Introduction for Students

Historical documents allow us to peer into the past and learn what happened and what did not happen — crucial beginning points for understanding how and why the present came to be. They record bits of history and preserve the momentary ideas and experiences of individuals and groups. But how can you, a twenty-first-century student, read and truly comprehend a letter from a seventeenth-century indentured servant or a nineteenth-century woman on the frontier, full of irregular spelling and contemporary references? How can you determine the historical value and accuracy of documents recorded years or even centuries ago? How can you read documents to figure out what really happened in the past?