U.S. History

On your power point guide, please take a minute and answer the first two questions. These are the questions: What does the word history mean? What is a historian? Just make your best guess if you don’t know what the answer is. Once you have answered the questions, turn and talk to your neighbor. Tell them what your answers are, and have them share with you. Pick one of you to come write your answers up on the board.

History is only a historian’s view of the past. This view can be influenced by what a historian believes. What a historian believes is sometimes an opinion, not always 100% fact. For the next few weeks, we are not going to take current historians at their word. We are going to investigate some mysteries in history, and figure out for ourselves what really happened in the past. Historians are influenced by many factors, just like you are in your life.

The biggest skill that historians must have is being able to separate fact from myth. Activity: I am going to tell something to a person in the front corner of the room. Let’s see what is said by the time it gets to the back of the room. What happened? Why did we get a different story from what was said at the start? How do you think a historian could separate fact from myth? There are three specific skills that a historian must possess in order to be able to separate fact from myth.

The first step a historian must take is to see if there is a record of the event in question. They like to find primary sources if possible. What do you think a primary source is? Why would historians want to use primary sources? Historians like to make sure they are getting the whole story. To do this, historians look for multiple sources when researching people and events from the past. You have accessed primary sources before. Activity: Write down a story that has been passed down in your family.

Historians may not always find primary sources that tell them everything that happened during the event that they are studying. In order to get a complete picture of an event, historians often have to make their best guesses of what happened. Historians call these guesses educated guesses. They are called educated guesses because historians have educate themselves about the event before making a guess. They start looking for cultural cues to understand what may have actually happened. A cultural cue is something that happens frequently within a culture.

Historians try to show two things when they study history. First, they want to present what happened at an event. Second, they want to reveal how the event may have affected the people involved. If participants did not leave written or oral accounts, there is no way for the historian to know for sure how the event affected the participants involved. A historian can use primary source information, cultural cues, participants, age, gender, and geographic location as well as records of similar experiences to make educated guesses about participants points of view. Circle Activity