Welcome.

In our course, each week we will be reading primary sources. These are historical artifacts that were made in the past and that historians study because they shed light on the past.

The most common historical artifact is a document, such as the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration sheds light on the time that it was made, 1776. Other documents might be a letter, diary, cooking recipe, newspaper. If you write in a journal, you are creating a primary source, though you may not know it.

But historical artifacts can be more than documents. My mother owns a Singer sewing machine made in 1912. It's a primary source. Why? Because it tells us much about the time in which it was made -- how people made money in the past, the state of American technology, and the material culture of the U.S. Another artifact owned by my mother is an ID card issued to my grandfather when he was drafted in World War 1 (1917). It was the first ID card he had ever owned (there were fewer cars in the U.S. at that time and not many Americans owned them, so no driver licenses yet!).

What does the card tell us? Already photography was common enough and cheap enough to make photographs a bureaucratic convenience. It also tells us the growing power of the U.S. government, which had the money, the means, and the organization to "document" several million "yanks" in a war that was the largest of its kind.

Many other primary sources exist. Merely take a look around the room you are in now. Everything in it, if it survives a thousand years, will be a valuable primary source. Your cell phone, for instance, is packed with information for future historians, as is any jewelry you may be wearing, your hairstyle, the very words you.

History is all around us.

To Do

For his content item, please watch two short videos about identifying and analyzing primary sources. They will set you up well for the primary documents we will soon be reading.

As you watch the videos, take notes and ask questions.

Video 1: How To Read a Primary Source Document: Source Identification

Video 2: How to Read a Primary Source Document: Analyzing a Historical Text

Extras

For an array of Primary Sources that cover this Week's Chapters, go to the Digital History website.