Chapter 7: Curiosity and Primary Source Materials: Making History Come Alive

Primary source material (PSM), “the documents and objects created as part of daily life, such as birth certificates, photographs, dairies, and letters” (Norby, 2004, p. 48), provides firsthand evidence of historical events. Other examples of PSM include manuscripts, articles of clothing, stamps, coins and currency, maps, carvings, audio and visual recordings, oral histories, postcards, posters, music scores, advertisements, artifacts (e.g., a farmer’s plow), e-mails, and text messages. In general, PSM is unpublished, but some scholars (e.g., Oldenburg, 2005; Tibbo, 2002) argue for a broader view of PSM that includes books and published scholarly manuscripts because they, too, can be evidence of past and current thinking about an event, object, notion, process, or theory. They are thus a product of society, culture, and embedded history (Vygotsky, 1978).