More recently, greater attention has been paid to teaching students how to use the internet, CD-ROM, and other technologies as they learn to do history. The proposed paper will examine a variety of digitized sources to illustrate how students can be taught how to be better researchers and writers. The course focuses on constructing narratives of English villages in the seventeenth century. The first sec tion of the paper will analyze a range of web and CD resources currently used in the seminar. To introduce students to historical demography and family reconstitution for example, I blend the five-diskette series of English birth, marriage, and death rec ords with printed parish registers and secondary interpretations.
Students work in small groups to first comprehend the demographic dynamics of small villages.
The work concentrates on Lancashire, Westmorland, and Cumberland and draws upon ecclesiastical, parochial, court, and estate records. Some of the materials are my own and some are placed on a private web site for ease of access and use. Others are on microform to remind students that other technologies continue to exist. The first half of the course emphasizes finding, reading, and interpreting the various types of primary and secondary mat erials. It also includes a crash course in seventeenth-century script.