Explore primary sources to learn about daily life in Colonial Massachusetts.

Students will practice with posing questions about primary source documents and then analyzing the resources to learn more about life in Colonial Massachusetts. Students will summarize their learning in the final lesson.

What was everyday life like for people who lived near the ocean in Massachusetts 250 years ago?

What can a newspaper tell us about the lives of men, women, and children in 1767 Massachusetts?

Focus skills include:

Maps, Knowledge, and Power in Medieval and Renaissance Europe

Maps are a representation of geographical space. As such, they are valuable as a source of information. Yet their makers can also use them to control or alter perceptions of that same information. In the 14th and 15th centuries, cartography, or the science of map-making, changed rapidly due to the explorations of the Americas. Use the maps below to trace some of these changes.

Primary Sources:

Mappa mundi, Hereford, c.1300 

The Bloody Massacre–Or Was It?

Performance assessments require students to demonstrate what they know and can do. Often expressed as “authentic”–mostly meaning as much like the real world as possible. In this performance task, fifth graders compare three pieces of evidence from a key event in American History.

The Library of Congress holds thousands of the most important primary sources on slavery and opposition to it and has devoted extensive and thoughtful labor to bringing them to the public. (See also the CES Primary Source Set: “Civil War and Reconstruction”). This primary source set offers distinct and vitally important sources not included in other primary source sets.