Intro to Grade 7/8 History
1. What is history?
• History is an account of the past.
• Accounts differ depending on who is telling the story. Primary vs Secondary sources.
• We rely on evidence to construct accounts of the past. This evidence can take many forms (diaries, drawings, maps, statistics, letters, newspapers, artifacts and other records from a given period).
• We must question the reliability of each piece of evidence.
• The more reliable evidence you have, the more reliable the account becomes.
2. Why do we study history?
3. What counts as history? How is it different from "the past"?
• History is an account of the past.
• Accounts differ depending on who is telling the story. Primary vs Secondary sources.
• We rely on evidence to construct accounts of the past. This evidence can take many forms (diaries, drawings, maps, statistics, letters, newspapers, artifacts and other records from a given period).
• We must question the reliability of each piece of evidence.
• The more reliable evidence you have, the more reliable the account becomes.
2. Why do we study history?
- We can learn about past mistakes and help change the future.
- We can learn how we came to be.
- We can learn about how our current society was built.
- Learning about history answers questions and sparks new ones.
- Everyone has a story, everyone has a past, everyone has a history, we truly get to know and understand one another when we learn each other's story.
- Countries, like people, have unique identities. A country's identity is influenced by its environment and the experiences of the people who live there. In order to better understand our country, we must learn its stories.
3. What counts as history? How is it different from "the past"?
- The past is everything that ever happened to anyone anywhere. For it to be considered history
- We usually consider events that result in change over long periods of time to be history.
- Events that change the world for good or bad are typically considered history.
- It depends on who the historian is.
