I have a box of primary sources. There are letters about "big events" (the Civil War, the Great War, the Great Depression) and smaller "big events" (New Year's cards and birth announcements). There are stock notes, ledger books, post cards, journals and photographs. I used to ask students to identify the cultural components or compare and contrast the medium to our contemporary equivalent. Students would fill out a "Primary Detectives" sheet about the primary source. I don't do that anymore. Now, I just hand it to the student and see what happens. I listen to the observations that they make. "Man, they dressed like hipsters back in the day." "They actually wrote love letters." "Mr. Spencer, Phoenix had signs written in Spanish in the twenties." "I never thought about people in the past having parties." But the most common statement I hear is, "They look like us." I'm not sure why it matters that they hold the real artifacts. Give them scanned images and it's not the same. There is something powerful about holding real photographs of people who were never famous or to read their trivial dinner invitations or ledger books. Students realize, in this moment, that the voices of the past are not all that different from the voices right now. Inevitably, students will reach a point where they will see the people of the past as truly human. And in the process, they will see history from a different perspective. They will see death as real and life as finite.
