What's Your Favorite Primary Source to Teach?
Emily Suzanne Clark
Maybe it's because I'm at a teaching school, but a lot of my posts in recent months have been teaching-centered. I assign a lot of primary sources in my classes. I have students write their own faux primary sources. I take students into the archives. Today I want to think about the primary sources I love to teach and why. Reply in the comments about your favorite primary sources for teaching.
What makes a primary source a good teaching resource? I think primary sources are great readings on their own, but some are certainly richer than others for the classroom. Good teaching primary sources are ones that reflect their context. A good source prompt student reflection on how his/her own subjectivity is shaped by the culture around her/him. Primary sources illuminate conflict and show moments of creative tension in American history. They show how the past can be a foreign country and they reveal how the past is not so different from today.
One of my favorite primary sources to teach has got to be MLK's Letter from Birmingham Jail. Students enjoy this reading, and for Gonzaga students, it speaks to the social justice mission of the university. To Zags (and many others), there is something timeless about it. Placing the document within the context of the Birmingham campaign and the subsequent bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church provide good conversation on the interplay between religion and culture. Excerpts from Frederick Douglass's autobiography (namely the excerpts printed in Milton Sernett's African American Religious History) do the same. When I taught some of the FBI files on the Moorish Science Temple the other week, I asked the students what it was like to read declassified FBI files. Many found the blacked-out parts frustrating. I agreed and used the opportunity to talk about the monitoring process and think out loud with them about what might be blacked out and why.
Those first three choices were pretty African American Religions-centric, which makes sense because I'm teaching that right now (Oh! And Jarena Lee's autobiography! So make that four choices). I'll expand further out for the final three and then open it up for the comments. I frequently teach excerpts from James Mooney's Ghost-dance Religion. The brilliant Sarah Dees recently made a strong case for continuing to teach this topic, and I agree. Mooney's work is great because it's both a primary and a secondary source. We have an anthropologist examining and analyzing a movement, but the content and his own biases make it a primary source that requires a close read. Excerpts from The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk are also good for teaching. It opens up conversations about religious intolerance and hate literature. Students can see how words have real effects; the burning of the Ursuline convent in Charlestown makes that clear. They also enjoy TJeff's "Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom," because the ideas both feel so familiar and strange. Then we play a game that day where I read out various 17th and 18th-century laws from around the colonies and they vote on whether or not they would work TJeff's views on religious freedom.
This is barely the tip of the iceberg. There are so many primary sources that are effective teaching tools. What are your favorites and why?
Also GO ZAGS! #DotheFew (sorrynotsorry)
Maybe it's because I'm at a teaching school, but a lot of my posts in recent months have been teaching-centered. I assign a lot of primary sources in my classes. I have students write their own faux primary sources. I take students into the archives. Today I want to think about the primary sources I love to teach and why. Reply in the comments about your favorite primary sources for teaching.
What makes a primary source a good teaching resource? I think primary sources are great readings on their own, but some are certainly richer than others for the classroom. Good teaching primary sources are ones that reflect their context. A good source prompt student reflection on how his/her own subjectivity is shaped by the culture around her/him. Primary sources illuminate conflict and show moments of creative tension in American history. They show how the past can be a foreign country and they reveal how the past is not so different from today.
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| King's mugshots provide good visual primary sources too. |
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| One of the original 38 engravings from The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk |
This is barely the tip of the iceberg. There are so many primary sources that are effective teaching tools. What are your favorites and why?
Also GO ZAGS! #DotheFew (sorrynotsorry)
Comments
In lieu of that, love to have them go to Freedmen's Bureau and/or Slave Narratives collection online, do a little keyword searching around "religion," and see what they find (most often violent attacks on black churches and ministers, etc.). Never fails to communicate importance of anti-democratic violence during Reconstruction.
Also like to use Richard Pratt's speech, best known for the phrase kill the Indian and save the man, from 1892: http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/4929/. Makes my point that religious idealists during slavery struggle and REconstruction (whom we often, rightly, admire) were also authors of the disastrous policies towards Native Americans in the late 19th century. Painful paradox of American history.
Finally, if I get a class where I get to go back far enough, the Lawes Divine Morall and Martiall from 1612 Virginia are always a hit, as long as you preselect the juiciest ones ahead of time. And so many others from 17th/early 18th century, throw a dart and you'll hit something great.