ABSTRACT
This chapter emphasizes the importance of helping students gain insight into the perspectives of people in the past. Dramatic activities, simulated journals, and other responses to historical literature are particularly useful in involving students in deeper interactions with history, and these can easily be extended to a wide range of historical topics, events, and people. Amy begins by explaining how villagers’ religious beliefs and their ideas about work and community influenced their attitudes toward each other. Over the next two weeks, students take on the roles of villagers and plan a simulated trial of a woman accused of witchcraft. The development of racial slavery in British North America, for example, can only be understood with reference to Englishmen’s ideas about the differences between themselves and Africans; the conquest of Native Americans by reference to ideas about what constituted civilization.
