DoHistory

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• Learn more about American history, colonial, information literacy, primary sources, and research.

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In 1981, historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich applied for a two-month research grant to work with the diary of Martha Ballard, a midwife who lived in a small town in Maine at the turn of the 19th century. Other researchers had dismissed the diary as historically unimportant - it was a sparse account by a relatively ordinary woman. But Ulrich saw in the diary - which covers every day of 27 years - a window into the daily life of early New England. She spent the next eight years reconstructing the lives of Martha Ballard, her family, and her neighbors from thousands of fragmentary surviving sources. The result of this massive project was her 1990 book A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary 1785-1812, which won the Bancroft Prize, the historical profession’s highest honor. PBS later produced a film that told the stories of Martha Ballard and of Laurel Ulrich’s work.

This website, DoHistory, takes you and your students through the same process of historical research. DoHistory, made by the Film Study Center at Harvard University, is “an experimental, interactive case study” that “invites you to explore the process of piecing together the lives of ordinary people in the past.” Although the site is based on the life of Martha Ballard, it teaches “basic skills and techniques for interpreting fragments that survive from any period in history.”

DoHistory offers excerpts from the book and film of A Midwife’s Tale as well as information about how each came to be. The entire text of Martha Ballard’s diary - both in her own handwriting and transcribed - and a variety of related primary documents are available as a basis for students to reconstruct her life on their own. A section entitled Doing History takes you through the process of reconstructing two important events from Martha Ballard’s life and of discovering the social and cultural context of those events. One of these events was the rape of Rebecca Foster, the young minister’s wife, by Joseph North, a local judge, offers students the chance to play “detective” with court, church, and town records as well as first-hand accounts. (Needless to say, this activity deals with sensitive issues and is not appropriate for younger students!)