What Would My Life Have Been Like?--Education Activity: Using Primary Sources, Sacramento Valley History Digital Collection

What Would My Life Have Been Like?
Education Activity: Using Primary Sources

photograph of young woman, taken in Nevada in 1875

Nevada,
1875

photograph of young woman, taken in California in the 1890s

California,
1890s

photograph of young man, taken in Kansas in 1905

Kansas,
1905

photograph of young man, taken in California in 1929

California,
1929

photograph of young woman, taken in California in 1940

California,
1940

photograph of young woman, taken in California in 1972

California,
1972

Suggestions
Examples
Primary sources

Suggestions

If you are a secondary school teacher, you can bring the past to life for your students by asking them to create stories using primary sources they find on the web. By adopting the viewpoint of a person, real or imagined, who lived in the past, students will project themselves into a different time and place. They will attach a more personal meaning to historical events, which will allow them to construct and retain more real knowledge about history.

As the students read and view primary documents and images, they should remember to think about and take notes on the following questions:

Who are you? (Whose perspective will you take?) Think especially about your age, nationality, race, gender, and economic status.
When and where do you live?
What is your daily life like? Do you spend most of your time in school, or working, or ...? What tasks or chores occupy your time? What do you eat?
Who do you spend your time with? Do you live with your family? Do you sit with classmates in a school? Do you work next to other people? Do you travel or explore on your own?
What are the best things in your life?
What are the limitations or problems in your life?
How do the major issues of the day influence your life?

If your stud ents need refreshing on how to assess the reliability of historical evidence like diaries and letters, I recommend History Matters - Making Sense of Evidence. This site provides useful help in analyzing primary sources.

Examples:

The stories in this section use primary documents to tell the story of someone who lived in the past. Each story focuses on daily life. This emphasis brings these individuals to life; it shows that people who lived in the past were real and human and faced some of the same issues that people still encounter today.

A young man living on a farm in California in 1890

Primary sources:

On this site:

Subject index to all the material on this site

On other reputable sites:

African-American Women On-line Archival Collections: rare memoirs and letters of African American women who lived under and after slavery; from Duke University.
American Memory search interface: 7 million primary documents on many time periods and regions in American history; from the Library of Congress.
California Underground Railroad Digital Archive: primary source documents on slavery in California; from California State University at Sacramento.
Documenting the American South: original texts, images, and sound files, primarily on the South but also on living and traveling in California; from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
History Matters - Many Pasts: a wide variety of primary documents, covering all regions and times in American history; from George Mason University.
Studs Terkel - Conversations with America: interviews with "ordinary" twentieth-century Americans from a variety of backgrounds; from the famed interviewer's archives.
The Valley of the Shadow - Two Communities in the Civil War: primary documents from Virginia and Pennsylvania telling of life during the Civil War era; from the University of Virginia and other institutions.