Examples of Historical Thinking - Slave Receipts - Slavery and the Law
Channel: teachinghistoryorg
Date: 15/09/2011

Historian Tom Thurston analyzes a slave receipt that records the sale of a female slave named Mary and her child, Louisianna, for $1,000 on September 17, 1853. Thurston models several historical thinking skills, including:

    close reading of the 1853 slave receipt to investigate the details of a single transaction as well as the larger significance of printed receipts and the information they convey;
    drawing on prior knowledge of life in the mid-19th-century in a country nearing Civil War; and
    placing the slave receipt within a larger context of the law, finances, and the geography of slavery.

http://teachinghistory.org/best-practices/examples-of-historical-thinking/23641