Eyewitness to History

As a history buff, nothing gets my research chops going like visiting a site where an historic event took place, like the field at Gettysburg. I've been meaning to explore how primary sources can be incorporated into the curriculum and the course I'm taking now has already showed me that there is a rich collection of primary source material out there for the discovering!

We began by defining primary sources. They are bits and pieces of history that can be in a variety of formats: documents, recordings, photos, diaries, letters, etc. These artifacts can be used to fill in the blanks and help students connect with a particular historical period or we can ask students to do the research to fill in the blanks. Either way, there is no doubt that history comes alive when we incorporate actual historical artifacts and we are providing students with an opportunity to develop their critical thinking skills- the essential component of information literacy.

We learned a lot from visiting the American Memory Learning Page "house." Listening to the audio tapes showed us how difficult dialects can be. The various items in each of the houses inspired lots of questions and we made judgments about what aspects of this exercise we might use with our students. The tour through the Library of Congress' primary sources actually caused me to reminisce and connect with many of the artifacts. Also from the site, there is a student activity that I found fascinating. It is called the "Mindwalk Activity." This exercise allows you to discover what the limitations of historical records can be. After mindwalking through all your activities over the last 24 hours, you are asked to reflect on what traces of your daily activities might remain and become artifacts for historians of the future.

The issue of equal access to technology was our next issue and we discovered that as more students are getting access to computers, either at school or at home, the problem of cheating and plagiarism has also increased. We also had a discussion about teachers using technology as an administrative tool, rather than a teaching too. We all have seen evidence of this.

Finally, I once stayed in a hotel room that I think could be classified as a primary resource. The Watergate break- in occurred the summer before I was to begin my junior year of college. About 3 months after the event, I visited some friends for a weekend in D.C. I stayed in a Howard Johnson Hotel across the street from the Watergate building. When my friend and I got up to our room, we discovered, much to our horror, that the ceiling had been ripped up, exposing pipes and lots of other nonsense. We called down to the front desk to complain. We were told that the room had been closed for many weeks because of the evidence it provided to the Watergate investigators. It had just been reopened several days earlier. It seems that we were staying in the room where the burglars had installed their bugging equipment. What do you think? Hotel room as primary resource?