Teaching Historical Thinking Through a Primary Source Database: Everyday Life Under Stalin

This module is part of the #AHRSyllabus project. More information about the project can be found on the AHR website under #AHRSyllabus. 

I. Baranov, Here and there in the Soviet Union, 1938-1951, photograph, 18 x 23.5 cm, Soviet Information Bureau Photograph Collection, Fung Library, Harvard University Library.

Edward Cohn

One of the main goals of any history class is to help students learn to think like historians. It can be hard, however, to produce exercises for introductory classes that resemble the work that historians actually do. This module, designed by a historian of the Soviet Union, shows how instructors of intro-level college history classes can work not just with pre-selected primary sources, but with an entire archive of documents—an online collection of oral history transcripts about everyday life in the Soviet Union known as the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System (HPSSS). The module begins with an essay on using primary sources in the college classroom and then presents readers with a lesson plan introducing students to the oral history collection and a writing assignment on the history of Soviet jokes or rumors. Through this module, students will get a sense of life in Stalin’s Russia and will hone their skills in reading primary sources, asking historical questions, and synthesizing material from a large and sometimes messy historical archive.

Read the module in full here.