How to be a historian

1. How to be a historian U.S. History

2. Answer these two questions • 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.

3. What is written in history • 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.

4. What a historian does • 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.

5. Skill #1Identifying and Analyzing Primary Sources • 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.

6. Skill #2: Making Educated Guesses Using Cultural Cues • 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.

7. Skill #3: Considering Multiple Points of View • 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