Civil War Soldiers, Homesteaders, and Dakota POWs
Artifact Description
Of the examples available from my graduate coursework, the strongest example of primary source analysis placed in context was an assignment from the Minnesota to 1862 course. In this assignment, students reviewed letters from three separate groups of people of whom experienced the realities of Minnesota in the 1860s in distinctly different ways. One cluster of primary sources was from the Christie brothers, who sent letters to each other and to other family members documenting their experiences in Civil War. A second cluster of primary sources was from Norwegian immigrants who had settled in and around Minnesota as homesteaders. The third cluster of primary sources was a collection of letters written by Dakota tribal members who were held as prisoners of war at Fort McClellan following the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862. In the reviews, students analyzed the content of the letters, their strengths and weaknesses as reliable sources of information about the specific experience to which each was related, and the historical context in which each must be placed in order to be understood. The critiques of each cluster of sources offered within the analysis relates directly to the important context that must be provided when using primary sources as a teaching tool in the classroom; primary sources do not exist in vacuums. Nevertheless, these primary sources have immense value in the classroom, as demonstrating the lived experiences of individuals who were touched by or involved in a historical event cannot be more directly achieved. Philosophically, these primary sources represent a wealth of information about any of the three topics and should be presented to history students. Primary sources frequently give the past a “voice”, which is exactly the function fulfilled by each of these collections. The voices of the past are able to tell the story from a narrative standpoint that is only clouded by the information of the day. When primary sources reveal that the writer/speaker/etc. presents from a biased, uninformed, or misinformed point of view, that reality is a valuable piece of historical evidence in itself.
Civil War Soldiers, Homesteaders, and Dakota POWs |