There is no official response this week. But we’ve made it to Week 4! If you have yet to complete Project Base 1, you should probably get on that, because if you don’t have the website up and running, you’ll have a hard time doing the responses for other weeks. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Today we’re thinking about the building blocks of the historical profession: Primary Sources.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Think about your day for the last 24 hours. What evidence have you left behind of those events? How would a historian write the history of your life? What would they probably leave out because they didn\u2019t have any evidence? Make a FlipGrid<\/a> speculating about these questions. (This does not count as a response.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hopefully this exercise made you think about how historians do their work. We never, ever have the whole picture when we’re writing about the past (or even the present); we are always piecing together stories just from the evidence that we have. So we do the best we can–and when more evidence comes to light, we change our conclusions to fit the evidence we have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This week you’re going to be compiling primary sources that will form the basis of your creative projects. You’ve already collected secondary sources about your war; now it’s time to think more specifically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You’ve already selected the war you want to focus on; now you’ll need to pick a narrower topic within the history of that war. You can do almost anything, but here are a few examples:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here at GMU, we have access to a tremendous number of primary sources. Our history librarian, Dr. George Oberle, goes through how to access the primary sources in GMU’s databases in this video.<\/p>\n\n\n\nActivities<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Step 1: Narrow your topic.<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Step 2: Find primary sources that can help you understand your topic better.<\/h3>\n\n\n\n