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eBook details

• Title: Integrating Primary and Secondary Sources: A Model from Early America (Historical Research)
• Author : Teaching History: A Journal of Methods
• Release Date : January 22, 2004
• Genre: Education,Books,Professional & Technical,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 210 KB

Description

It is always a boon to history teachers when one of the profession's most respected scholars publishes a synthetic, concise, and accessible book. It was therefore with much enthusiasm that I assigned Joyce Appleby's recently published Inheriting the Revolution in my undergraduate course on early America, and it came as no surprise when this work provoked a lively discussion. (1) Students who were aware of Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation were intrigued by Appleby's implicit suggestion that America's truly great generation was not comprised of Brokaw's heroes, but rather those men and women born in the years just after the Revolution. Others demurred, questioning the utility of comparing generations at all, and arguing that generations do not exist autonomously, but rather build upon each other, acquiring an identity through the selective adaptation and rejection of the preceding generation's habits and characteristics. Appleby similarly struck a cord with her claim that the founding generation of Americans enjoyed a rare opportunity to set a precedent for American individualism, and that the definition that they forged remains for better or worse--an integral aspect of American culture today. Perhaps most importantly, Inheriting the Revolution evoked excitement from a generally indifferent undergraduate audience because of the primary sources that she used: autobiographies. Her explanation that "almost four hundred men and women in this cohort wrote autobiographies" inspired one student to remark that writing the book "must have been a lot of fun." As much as I enjoyed this discussion, though, Appleby's book ultimately left me feeling frustrated. Writing the book must have been fun, and as a professional historian, I too have savored the experience of molding the voices of the past to the interpretations of the present. My undergraduate students, however, have not. They were thus only able to appreciate Appleby's research methods from a cold distance, and my traditional approach to the book failed to help close this interpretive gap. In this failure, I know I'm not alone. History teachers are frequently torn between the competing goals of conveying a sound overview of a topic's historiography and establishing a familiarity with the topic's salient primary sources. More often than not, we lack models to help us structure these exercises in a way that allows students to evaluate historical documents against the backdrop of a popular interpretation and historiography. Herein, of course, lies the real thrill of historical investigation not just grasping what someone else has written or attempting an autonomous interpretation of a discrete primary document, but evaluating that document in the context of what other historians have said about it, and comparing your interpretation to theirs. The combination of historiography and primary document analysis adds a rich layer of meaning to the process of historical study that remains well within the grasp of most undergraduates. How, then, can we bring together these goals in a coherent and realistic fashion?

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