Primary and Secondary Sources: How We Know What Happened

Warm-Up

5 minutes. Ask the class to tell you about something that happened at school this term — a trip, a sports day, a fire drill. Get two or three retellings and let them contradict each other, because they will.

Then ask a sharper question: who in this room actually saw it? Hands go up. Ask who is telling you because somebody else told them. More hands.

Point out that the room now contains two different kinds of knowing, and that both are useful but they are not the same. Someone who was there can tell you what the air smelled like. Someone who heard about it can tell you what people said afterwards, which is a different and also real thing.

Say that historians have names for these, and that the difference is the whole reason we can claim to know anything about a time nobody alive remembers.

Direct Instruction

12 minutes. Give the two names and tie each one to the warm-up: a primary source comes from somebody who was there; a secondary source is made later by somebody who was not.

Hold up the class photograph. Ask whether it is primary. It is — the camera was there. Then name the two absent students and ask whether their account of that day would be primary. It would not, and the room usually goes quiet for a second, because those are people they know rather than historical figures.

Now break the shortcut before it forms, which is the point of the whole segment. Hold up the modern reprint of an old photograph and ask what it is. It looks new; it is primary. Hold up the fifty-year-old history book and ask what it is. It looks old; it is secondary.

Say it explicitly: it is not about how old it looks, or whether it is handwriting or print. It is about whether the person who made it was there.

Then walk the common kinds so students have examples to reason from rather than a definition to apply:

• Primary. Letters, diaries, photographs taken at the time, objects people used, newspaper reports from that week, a recorded interview with someone who was there.
• Secondary. Textbooks, encyclopedia entries, most library books about history, a documentary made now, a biography written after the person died.

Finish on disagreement, which is the part that turns this from vocabulary into thinking. Give two short conflicting accounts of one event — two soldiers, two neighbors, two newspapers — and ask which one is lying.

Usually neither. They stood in different places, saw different parts, and cared about different things. Say plainly that when two sources disagree, the interesting question is not who is wrong but why would these two people see it differently — and that is what a historian actually does for a living.

Guided Practice

13 minutes. Pairs sort the eight source cards into two piles and write one reason for each — not "it is old" but who made it and whether they were there.

Requiring the reason is what catches the appearance shortcut. A pair can sort the cards correctly by look alone and be completely unable to say why, and you would never find out from the piles.

Take the two mismatched cards to the whole class when most pairs have finished. Ask who put the modern photograph in the secondary pile, and treat it as a reasonable mistake, because it is — then run the test on it together.

Then give them the ones that argue back:

• A drawing of a battle, made by an artist forty years later from soldiers’ descriptions.
• A letter written by someone who was there, but written twenty years afterwards from memory.
• A museum label next to a real Roman coin — one of those two things is a primary source and the other is not.

The letter is the best of the three and worth dwelling on. The writer was there, so it is primary; the memory is twenty years old, so it is primary and unreliable. Those are two separate judgments, and collapsing them is the mistake older students most often make.

Independent Practice

10 minutes. Students complete the Primary and Secondary Sources Worksheet alone, then take one primary source from the cards and write two sentences: one thing it tells us, and one thing it cannot tell us.

The second sentence is the one that does the teaching. Students arrive believing a primary source is simply the true one; asking what it cannot tell you is how they discover that a photograph shows one moment from one angle and says nothing about what happened five minutes later.

For a class ready to be pushed, ask what sources a historian in a hundred years would use to find out about this school year, and what those sources would miss.

Assessment

3 minutes. Exit ticket, three items. Is a diary written during a war a primary or secondary source? Is a textbook chapter about that war primary or secondary? Then: How can you tell the difference?

Only the third item is worth reading carefully. "The old one is primary" is the answer to watch for — it produces two correct answers on this ticket and will fail on the first source that does not look its age.

Closure

2 minutes. Hold up the class photograph one more time and ask what a person a hundred years from now could learn from it, and what they would still not know. Close on the sentence the lesson earns: everything we know about the past came from something somebody left behind, and the first question to ask of any of it is whether the person who made it was there.