “raid documents rather than read them,” the program emphasizes ample practice to do more than “raid” documents as we prepare for the exam (pg. 131). Reflecting on my first days as an AP U.S. History teacher, I started to see these documents in a different light: as foundational to the study and interpretation of the past. As I researched the Birmingham Campaign of 1963 for Civil Rights in the 20th Century, I was able to see firsthand how documents were able to tell stories that remain invisible in secondary texts. As I struggled with the issue of selectivity for my research, my understanding of this event became far richer than ever before, even though I had taught lessons on the subject for decades. My view of the event having been changed by this activity, it encouraged me to gather documents that I would be able to use in my classroom for a practice DBQ centered on the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. The process of constructing this activity broadened my understanding of the movement even further. Once implemented, this DBQ provided my students the opportunity to examine sources for their value and limitations, understand their source attribution, and place them within historical context. Students finally drew conclusions and defended historical arguments with evidence in a summative essay to culminate the activity. It was a largely successful exercise for my students as they were well versed in “sourcing” documents by this time in the year through the use of an analysis tool I created I titled COMET (Context-Origin-Meaning-Eyes/Ears-Tone).
This strategy was the result of an activity that I had a semester earlier in my course on Ancient Greece and Rome. I had long struggled with other frameworks for document analysis like OPVL (Origin-Purpose-Value-Limitation) and SOAPSTone (Source-Occasion-Audience-Purpose-Subject-Tone). They were either too vague or too unwieldy for my students to grasp effectively. COMET was a hybrid of these frameworks with significant attention paid to context. While we were examining Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War, I was encouraged by discussions with my classmates and Dr. Corley to examine Thucydides’ work more closely in context and that I should be careful to not, as Wineburg suggests, “take at face value words from other times and other places.” (pg. 100) Thucydudes’ history had been influenced by his experience of his time and place. It was revelatory. I better understood the significance of placing documents in context, a skill I had struggled to instill in my students effectively. As a result of constructing this new hybrid framework and using it in the classroom, my students seemed, with copious practice, better equipped to understand the limitations of documents. With practice and tweaks throughout the year, students consistently employed this strategy to successfully analyze the mountain of documents that they would see throughout the course.
As a result of the activities in my course experience in the Graduate History Certificate program, I’ve gained a better understanding of the importance of primary sources as a fundamental building block of historical study. It has helped me refine my practice in the classroom to more effectively and consistently help me and my students think like historians. In addition, students have a better appreciation and deeper understanding of the voices that have built historical narratives of our past to have a better understanding of the present.
[1] Samuel S. Wineburg, Why Learn History (When Its Already on Your Phone), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018.
