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History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 8

Historical Reasoning and Source Corroboration

What happened on King Street in Boston on the night of 5 March 1770? Learners investigate the Boston Massacre through an engraving, a British officer's account and trial testimony. They practice sourcing, contextualization, close reading and corroboration, separate perspective from bias and propaganda, and write their own carefully corroborated account.

  • 4 lessons
  • About 110 minutes
  • Corroboration check: 9 questions
  • Ways to answer: fill in the blanks, choose an answer, highlight a text, match pairs, type a number and put in order
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What learners will discover

  • Source and contextualize documents: identify author, date, audience and purpose, and explain how the situation in Boston in 1768–1770 shaped them.
  • Corroborate conflicting accounts to identify what is well supported, what is contested and what cannot be known.
  • Distinguish perspective, bias and propaganda, and judge a source's reliability and usefulness for a specific question.
  • Write a historical account that uses corroborated evidence and states uncertainty honestly.

Lessons

  1. Context: Boston, 1768–1770 5 steps3 practiceabout 25 min
  2. Three accounts 5 steps3 practiceabout 28 min
  3. Corroborate the accounts 6 steps3 practiceabout 28 min
  4. Perspective, bias and propaganda 5 steps4 practiceabout 29 min
  5. Corroboration check 9 questions at the end

Keep exploring

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