Purpose:
The following activity is intended high school students in a history classroom. Ask your students to leverage any one headline right now and apply historical thinking. For example, I’ve broken down the current discussions/debates over removing historical monuments. Although it’s a contentious topic, the goal is not to get political but rather to understand the monument’s historical moment (good, bad, and ugly).
Objectives:
- Push knowledge boundaries. How much do you really understand about a historical monument?
- Learn how to diversify online research. The internet can be a bit of a wild, wild west when it comes to research, so this activity helps students start to understand the types of questions they need to be asking as they research online so that they’re able to analyze more thoroughly and create a more comprehensive picture of a historical topic.
Directions:
Students can pick any monument – maybe one that has already been taken down or maybe one that the student thinks should/shouldn’t be taken down. Then they can start analyzing:
1. For starters… what do you think you know about the monument? Write it down.
2. Then move into the monument’s representation:
- Who’s represented in the monument?
- Is there more than one person present? Why?
- Are people left out? Why?
3. Next, place the monument into historical context:
- What was happening at that time? Anything historically notable going on? (The historically insignificant things can be telling, too, so don’t leave them out!)
- What’s the underlying story that was being told when the monument was erected?
4. Finally, let’s talk about sources:
- Where did you start your research?
- What do you know about the sources that you used? Are they credible?
- Are they newspapers? If so, what’s the political bias?
- Are they historical documents? If so, when were they written? Who wrote them? What kind of bias can you think of that may’ve slanted this document?
- Did you include an array of sources in your research to ensure that you’re covering as many bases as possible? Diversifying sources is key in making sense of online data and analyzing it responsibly.
- What online search engines did you use? How were their search results the same and how were the different?
5. Circle back to the beginning and reevaluate what you now know about the monument.
- How has your knowledge of the monument changed, if at all?
- What’s something new that you learned about this person? Something surprising? Something disappointing? Something exciting?
