How Images Can Affect Perspectives of the Lincoln Conspirators

Why Use Primary Sources?

Primary sources provide a window into the past—unfiltered access to the record of artistic, social, scientific and political thought and achievement during the specific period under study, produced by people who lived during that period.

Bringing young people into close contact with these unique, often profoundly personal, documents and objects can give them a very real sense of what it was like to be alive during a long-past era.

A. Engage students

• Primary sources help students relate in a personal way to events of the past and promote a deeper understanding of history as a series of human events.
• Because primary sources are snippets of history, they encourage students to seek additional evidence through research.
• First-person accounts of events help make them more real, fostering active reading and response.

B. Develop critical thinking skills

• Many state standards support teaching with primary sources, which require students to be both critical and analytical as they read and examine documents and objects.
• Primary sources are often incomplete and have little context. Students must use prior knowledge and work with multiple primary sources to find patterns.
• In analyzing primary sources, students move from concrete observations and facts to questioning and making inferences about the materials.
• Questions of creator bias, purpose, and point of view may challenge students’ assumptions.

C. Construct knowledge

• Inquiry into primary sources encourages students to wrestle with contradictions and compare multiple sources that represent differing points of view, confronting the complexity of the past.
• Students construct knowledge as they form reasoned conclusions, base their conclusions on evidence, and connect primary sources to the context in which they were created, synthesizing information from multiple sources.

Integrating what they glean from comparing primary sources with what they already know, and what they learn from research, allows students to construct content knowledge and deepen understanding.

Library of Congress. http://www.loc.gov/teachers/usingprimarysources/whyuse.html

2. Provide students with a copy of the Stanford “Historical Thinking Chart.” Select a document from one of the sources in the lesson plan bibliography and use it to model how students can investigate historical questions by employing the following reading strategies: sourcing, contextualizing, close reading and corroborating.

http://sheg.stanford.edu/upload/V3LessonPlans/Historical%20Thinking%20Chart.pdf

3. Review with students the following Internet websites: Douglas Linder’s Famous Trials—The Trial of the Lincoln Conspirators located at

http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/lincolnconspiracy/lincolnconspiracy.html   

The Abraham Lincoln Papers. The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln located at 

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/alhtml/alrgall.html

Ask individual students to identify specific primary sources located within the document and use the “Historical Thinking Chart” to analyze the document.

4. Assign teams of three to four students to answers the questions located at Linder’s Famous Trials site located at Lincoln Assassination Conspiracy Trial Jeopardy

http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/lincolnconspiracy/jeopardy.html

To play Conspiracy Jeopardy, click on one of the dollar amounts above.  An answer will appear.  Try to provide the question that corresponds to that answer.  Request that each team total the score for all their correct answers.  Post the totals for each team

5. Assign students  (through a cooperative endeavor) to access the political cartoon listed below and use the “Cartoon Analysis Worksheet” to analyze the political cartoon.

http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/lincolnconspiracy/menagerie.jpg

Cartoon Analysis Worksheet

National Archives.   http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/worksheets//

6. Instruct students to analyze the following image “Adjusting the ropes for hanging the conspirators” using the SOCC Visual Image Analysis” Worksheet

Library of Congress. Prints and Photographs Reading Room.

http://loc.gov/pictures/resource/cwpb.04229/