ABSTRACT
Kevin O’Reilly, a high school American history teacher from the Hamilton-Wenham School system in Massachusetts, starts his lessons about the reliability of sources of information in history by staging a scuffle in the corridors outside his classroom. He then tries to ascertain what happened by asking students who were in the vicinity. The differences in the accounts his students give are like the variety of accounts that were given about who fired first in the Revolutionary War at the Battle of Lexington (Massachusetts) in 1775. The attempts by these students to determine which of the eyewitnesses to the battle-gave the most accurate account, and their reflections on why one account is better or worse than another, arm them with certain critical skills that they draw on again and again in Kevin’s classroom. In the immediate context of their study of the Revolutionary War, these skills put Kevin’s students in an excellent position to make informed critical judgments of the accuracy of various textbook accounts of these incidents that other students in other classrooms are directed to read simply to “get the facts.”
