Inquiring and Storytelling Using the Letters

This project represents NC State College of Education graduate students' work interpreting letters from the Plantation Letters collection http://plantationletters.com/. The work reported here is a project of inquiry, analysis and imagination. Students were asked to initially engage the letters using a tool called the Document Viewer (read a description of the Document Viewer here). The viewer allowed students to select letters according to topics and actually read the letters in a side by side browser.

The letters were written by people connected with the Cameron plantations of North Carolina and Alabama. The overall focus of this project is on the lives of people living and working on these plantations. After students made their initial engagement with the letters in the Cameron collection and selected a topic, they then began to analysis the letters and post information about the activities on the plantations and about people mentioned in the letters. These posting are below and can be located by scrolling through he discussion postings.

Ultimately the analysis involved reading and analyzing letters using the power of collaboration. This involved each student reading a small subset of the letters and reporting on these in the postings below.

After the letters were analyzed, students developed inferences about what they had read and ultimately composed stories about people and events recorded in the letters. When writing their stories, students took some fictional license, but are grounded in the letters. As evidence of this grounding, all stories include a memo that traces the story back to the letters. These memos are available below as well.

After students wrote their stories, they recorded podcast versions. Links to these podcast can be found within the memos or you can hear them here on our Plantation Letters Ning music player.

More information about the process and other projects in this class can be found at

The Digital History Lab - www.lab.dhpp.org