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Lesson Overview
Featured Article: “The Lost Diaries of War” by Nina Siegal and Josephine Sedgwick
Volunteers have begun an effort to transcribe the pages of more than 2,000 diaries written by ordinary people during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Their voices, filled with anxiety, isolation and uncertainty, resonate powerfully today.
In this lesson, you’ll consider the value that first-person accounts like diaries and letters can have when it comes to understanding history. Then, you’ll be invited to start your own journal that may one day help future historians learn what it was like to live through the coronavirus pandemic.
Warm Up
Have you ever read diaries or letters to learn about history? For instance, maybe you’ve read “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl” to learn about World War II and the Holocaust or studied Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks.
What can you learn about history through first-person accounts like these? How is the experience of reading them different from, say, reading a textbook or a newspaper article?
Spend a few minutes viewing the images in the featured article, which includes photographs and diary entries by ordinary people during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. What makes these different from other historical sources? What insights might they give us into what life was like during this time?
Now, read the featured article to find out.
Questions for Writing and Discussion
First, read the introduction and answer the following questions:
1. Why did the Dutch minister of education tell citizens to preserve the diaries and letters they had written during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands?
Then, choose two diary entries to read in full and continue to respond to the questions:
2. What did you learn about the Nazi occupation from these entries that you might not have learned from a more formal source, like a textbook or newspaper article?
3. Which lines or images from the entries that you read resonated with you the most? Why?
4. The authors say that these diarists’ words “register with particular power today in another unsettled time.” Do you agree? What, if anything, did you read that resonates with your experience today? Why?
Finally, scroll to the end of the article to read the conclusion, which begins after the diary titled “Liberation in Zwolle.” Then, respond to the last question:
5. According to the article, experts say that “diaries, once thought to be too subjective to be historical sources, are now regarded as more reliable.” What advantages and disadvantages might there be to using diaries to learn about history? Do you think they have value as historical sources? Why or why not?
Going Further
You are living through history now, too — and future historians might turn to personal diaries to learn about this uncertain time.
Have you been keeping a diary, or thought about keeping one, to record your experiences of living through the coronavirus pandemic? What unique insights and perspectives do you think you might have for future historians who will study this time period?
Try writing a journal entry modeled after the ones you read. You can write about anything — the ways your life has been upended, the acts of kindness you’ve witnessed, the struggles and joys of distance learning — but, like researchers in the article suggest, you might focus primarily on your thoughts and feelings.
For more inspiration, see the “Journal” project in our lesson plan “12 Ideas for Writing Through the Pandemic With The New York Times.”
