All About Teaching with Primary Documents

picture montage

What are primary documents?

As they relate to the study of history, primary documents are records "created in the past, which have survived into the present." Letters, photos, drawings, and other records that were created at or near the time being studied bring a dimension to the subject that is not available through any other means.

How are they valuable in the study of history?

Primary documents provide a unique perspective on historic events and situations. Unlike textbooks which provide a retelling of the events from the perspective of the author, primary documents are treasures that have emerged from history intact. They are time-capsules that provide windows into the past that are not available any other way.

For further information visit these sources:

Teaching History with Primary Documents

Ruth Sandwell
July 15, 2006


Defining Primary Documents

Primary documents are those records created in the past, at or close to the time under study, which have survived into the present. Historians have traditionally used a wide variety of written records, from personal diaries created by a child to statistical records kept by government departments, as the foundation for their historical investigation. More recently, historians have been drawing on non-document records, including photographs, moving pictures, the spoken word and even architectural plans or botanical (plant) inventories to find clues about how people lived in the past. 
Watercolour: Rice Lewis Warehouse, King and Victoria front elevation, 1886-1891
Rice Lewis Warehouse, King and Victoria front elevation, 1886-1891
William G. Storm
Watercolour on paper
J. C. B. & E. C. Horwood Collection
Reference Code: C 11-757-0-1,(714)9
Archives of Ontario, I0005469

All of these primary documents are, in an important sense, the “raw materials” that historians work with as they attempt to figure out ‘what happened’ in the past, and what it all means to us in the present.

Primary Documents vs Textbooks

When you use primary documents to teach history, you are doing something quite different than when you teach history by asking students to read passages from a text book, and then answer questions. When you use a textbook, you know what the story is, you know what questions to ask, and you know the right answer.

Using primary documents is different.

Certificate of Physical Training Instruction, 1918
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Certificate of Physical Training Instruction, 1918
Grade B Public School Teacher
Alvin D. McCurdy fonds
Reference Code: F 2076-10-0-46
Archives of Ontario

Text Book Cover: Public School History of England and Canada
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Public School History of England and Canada
Reference Code: Box H-B & E 1 (1886)
Archives of Ontario Library Collection

When you ask students to look at a primary document, you are asking them to do what a historian (or a detective, for that matter) does: to look at some left-overs from the past (i.e. the primary documents created in the past, and surviving into the present), and then decide how to best use the information, or insights, or point of view in the documents as evidence about the past.

It is not a simple process, as the answers are not provided in advance. You need to figure out what the document is, and what kind of evidence it contains, before you know what it can tell you about the past.
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Turning the Past into History

The past is not the same as history. The past involves everything that ever happened since the beginning of time – every thought and action of each and every human being on the planet, every tree that fell in the forest, and every chemical transformation in this universe and others since the dawn of time.

History, by contrast, is an interpretation, or rather a process by which people interpret records left over from the past. Historians have always relied heavily on written records, but spoken, visual, archeological and botanical records have been investigated for what they can help us understand about human life on this planet.

People do their historical work of interpreting records from the past  in the context other people’s (usually historians’) interpretations, and according to certain rules, particularly rules of evidence. But the process of historical interpretation also takes place in the context of certain assumptions (assumptions which are often challenged and argued about) concerning what is worth knowing about in the past. History concerns those issues, events, people and ideas that people, or at least some people,  think are important.

Click to see a larger image (353K)
Committee of Safety Minutes, 1866
Page1
Reference Code: F 4416
Archives of Ontario

Committee of Safety Minutes, 1866 - Page 1

History is the process of turning the past into history. History is the narrative that gives meaning, sense and explanatory force to the past in the present.

 

Lessons

Here are two lessons that can be used to introduce your students to primary documents, or history as a process.

 
 

Scaffolding Lesson One: Making Sense of Primary Documents

The past is not easy to see or understand. Most people (very much like you) did not create documents that tell us about their experiences, and even if they did, these records seldom survived through the ages.

To make things even more complicated, as we saw above, historians are not only interested in what individuals in the past perceived and understood about their lives; historians are also interested in larger and more general questions like, “what role did religious differences have in community formation?” questions that simply cannot be answered at the level of individual observation, or point of view.

While most historians would agree that it is impossible to provide a definitive answer to the question “What happened in the past?,” we can draw on a variety of sources (texts), and on the research and writing that has already been done (contexts) to create a better understanding of the people, events and relationships that we know about from the past.

 Photo: Roman Catholic church at Sandy Lake, 1953
Click to see a larger image (76K)
 Roman Catholic church at Sandy Lake, 1953
John Macfie
Black and white negative
Reference Code: C 330-8-0-0-3
Archives of Ontario, I0000182

This section examines some concrete ways of evaluating the quality, meaning and significance of any particular historical document in the process of “doing history.
 


Step 1: Evaluate the quality of your historical document.

How do we measure the quality of a historical document? Its quality is dependent on three things: its authenticity, its scope, and its suitability to our research agenda. Here are some questions that can help you evaluate these elements:

  • Is the historical origin and archival location of the document identified? Why does this matter?
  • How do you know that your document is authentic, i.e. what it claims to be?
  • Is the information that it contains complete, or are pieces of information missing? Are they illegible? How could an incomplete document, or an incomplete series of documents, influence your research findings?
  • Any single document does not provide us with enough evidence to make reasonable conclusions about the past. What other documents on the same subject, time period or about the same person, issue or event should you read to get a better understanding?

 

Step 2: Assess the kind of information the document contains.

Every historical document gives us a snapshot of the past that provides some kind of information. Before we can understand what, exactly, a snapshot is showing us, however, we need to know something about where, when, why and by whom it was taken. We need a context for understanding its existence before we can understand its meaning.

Both a personal letter from 1881 and a census from the same date might, for example, contain information of great use to a researcher. A letter gives us an excellent view of how a single individual experienced and felt about the past, while the census gives us a general overview of certain (and limited) kinds of behaviors. The kind of information that they contain about the past is, however, very different; using the census to explore an individual’s emotional experience of settlement, for example, is not likely to yield much success.

To the extent that we know and understand a) the context in which a document was created, b) the purposes for which it was created and c) our own research questions, we can understand and evaluate the kind of information it gives us about the past.

The evidence contained in the document can be further interrogated with the following:

This document provides a good source of information about some aspects of the past.

  • List three questions about the past that your document answers well.
  • List three questions about the past that the document addresses poorly, or not at all.
  • How would your opinion of this source change if you knew if was created by
    a) a corrupt bureaucrat
    b) a writer of historical fiction
    c) an inmate of a lunatic asylum?
  • How would your opinion of this source change if you knew it was created for
    a) an advertising campaign
    b) a theatre production
    c) the government of Canada?

 

Step 3: Evaluate the significance of the document to your historical argument.

Even though a document is authentic, complete and well contextualized, it still might be useless for historical research. This is because the significance of any historical document is ultimately dependent on the skilled and appropriate use that the historian makes of it.

The knowledge that researchers have of their general subject area helps them to frame questions about the past that are significant to current debates and interests. Their skill in thinking reasonably, logically, and creatively helps them to determine whether any particular source is a suitable one for answering familiar or new questions about the past.

The following questions provide some ways of evaluating the historical significance of your document:

  • What makes this document particularly suitable to the research you are doing?
  • Does the kind of information provided by your document answer the questions you are asking?
  • Does the information contained in this document support or contradict the findings of other historians? How?
  • If your research is on a new topic or unexplored area, how does it fit in with other research in a related geographical or subject area?
  • Do you need to consult more sources, more types of sources, or the findings of other historians to support the points you are making with this evidence?
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Scaffolding Lesson Two: Seeing Myself in the Future’s Past

Overview

In this introduction to historical documents, the class comes up with a list of the kinds of documents (primary sources) that historians of the future might use to understand our world hundreds of years from now. Students then choose five primary sources that they think will best describe their own lives for future historians

Activities

  • Students are given the following scenario:

A historian of the twenty-third century, feeling that teenagers have been misunderstood throughout time, wants to write a history of teenagers, beginning in early twenty-first century Canada. The historian wants to know about all aspects of teenage life, from work, family life and formal education to leisure activities, social life and personal issues of concern to the twenty-first century teenager.

Ask students: how do historians learn about the past?

  • Explain that while historians read a lot of things written by other historians, the books and articles they write are based on their own research into evidence created in the past – called primary documents -- which have been preserved up to the present. Historians use these documents to make INFERENCES about life in the past.
  • Familiarize students with the concept of INFERENCE by asking students what kinds of inferences they might make about a society if they were an alien from another planet who encountered a common object from our world: a soccer ball, a coat or any other commonly used object in the classroom. Examples might include “the society had the technology to create plastics,” or “the society had enough wealth to make a lot of useless objects,” or “people must have loved music.”
  • Students are asked to work in pairs to brainstorm the following question:

a) What records will individual students in the class leave behind that this historian might use to understand that person’s life?

b) What records about that person’s life will have been created, and might be preserved for that historian to find?
  • After 5-10 minutes, write all of their responses on the board, encouraging students, if needed with the following suggestions: (issues that you might like to raise about the creation, preservation and interpretation of the source are in brackets)
  • diaries and journals (Who will keep them? Will they make it into a public archives, as hundreds of thousands have in the past? What will they tell historians?)
  • e-mails (Will they be preserved? Will they be machine readable in the future? What will they tell historians?)
  • VISA and other credit card bills (Where will they be stored? Will historians have access to them? What will they tell historians?)
  • home movies (Will the technology still exist to view them? What will they tell historians?)
  • photographs (Who will preserve them? Will they be in public archives? What will they tell historians?)
  • school records (kept by school and then by the provincial archives, as required by law; who will have access to them in the future? If they are kept by individuals, who will preserve them and who will have access to them? What will they tell historians?)
  • school work (How will it be preserved? What will it tell historians?)
  • clothing (How will someone in the future understand what the clothing means?)
  • music (How will someone in the future understand what the music means? Will the technology exist to listen to it?)
  • court records (Juvenile court records may become part of the public domain after 100 years.)
  • census records (Every Canadian will appear on the census if they are in Canada in a Census year, even though their individual information will not be available to historians for 96 years.)
  • birth, marriage and death records (What might these tell someone in the future about teenage life: i.e. AIDS statistics, car accidents, teenage pregnancy etc.)

Divide students once again into groups of 2 or 3 and distribute the following chart. Give the students the following task:

Choose three sources from the list on the board (or other sources they can think of) that would give a historian of the future THE BEST understanding of their life, and explain why.

On an overhead, go over one example with the students (Visa bills, for example), filling in the spaces as demonstrated, or as students suggest, filling in all three columns:

For a printable pdf copy
of this chart, click here.

Source: What information/ evidence about me will this primary source give to historians of the future? What makes this “good evidence” about me and my life? What inferences about teenage life might the historian make from this evidence?
1) Best source

Visa bills		 How I spent my money, or at least some of it, The things that I buy are a good reflection of what I like, and what I care about
  • teenagers like to buy things
  • teenagers had money to buy things (i.e. they were not totally poor)
  • teenagers bought different things from each other and from adults
2) Second best    
3) Third best    

After students have completed the sheet, select three or four groups to present their first choice, and discuss.

Other introductory exercises using primary documents

There are a wide variety of lessons that teachers can do in the classroom relating to the exploration of primary documents, depending on the time available and the grade level. They might include the following:

  • ask students to keep a journal of the documents they create in a given week, of the “traces” that they are leaving behind for future historians to find;
  • ask students to create a journal, diary or short essay that they might leave for historians of the future;
  • get students to create a time capsule that best represents their lives, the lives of their family, or their school in the twentieth century;
  • have students write a history of their lives, or of their family based only on the documentary evidence available in their home.
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