One of the things that is a bit different about the way I'm using primary sources in my US History 1 class this semester is that they don't necessarily conform with the "high points" of traditional American history. People didn't write primary sources ONLY about the events and people that subsequent historians have decided were momentous or pivotal in our national past. They wrote about what was happening to them and the people they cared about, in their little corner of the world.
The 212 primary source passages I'm having students read this semester are relatively evenly spaced across the decades. The first section's coverage is a bit wider, since it's collecting impressions from before the period of English colonization. But once we're into the English colonial period in the early seventeenth century, the sections advance fairly chronologically (if not entirely evenly). Section Two's sources date from 1602 to 1623. Section Three takes us from 1623 to 1670. At this pace, we don't reach the French and Indian War (1754-63) until Section Six! Not a lot happens in most American Histories, between the Starving Time in Jamestown and Washington's retreat from Fort Necessity (well, maybe Bacon's Rebellion and King Philip's War). But a lot happens in those decades that are really nearly a century, to the people living in America!
I'm hoping the effect of going through this semester-long process of reading and discussing slightly less momentous events described by regular people, along with some primary sources describing the big events that we ARE going to read, will remind students that there's a lot happening all the time, that doesn't necessarily make the headlines and wind up in the history books. I think that's important for them to consider, in the present moment when all our attention seems to be directed at national news stories we're being told are the most important things (the existential crises) we really ought to be spending all our time thinking about.
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