Teaching with Primary Sources

Most Montana History Society Lesson Plans include primary sources. You can find even more primary source lesson plans by exploring the resources listed on our Indian Education for All, Hand's-on History Footlocker, and Integrating Art and History pages. 

Featured Resources

Annotated Resource Sets  The Montana Historical Society has created topical resource sets that include links to photographs, maps, illustrations, and documents. Many, but not all, of the images linked in these sets were also used to illustrate the textbook Montana: Stories of the Land. These sources can be used to build PowerPoints or to create DBQs or other primary-source based activities.

Montana Newspapers Online  Newspapers are the closest thing we have to a time machine. See which issues and papers are available for online research.

Learning from Historical Documents  The Montana Historical Society posted primary sources relating to almost every era in Montana history when they created the Montana: Stories of the Land Companion Website. They are aggregated on this page. A typed excerpt, a link to the original, a brief context, and a copy of the National Archives Document Analysis Worksheet is posted for each document.

Featured Lessons

Girl from the Gulches: The Story of Mary Ronan Study Guide  This study guide includes lesson plans, vocabulary, chapter summaries and questions, alignment to the Common Core, and other information to facilitate classroom use of Girl from the Gulches: The Story of Mary Ronan, as told to Margaret Ronan, edited by Ellen Baumler. Set in the second half of the nineteenth century, this highly readable 222-page memoir details Mary Sheehan Ronan’s journey across the Great Plains, her childhood on the Colorado and Montana mining frontiers, her ascent to young womanhood in Southern California, her return to Montana as a young bride, and her life on the Flathead Indian Reservation as the wife of an Indian agent. Book One, which provides a child’s-eye view of the mining frontier, is available to download as a PDF. Classroom sets of Girl from the Gulches can be purchased from the Montana Historical Society Museum Store by calling toll free 1-800-243-9900.  (Designed for 6-10).

Hazel Hunkins, Billings Suffragist: A Primary Source Investigation  In this lesson, student historians will analyze photos, letters, newspaper articles, and other sources to learn more about the suffrage movement as experienced by Billings, Montana, native and National Woman's Party activist Hazel Hunkins. (Designed for 8-12) 

Oral History in the Classroom  The User Guide for our oral history mini footlocker includes detailed lesson plans for creating a classroom-based oral history project.Order the footlocker to borrow eight Sony IC Audio Recorders, batteries and chargers and additional useful reference material. (Designed for 4-12)

Reader's Theater: Letters Home from Montanans at War  This three-to-five period unit asks students to work in groups to read and interpret letters written by soldiers at war, from the Civil War to the Operation Iraqi Freedom. After engaging in close reading and conducting research to interpret the letters, they will perform the letters as reader’s theater. Preview this lesson by watching Rob Hoffman perform one of the letters, a 2005 email from Helenan Cory Swanson, who was serving in Iraq. (Designed for 7-12) 

Women at Work Lesson Plan: Clothesline Timeline. This primary-source based lesson asks students to analyze historic photographs to draw conclusions about women and work from the 1870s through the 2010s. Students will discover that Montana women have always worked, but that discrimination, cultural expectations, and changing technology have influenced the types of work women undertook. (Designed for 4-12)

Additional Lessons and Resources

"Montana's Landless Indians and the Assimilation Era of Federal Indian Policy: A Case of Contradiction" is a week-long primary-source based unit designed to introduce students to the history of the landless Métis, Cree, and Chippewa Indians in Montana between 1889 and 1916, while giving them an opportunity to do their own guided analysis of historical and primary source materials. In this Common Core-aligned unit, students will wrestle with issues of perspective, power, ideology, and prejudice and will closely examine the role Montana newspapers played in shaping public opinion toward the tribes’ attempts to maintain economic independence and gain a land base and political recognition. (Designed for grades 10-12 or college)

Montana’s State Flower: A Lesson in Civic Engagement  This seven-period unit introduces students to the electoral process while providing an opportunity to develop research skills and to explore historical newspapers. By organizing an election for class flower, students will learn about the electoral process and experience civic engagement first hand while practicing such Common Core skills as close reading of complex texts and persuasive writing. (Designed for 4-7)

Thinking Like a Historian: Using Digital Newspapers in the Classroom  Have students exercise their historical imaginations as while introducing them to the research, the richness of historic newspapers, and the social history of gold-rush era Montana. (Designed for 4-8)