Hands-On History for 9th Graders at the Gilder Lehrman Institute
Ninth graders visited the Gilder Lehrman Institute at the New York Historical Society during the week of March 6 to engage with authentic primary source material in support of the current Assignment on the transformation of the Atlantic World and the American Revolution.
From letters by Alexander Hamilton and Henry Knox to an original publication of the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, a 17th-century map, Paul Revere's broadside of the Boston Massacre, to a lock of James Madison's hair from his deathbed, and beyond, students continued to question how we access the past through the use of varied evidence. Students had the opportunity to look closely and to think deeply about these source materials.
This trip will help animate ongoing conversations about the forces leading to the revolutionary transformations of the early modern world under consideration in our world history curriculum.