Instructify

BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

Primary resources are the most important historical tool that students, teachers, and scholars have to examine the past. As someone who holds a degree in history and holds history near to his heart, the compacting and summarizing of society-changing documents into a single paragraph in a text book brings a tear to my eye. More and more, historical documentation is referenced for justification by those who have not read what was actually written.

Enter the website, Our Documents, a completely free-to-use, wonderfully cataloged and explained collection of 100 milestone documents in American history. Documents are provided in both their original format with high-resolution images as well as full transcriptions — script from the 1700’s is very hard to read. It’s one thing to note that in George Washington’s farewell address he advocated avoiding long-term alliances and warned of political partisanship. However, when you read the actual document and see the passion and reasoning laid out, it makes the moment stand out in a student’s mind and can provoke engaging discussion in the classroom.

I could go on for many paragraphs about why the study of primary sources is paramount to an understanding of historical events in their proper context, but let me just say this is an extremely important and useful free resource for an academic field that sorely needs it. For teachers, there is a Teacher Sourcebook (FYI, this is a 4MB PDF, so you might be better off right-clicking that link and hitting “save target as” or “save link as” rather than having it load each time) that help teachers generate lesson plans and activities for each of the documents. Some of these documents can be of an overwhelming length or a writing style containing vocabulary unfamiliar in our modern English lexicon, so the accompanying Sourcebook is an invaluable tool to helping students adjust to learning through these primary sources.

These are the documents that form the basis of American society; they deserve examination by students in any history or government course.

Our Documents

Related stuff:

U.S. Department of State Office of the Historian

Awesome Stories: Connecting primary sources from around the web

Break into the vaults at the National Archive Experience

Put your hands together for The Civil Rights Digital Library