Response to Schmidt

Blog Post 4

While I found the Schmidt chapter on primary sources very informative (and full of great examples), I think it is important to remember that when teaching history, the selection of primary sources is just as important as remembering to include them. History as a discipline requires us to consolidate events and eras down into smaller easier to digest chunks. If the class were studying the great depression it would not be practical to try to read every newspaper article, from every city, for every day of the era. Every single one of those stories would add some kind of color to inform our understanding of what life was like then, but at some point, you have to decide what stories are more important than others. Similarly, if the class were studying white American’s westward expansion and homesteading efforts it would be very informative but also very impractical to look at the farmers almanac for every day of the late 1800s. Even a PhD student with a specific focus on that era probably doesn’t have that much time. Schmidt has some great exercises and makes some great points, but I think she forgot to talk about how important and delicate the selection process is. The conclusion especially seemed to be a sales pitch that could be summarized as “social studies teachers should totally use primary sources” to which I think an overwhelming majority of social studies teachers would put up no counter argument. Maybe I’m not giving Schmidt enough credit, and maybe she addresses this in another excerpt somewhere, but it just seemed like something that needed to be addressed. I did however like the examples she gave and personally remember those types of exercises much better than dry textbook reading (if I ever really did my textbook reading like I was supposed to in high school) I think primary sources can be a very powerful tool for students of history, which is all the more reason that we should closely examine why we choose the ones we do. To be fair to Schmidt, I don’t have any golden rule or clear standard as to how to decide if the accounts of Roman peasant field workers are more or less important than the record from the treasury detailing the budgets for military equipment. This is the subjective nature that is inherent to doing history.