SkillsHistorical thinking toolkit

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Historical thinking

Think Like a Historian

Three questions to bring to any event, person, or source. Ask them in this order and your writing gets deeper on its own.

WHY?
Look for motive and cause behind what people did and what they left behind.
- Why did this happen?
- Why did this person or group act this way?
- Why might this source have this point of view?
HOW?
Trace the links between events, evidence, and the argument you are making.
- How are these ideas connected?
- How did one event affect another?
- How does this evidence support my claim?
- How does historical context matter?
SO WHAT?
Push past what happened to why it mattered, and to whom.
- Why does this matter?
- What changed because of it?
- Who was affected?
- What does this evidence show?

Reference

Your own definitions, gathered by job. Use it while you write — it is a reference shelf, not an assignment.

Start with a defensible answer, then prove it.

Thesis / Claim: A claim is a clear, defensible answer or argument that can be supported with evidence. A thesis is the central claim of a longer or more developed response. In 7th grade, the terms can be used interchangeably.
Evidence: Specific information used to support a claim or thesis.
Reasoning: The explanation that connects evidence back to a claim.
Analysis: Analysis takes your thinking deeper. It explains HOW things are connected, WHY something happened, WHAT resulted, or WHY it matters.

The frameworks we use to turn an answer into an argument.

CER: A writing structure that stands for Claim, Evidence, and Reasoning.
TEA: A historical-writing structure that stands for Thesis, Evidence, and Analysis.

Go past the basics with context, connections, and outside knowledge.

Analysis: Analysis takes your thinking deeper. It explains HOW things are connected, WHY something happened, WHAT resulted, or WHY it matters.
Outside Information: Relevant historical facts, details, examples, or vocabulary you know from your own reading, notes, and learning, not just from the source placed in front of you.
Historical Context: The background information about the time, place, and circumstances surrounding a source or event.
Geographic Context: The location and physical surroundings of a historical event, place, or source and how those surroundings may have influenced it.

Read a source the way a historian does before you use it as evidence.

Primary Source: Firsthand evidence connected to the time, person, or event being studied.
Secondary Source: An account, explanation, or interpretation of the past created by someone who did not directly experience the event being described.
Sourcing: Examining basic information about a source before closely analyzing what it says.
HIPP: An acronym historians can use to analyze a historical source after sourcing it.
Point of View: The way a person sees or understands an event or issue.
Purpose: The reason a source was created.
Intended Audience: The specific person or group a source was created to reach or influence.
Bias: A one-sided or slanted point of view that favors or opposes a person, group, idea, or outcome instead of being completely neutral.
Reliable / Reliability: Reliability means how much a source can be trusted to provide accurate information for the question you are asking.
Corroboration: Comparing multiple sources to see where they agree, disagree, or support the same idea.
Time Gap: The amount of time between the event being studied and the creation of a source about that event.

How to mark up a source so your thinking is visible.

Annotations / Annotating: To annotate means to make purposeful notes or marks on a text while reading.
Text Tagging: Text tagging means adding simple labels or marks to a text to show what specific information is about.
Chronological Order: The arrangement of events in the order in which they happened, from earliest to latest.