Objectives

• To give students insight into the way historians learn about the past.

Table of Contents

Connecting to the Past
Thinking Critically
Empathizing With Personal Experience
Using What We Know

Connecting to the Past

1. What do the Primary Source Documents tell students about what was happening in the country's culture during the 19th century? Ask students to pay attention to images from the videos that show daily life in the 19th century. What kinds of products and fashions were popular and/or available at the time of the Civil War? Divide the class into groups. Tell students that they are to assume they know nothing about the culture represented in the images. Ask students to think broadly and to write down 5 things about the culture as represented by the images in the videos. For example: who lived in this culture? What were differences between men and women? How developed was this society? What did people do for a living and for entertainment? Did the society have money, religion, literacy, etc.? What kinds of technologies defined communication, transportation, and domestic life?

   Discuss the activity. How much was the class able to learn from these images? What else would students like to know? Students might also analyze the documents in the Archive on the screen.

2. Ask students to interview each other. Interview partners must choose a topic for their interviews. The goal of the interviews should be to show the class that students have something to contribute to our understanding of culture and society.

Thinking Critically

1. Ask students what they have enjoyed the most about THE CIVIL WAR. Which segments intrigued them or opened their eyes? What kinds of stories did they tell? What kinds of images, sounds, and narrations were included in those segments that made them interesting? Ask students what roles historians must play in creating documentaries like THE CIVIL WAR. Why are documentary films important? What would people know about their culture if there were no documentaries? Ask students to think about the kinds of documentaries they would like to make or would like to see made. What kinds of issues would they cover?

2. Give students copies of documents. Divide the class into partner pairs. Have each pair create a list of questions a historian would ask upon examining the document. For example, who was the document's author; when was the document written; where is it from; in what context was it meaningful, etc? Compare and discuss students' notes. What kind of historical information can be gathered from each document?

3. Have students view the photographs. Ask students to describe what these images tell the historian. What distinguishes the stories told by photographs and paintings? What visual evidence were historians able to gather from times prior to the camera? What will historians use when they examine our culture from some point in the future? Emphasize the differences between photographs and paintings of the war.

4. Ask students to think about the personal testimonies heard in THE CIVIL WAR. How do first-person descriptions of events tell us about history? Did all people view historical events from the same angle? Did they all see the same thing? Did they all draw the same meaning from those events? What role does individual memory play in history writing?

5. As a class, choose a current event that students are familiar with. Have students imagine that they are being interviewed as witnesses to the event. What point of view would students offer to the interviewer? What would the interviewer be able to learn from them?

6. Ask students to look through a magazine to find images which need explanation--whose meaning is not obvious. Have students show them to each other. What does the rest of the class guess about the image? Discuss the difficulty of interpreting these kinds of images. What kind of supplementary information is needed to make accurate interpretations?

   Ask students to find other examples of text or images that are particularly hard to decipher. They might write a page about the image or text, describing the various interpretations people might have of them. Talk about the ads, songs, movies, photographs, words, etc., that have stirred controversy because people's interpretations of them have differed.

   Show students the Population and Casualties of War graphs. Without explaining what the graphs mean, have students write several questions that come to mind when they see each one. What do students need to know to understand the graphs? What might these graphs tell a historian? Do the graphs tell different stories to different people?

Empathizing with Personal Experience

"Mr. Brady has done something to bring to us the terrible reality and earnestness of the war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our door-yards and along [our] streets, he has done something very like it." --The New York Times

1. Read the above quote to the class. Ask students if they can guess who Mr. Brady was. Tell the class that he was the Civil War's most important photographer. (While Brady was responsible for organizing the effort, most of the photographs taken by his studio were actually shot by photographers working for him, such as Alexander Gardner.)

2. Review profile: Matthew Brady

   Explain to the class that photography reached the United States soon after its invention in 1838. In Brady's time, photographs were made on glass plates coated with a light-sensitive silver compound. Photographic film did not yet exist. Photographers could only take pictures of very still scenes, as their plates required long exposure times to form an image. Plates were then rushed to a studio where they were developed; they could not be stored in the camera as they are today. Photographers risked their lives to obtain many of the shots they captured, but without their work our knowledge about the war would have been much less complete.

   Invite students to form documentary groups and go into their community with a camera to document an issue of their choice. Explain to the class that the point of the exercise is to better appreciate the act of documenting reality. Students should try to photograph people and scenes from different angles and arrange their images so that their documentary project tells some kind of story.

Using What We Know

1. Give each student a copy of a newspaper. Try to provide different kinds of newspapers, from sensationalist human interest papers to respected papers that cover national and international news. Divide students into groups, and ask them to thinks about events during the Civil War that seem interesting to them. Have each group write headlines for their chosen events in the style of their newspaper.

2. Have the class research casualty figures for wars of the present century. Review the Casualties of the War graph. How do these numbers compare to those of the Civil War? What does this kind of a comparison tell us about the Civil War, and about war in general?

 

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