Lemisko, Lynn. “The Inside, Out: Diaries as Entry Points to Historical Perspective Taking.” (2010)

Diaries can serve as meaningful entry points for advancing historical consciousness and developing historical thinking because they can connect readers/learners with the diverse emotions, thoughts and motivations of the people who wrote about them in particular times and places. Historical thinking and meaning-making involves exploration of both the ‘outside’ (that which would have been observable: “bodies and their movements”) and the ‘inside’ (that which would have been unobservable: thoughts, emotions, motivations) of past human actions. One of the tasks and tensions of historical work is to get to the ‘inside’ – to bring out (reveal or reconstruct) and contextualize ways of thinking and feeling represented in documents and artifacts left behind, so that we can understand both the similarities and differences in how people viewed the world. The author discusses the importance of historical perspective-taking as an aspect of historical thinking and outlines why and how teachers could assist learners in using diaries as evidence for reconstructing historical perspectives. She gives examples from three published diaries to show how these provide evidence of points of view in the context of the period in which they were written, and provides some specific suggestions of how teachers can use examples from these diaries to spark deeper probing of ideas and time periods.