Houghton Mifflin Social Studies
Chapter 3, Lesson 1: Understanding History (pp. 56-61)
I. Historical Evidence
B. Written sources include books, letters, diaries, writings on monuments--anything with writing.
C. Non-written sources include fossils, artifacts, music, and oral tradition.
D. Historians must examine information and decide how to interpret it.
II. The Evaluation of Sources
B. Primary sources are materials created in the same time period as the events described.
C. Secondary sources are materials created later by people who studied the original or primary sources.
III. The Puzzle of History
B. Historians work to understand not only what happened in the past, but also how and why it happened.
Lesson at a Glance Outline
A. Historians use both written and non-written sources to learn about the past.
A. Historians ask questions about a source to determine how accurate and useful it is.
A. Each generation has historians who gather and interpret sources of information about the past. The interpretation varies from generation to generation.
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