Another Post About Primary Sources

On the heels of Emily Conroy-Krutz’s excellent post about primary sources, I ask the following question to my fellow history teachers: What’s your favorite primary source to use in class, that is outside your area of specialty?

I ask because we all have to teach outside our comfort zones, and if you’re like me, you find primary sources on your own or from colleagues that really excite you. Maybe it’s a source you hadn’t seen in a long time, or maybe it’s something you never even knew about. Perhaps it’s a source you had doubts about at first, but then the students really responded to it. What source was it, and what did you do with it?

For me, it’s Cannibals All!, George Fitzhugh’s classic ardently pro-slavery screed. For historians of 19th century politics and slavery, this will likely be old news. But I had never read Fitzhugh until I TAed for a 19th Century course in grad school, and I was amazed at the students’ reactions. For my students, Fitzhugh was an enigma: a pro-slavery, anti-capitalist racist. Many of the students in the class were liberal in their politics. Though they all seemed to generally favor capitalism, many understood, at least in general terms, the inequality it cultivates. Confronted by a thinker like Fitzhugh, who favors inequality as natural and essential to order, but despises Northern capitalism as more callous and exploitative than Southern slavery, my students were baffled. They had to not only examine the relationship between capitalism and slavery from an unusual perspective, but also carefully analyze Fitzhugh’s theoretical perspective.

As always, comments are welcome. I hope we can get a productive conversation started about primary sources outside of our research areas, how we find them, and which ones are the most effective.

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