Contextualization is a historical thinking skill that involves connecting historical events and processes to specific circumstances of time and place. Without understanding the circumstances that surround and build up to historical events, it’s difficult to make sense of them. In this first in the progression of activities on understanding context, you will begin to work with the idea of contextualization so you see how important it is for understanding the past.

Reading, claim testing, causation
To adequately make sense of the historical accounts you read, you need to understand the context in which events occurred and how the assertions about the events are supported through claim testing. In addition, when you categorize broad and narrow context, you will consider how these pieces of context led to the historical event being studied.

Do you know what the word context means? Work with your class to come up with a definition. Can you think of a time when you needed to have context to understand something that happened?

Take a look at the first photo in the activity.

Why is this person yelling? Share your ideas with your class.

Now, look at the second photo in the activity with more context.

Any additional ideas about why this person is yelling? Does having a fuller view of the picture give you more information? It may have helped you a little, but clearly, you need even more information.

This is actually a popular photograph from the 1900s. What else do you think you need to know to figure out what’s going on here? In other words, what categories of information might help you figure out what’s happening? Discuss your ideas with your class and ask your teacher as many questions as you want. Once you’ve gotten more information, your teacher will tell you the title of this picture and give you any additional information you might need to figure out why this person is yelling.

Do you think you would have been able to figure out why this person is yelling without all this extra information? The process you just went through is called contextualization, and it’s something historians do all the time. It’s also something we do in our everyday lives to help us properly interpret things that have happened instead of just jumping to conclusions.

Your teacher will break the class into small groups and hand out event cards. Work with your group members to divide the cards into two piles—one for broad context and the other for narrow context. Broad context represents broader themes, trends, events, eras, or regions that are related to the historical event you’re studying. Often, broad context helps us understand long-term causes of an event. Narrow context refers to the themes, trends, events, eras, and regions that are more closely tied in time or place to the historical event. Narrow context helps us see the short-term causes of an event.

Next, your teacher will ask a few groups to place their event cards on the board. Be prepared to explain why you chose to place your cards in a particular area of the funnel.

To help with historical contextualization in this course, we have a tool for you to use. Your teacher will either hand out or have you download the Contextualization – Introduction worksheet and ask you to review the Contextualization Tool with your class. You’ll be using this tool throughout the course to help you practice contextualizing, which will enable you to correctly interpret the historical events you’ll be studying.

Print and cut out the Supporting Statement Cards

Claim testing is an important analytical process for assessing the quality and veracity (truthfulness) of claims. It helps you “see” and evaluate people’s assertions and gives shape to one of the most important and useful critical thinking practices in history. Since history is all about making assertions, it’s important that you learn the skill of testing claims early and use it frequently as part of evaluating historical accounts and making historical interpretations.

Reading, writing
Being well-versed in claim testing will help you be a critical consumer of what you read. If you use claim testers to construct essays, your speaking and writing skills will improve.

In this course, and in everyday life, we encounter assertions or claims. At times, we believe we can take these at face value, but more and more, it is important to question and test the claims that we come across. In other words, we need to decide if the claims are true, so we can determine what to believe. In this course, we use what we call claim testers to help us check the soundness and strength of our beliefs. The four claim testers are intuition, authority, logic, and evidence. Before we use the claim testers, we need to understand what they are! Look at the claim testing poster on the wall, and get ready to review each claim tester as a class.

Now, you’ll practice with a claim. You are going to get a bunch of statements that support the claim: “There is one true history.” Your job will be to determine which supporting statements match which claim tester. Before starting, think about the following example with your class:

The school board and the government require that we all take the same social studies classes.

What claim tester do you think is being used here? Discuss your answer with the class.

Now that you’ve practiced as a class, get into groups and sort the cards into the four claim testing categories and tape them to the grid in the areas designated by your teacher. You will be asked to defend your categorizations at the end of the activity, especially for those supporting statements that were hard to place in just one claim tester category.

Finally, see if you can come up with any statements or counterclaims that might help debunk the claim, “There is one true history.” Do you believe this claim?

Remember that this course encourages us to consider multiple accounts in history. We all have different perspectives, and that is often reflected in how history stories are told. So, while there might be different stories about the same thing, it’s not necessarily because one story is true and another is false—it’s about our perspective. And often, the story that seems more true is just better supported via claim testers—and that is why you’ll be practicing claim testing all the time in this class.

Sourcing—the act of understanding who wrote a document, where they wrote it, and why they wrote it, for the purposes of analysis or interpretation—is integral to the work of a historian. Without properly understanding an author’s purpose and perspective, it’s difficult to properly interpret a document. In this first activity on sourcing, you’ll learn how an author has framed that event, and how that then impacts your interpretation of it.

Reading, claim testing
It’s nearly impossible to source something without reading it first. Not all sources are based on text, so in this course we consider reading more broadly and include video, artifacts, infographics, photographs, art, and other data representations all part of reading. In order to adequately make sense of a source, it’s important to understand the author, their background, and how this might have impacted what they produced. This connects to one of our claim testers—authority. Understanding what kind of authority the author has helps us interpret their point of view and also assists us in determining if their account is credible or trustworthy.

In this activity, you’re going to read a collection of documents related to a high school located in Anytown, USA, that recently changed its off-campus lunch policy. As you can probably imagine, changing a school policy such as this one garnered a lot of reactions from both the local and school community.

Everyone—from the administration, to students, to local business owners—had an opinion about this change. Now, you are being asked to examine everyone’s reactions to this policy change to determine why this was such a significant moment in time. This is something historians do all the time to understand the past: they look at the past from different people’s perspectives to understand the historical importance of that event. This is typically referred to as sourcing.

You will source documents throughout the course, something that is not easy to do. Sourcing can be hard because sometimes people have to interpret old documents that are written in less-modern English, or that are translated from other languages. As part of sourcing work, you’ll also be asked to look at images and other types of documents to try to interpret the creator’s intention. Because this can be tricky, we’ve created a tool you can use to help you source documents. Review the Sourcing Tool, which is included in the Sourcing – Introduction worksheet, with your class. One way to remember what to think about when sourcing is by using the acronym HAPPY. Review each section of the tool with your class and be sure to pay attention to the questions being asked in each section.

Once you’ve reviewed the tool, you’re going to learn more about it by using it to review some source documents from when the off-campus lunch policy change took place.

Get into groups of four and look at the excerpts, also included in the worksheet. Each person in your group should pick one excerpt to read and then share about with the rest of the group. Then, decide which document is the best fit for each of the first four sourcing categories of HAPPY: historical context (H), audience (A), purpose (P), and point of view (P). Be sure you can explain your category decisions and be prepared to share your answers with the class.

Once you’ve discussed the documents as a class, pick out one of the sources and answer the questions in the WhY (Importance) row of the Sourcing Tool. Hand in your answers to your teacher before leaving class.

In this first activity in the Causation Practice Progression, you’ll get familiar with different ways of understanding cause and consequence, and you’ll learn to use cause and consequence as analytical tools for understanding change over time. Historical events rarely have a single, proximate cause—some happen immediately before an event, some long before an event; some play a central role, and some merely contribute. Some causes may also be considered consequences, and the significance of the event may change depending on your framing of that event. In this activity, you will quickly learn about different types of causes.

Note that “Alphonse the Camel” is a story that was used in the Big History Project course, so you might be familiar with it. Although the story is being reused in this course, the way it’s being used is different, so be sure to pay close attention to the differences!

Start by listening to or reading the following story:

Alphonse the Camel

Once upon a time, there was a camel (called Alphonse). For various reasons (relating to an unfortunate accident during his birth) the camel had severe back problems. This was not the end of his misfortune, however, because he also had an evil, exploitative owner (called Frank the Camel Killer). Frank had hated camels ever since he experienced a nasty incident in his childhood involving a camel’s hoof and his rear end. He was very bitter and hadn’t trusted camels since.

Frank regularly overloaded his camels prior to taking them on grueling and totally unnecessary round trips up and down mountains on his way to deliver goods to his customers. These customers, shockingly, were completely indifferent to these frequent and gross violations of the rights of camels and even found Frank and his antics vaguely endearing. On top of it all, Alphonse was sometimes his own worst enemy. Camels are very proud creatures, and he would act tough in front of his camel friends, and on his rare breaks he would show off how much he could carry.

Plenty of camels had died doing similar work to Alphonse and his friends. After a particularly nasty few weeks when camels were keeling over left, right, and center, the camels decided to form a union to defend their rights and protect them from evil owners. However, when it comes down to it, camels are selfish creatures who don’t trust each other. They were more worried about looking after themselves than about working together, and the union soon fizzled out.

One Friday, Frank had just finished loading up Alphonse and his poor exploited fellow creatures for yet another grueling and totally unnecessary round trip up and down the mountains. He had piled and piled and piled up the goods onto Alphonse’s back and was taking a break, chewing a straw while thinking smugly about his handiwork. On a whim, he decided to add the bedraggled straw he had been chewing to Alphonse’s load. Alphonse groaned obligingly. He eyed his owner with disgust. He keeled over and died of radical and irreversible back collapse.

Now, list all the reasons you can think of for why Alphonse died. Once you and your class have come up with a final list, write all the reasons on sticky notes or cards.

Arrange your stickies or cards into three different categories: short-, intermediate-, and long-term causes. Once you’ve arranged your cards by timeframe, look at your short-term cards to identify the triggering event in the story. The triggering event is defined as the most immediate cause of an event. Be ready to share your categorizations with the class.

You might notice that you didn’t categorize long-, intermediate-, and short-term causes the same way as some of your classmates. That’s OK! Our perspective—in this case, timeframe—can shift how we categorize the causes. Therefore, the definitions of long term, intermediate term, and short term vary and depend on the timeframe or periodization that you use to examine an event.

Finally, take a look at the Causation Tool (included in the Causation – Introduction worksheet), which is meant to help you categorize causes and consequences. Although you haven’t been introduced to everything on the tool quite yet, you will become familiar with role, type, and effects soon enough! You can use this tool to create a causal map or other representation of causation. Eventually, you will probably get so used to the tool that you won’t need it anymore. But for now, it will help as you get used to this type of historical analysis.

As you’ve learned, one of the main historical thinking tools that historians use to analyze and produce accounts of the past is comparison. In this activity, you’ll learn how to evaluate for continuity and change over time (which we’ll refer to as CCOT throughout the course) so that you have a method for comparing (and making claims about) how the same location, idea, or historical process either stayed the same or changed during a set time in history.

Comparison, causation
Continuity and change analysis involves comparison, but it’s different from the kind of historical comparison that you’ve been introduced to earlier in this course. Typically, historical comparison involves examining the similarities and differences between two things, while CCOT looks at how things stayed the same or changed over time. Comparison is often a component of a CCOT analysis. Additionally, part of understanding how and when a change occurred is related to understanding the causes and consequences of those changes.

What are continuities? What are changes? How do these relate to history? We refer to continuities as the things that have stayed the same over time in history. And changes—which are often easier to identify—are the things that did not stay the same. Historians often do something called a continuity and change over time analysis (CCOT analysis for short). They do this by looking at how certain things changed or stayed the same over time. One of the reasons historians find CCOT analysis useful is that recognizing what has stayed the same helps them decide which changes throughout history were the most significant. This, in turn, allows historians to see how those changes may have led to major transformations in how people lived and continue to live today.

Instead of looking at an event or something that happened at a defined moment or time period, we are now trying to understand how farms, one of the mainstays of societies since the development of agriculture, have evolved. We are going to look at farms in the state of Iowa from the 1700s, 1800s, 1900s, and today, to determine how farms have changed and how they’ve stayed the same over time.

Your teacher will either hand out or have you download the CCOT – Introduction worksheet. Glance at the pictures of the four farms on the first few pages. Based on just the images, discuss as a class what is the same and what is different about the four farms. Remember that the things that are the same are continuities. And the things that are different are, you guessed it, changes!

Now, you’ll review the CCOT Tool portion of the worksheet with your class. As with sourcing, claim testing, and reading, there is a tool that you can use to help you analyze continuities and changes. Working in small groups, write down on the tool portion of the worksheet the timeframe with which you’re working. Then, read through the text accompanying the images of farms and write the continuities and changes you find on your sticky notes (one continuity or one change per sticky note).

Next, place your sticky notes on the graph (either using the graph in your worksheet or by drawing the graph on the board) and decide whether your continuities and changes were positive or negative. Be prepared to explain your reasons for categorizing your continuities and changes as either positive or negative.

Once your group has placed all your sticky notes on the graph, answer the remaining questions on the tool. In the last set of questions, you’ll be evaluating the most significant change and continuity. You can use the acronym ADE (amount, depth, and endurance) to help you determine historical significance. You’ll decide if the changes and continuities affected all people (amount); if the changes and continuities deeply affected people (depth); or if the changes and continuities were long lasting (endurance). Be prepared to share your most significant continuities and changes with the class.

Your teacher will collect your worksheets and use them to assess your understanding of this historical thinking practice. And remember, this is a just a simple exercise to get you used to the idea of CCOT. It’s going to get a lot more complicated as you move through the course and increase your historical knowledge!

Comparison is a key process that historians use to help them better understand the past. While comparing and contrasting is something that you’ve likely engaged in prior to this course, in this activity you’re introduced to a systematic way of conducting historical comparison. The ultimate goal is for you to be able to describe and explain the relevant similarities and differences between specific historical developments and processes, as well as to be able to explain the relative historical significance of similarities and differences between topics of study. In addition, you’ll learn to use the Comparison Tool (which you’ll see an example of in this activity’s worksheet) to conduct and generate historical comparisons.

Reading
You’ll conduct historical comparison both as part of reading historical accounts and as part of generating your own historical interpretations. This comparison activity has you look at two points of time and place (temporal and spatial scale). Try to use the language of spatial scale when describing your comparison (for example: local, regional, national, or global).

Although comparing and contrasting may sound simple, it actually gets really complicated when what you’re comparing is multidimensional, as is the case with historical topics. Because comparison is harder than it looks, your teacher will show you a tool you can use to conduct historical comparisons using the themes you learned about earlier in this unit.

First, your teacher will either hand out or have you download the Comparison – Life in 1200 and Today worksheet. Review the questions associated with each of the themes. The questions in the left-hand column of the worksheet have been selected because they are most relevant to this particular comparison. As this is the first comparison activity of the course, you’ll complete this one together as a class. Your teacher will guide you through the process of using these questions to fill in the top few rows of the worksheet.

Before you read the synopsis of life in 1200, decide which time period you’d rather live in—today or 1200. Be sure to explain your choice.

Next, read the synopsis of life in 1200. This is a general story of what life was like in the thirteenth century, so the specifics would change depending on geographic location, ethnicity, age, gender, and social class. Your teacher may also have you read one or more of the region-specific paragraphs for what life was like in 1200.

Then, as a class, work to fill out the first part of the worksheet using the synopsis for 1200. Next, do the same thing to complete the sections for life today, using your own knowledge of today to fill out those columns. Remember, the social theme refers to how people organize into groups and how they interact in those groups. Political is about governance, leadership, and order. Economy is really about the ways in which humans produce, exchange, and distribute goods and services. Once you have filled out the Today section with the class, discuss the following questions:

• How are these stories similar?
• How are they different?
• What’s important about those similarities and differences?

Now that you’ve learned more about life in 1200 versus today, would you change the answer you gave at the start of this activity about which period you’d rather live in? Be prepared to share your reasoning with the class.

Once everyone has completed the rows relating to the themes, you’ll review the answers together, and then work in small groups to identify similarities and differences between life in 1200 and today, which you’ll then add to the similarities and differences sections on the Comparison Tool.

Finally, you’ll come back together as a class to share the similarities and differences your group came up with.

Your teacher may also discuss how to use these similarities and differences to develop two thesis statements, one about the similarities between 1200 and today, and another about the differences between 1200 and today.

Don’t worry—if your teacher chooses to have you do this activity extension, they’ll walk you through the definition of a thesis statement and show you how to create a thesis statement that answers a comparison prompt.

This activity will introduce you to WHP’s map activities. Maps are a great way to show information about our world. They let you know where stuff is in relation to other stuff. They can help orient you in time and space and identify some important historical changes. But maps are also one more way to tell a story. You’re probably not super familiar with the geography of 1200 CE, so we won’t ask you to draw any historical maps…yet. Instead, in this first activity, you’ll get familiar with WHP mapping activities by completing a scavenger hunt—a map of your personal world!

You’ll begin this activity by completing a scavenger hunt, in which you identify, label, and annotate a blank map. Next, you’ll discuss what maps are and what they do. Finally, your teacher will do some show-and-tell, guiding you through some of WHP’s maps so you can easily recognize the various blank, political, and thematic maps you’ll encounter in the course.

Step 1

This is the first of several mapping activities you’ll complete in this course. At the beginning of each unit, you will identify features and label them on a map, and at the end of each unit, you will use maps to respond to the Unit Problem or to connect to the AP themes.

Individually or in small groups, you should review the scavenger hunt list and label the map to the best of your ability. Some items on the list ask you to provide an annotation—meaning you need to write notes on the map giving additional explanation along with the label. Remember, this is the first map activity, and you’re not expected to know everything.

Step 2

As a whole class, share your answers to the scavenger hunt and make any corrections to your map. Your teacher will then ask you some questions about what maps are and what they do.

Step 3

In groups or as a whole class, your teacher will guide you through some of WHP’s maps. In the scavenger hunt, you’ve just worked with a blank map, but there are two more kinds of maps in WHP activities: political and thematic maps. As your teacher introduces you to each new map, try to identify important features. What information is contained in the map? What do the labels and colors mean? Where is the legend? What did the makers of this map care about? What’s missing from this map? Did anything surprise you?