Teacher Commentary
For students who are familiar with the idea of using and evaluating primary sources but have not yet internalized these practices, prefacing the reading with this short discussion will put the idea of evaluation in the foreground as they read. For students who are not yet familiar with historical thinking practices, a much more extensive conversation is necessary.

Students in my class were introduced to the idea of historical inquiry at the beginning of the course. Many came in with the notion that history is just a collection of facts about events in the past, and we did a series of activities to refute this idea, including unpacking an event – a fake fight – that happened in class. We gathered multiple “witness statements” and compared the conflicting evidence and then drew connections to ambiguity in history. We made distinctions between primary and secondary sources and defined factors that could affect trustworthiness. By comparing the discipline of history to investigative work, students came to understand that the business of historians is to examine, evaluate, and interpret historical documents and artifacts.