Lindsay Stewart
Easton Middle School, Talbot County Public Schools
Primary sources are not something I have ever really considered myself comfortable with. While I love to use photographs in the classroom, I never even thought of them when I was asked what primary sources I used in my classroom. After spending a few days working with different primary sources and investigating how to find them and what to do with them, I find myself much more comfortable using them with my students. Since the workshop I have used multiple images and narratives of child laborers from the industrial revolution era as well as had students recreate some of these images and documents as a way to ‘push’ my students from their world into history.
At the end of the workshop, I was really not sure how to use LOCAL primary sources in any way. I had seen all of the different ways to find the resources and heard ideas of how to use such sources; but nothing really jumped at me as working for my classes. A few days later we began covering the age of reform with my 8th grade classes. I had an ‘Ah Ha!’ moment when reading exit tickets one day which led me to realize that over half of my students had NO idea that Maryland had a history of slavery. This came as a shock to me – with the birthplace of Frederick Douglass practically in our backyards, these students hadn’t the foggiest idea of Maryland’s slave filled past. With this in mind, I began to dig for sources and documents I could use to once more push my students into Maryland’s past and the past of our own Eastern Shore. I have decided to build a historical investigation based on a picture of a supposed slave sale taking place in downtown Easton (only 4-5 blocks from our school!)
The picture is of a market taking place near the courthouse in downtown Easton. Records show that many things were traded at these markets, but there is no proof that there were slaves being sold at the time of this picture. I hope to use other sources also found at the workshop – such as newspaper ads from the Easton Gazette and other news outlets regarding slaves and, of course, narratives of a Talbot county native, Frederick Douglass, to help the children decide for themselves what exactly is going on in this picture. While the end result will undoubtedly be inconclusive, my goal is to simply open my students’ eyes to the fact that the institution of slavery isn’t something that is just tied to the Deep South – but actually a historical fact from their own home town. Along with the above photo, I also plan to use excerpts from a narrative found at the Talbot County Free Library.
