Tips for Teachers


Integrating the podcast into a curriculum

The type of historical inquiry and analysis that drives The Last Archive is consistent with the national History Standards urged by the National Center for History in the Schools, at UCLA, including the emphasis on the learning of historical thinking and the practice of historical methods. The podcast is also easily integrated with the historical thinking skills promoted by the Stanford History Education Group.

Everything we do on The Last Archive also lines up with the History disciplinary standards elaborated by the National Council of Social Studies. The Last Archive’s specific investigation of sources and evidence and the rules of evidence is driven by the same framework identified by the NCSS’s broader, social studies-wide emphasis on evidence and sources.

Some Ideas for Activities

  • Make a list of the rules of evidence you use over the course of an ordinary day. Here are some examples! If my brother tells me something, I always check with my sister. I have gotten pranked too many times by texts from my friend Satchel so I pretty much wait and see when he texts me something. If I want to know something, I usually go to Wikipedia first, even though my teachers tell me not to. 

  • Pick apart an episode: What is its argument? What’s the evidence used to support that argument? Do you buy it?

  • Read the primary sources we used in our show and analyze them for yourself—did we miss anything? Do you read these sources differently? Could you make a totally different argument using this same set of sources? 

    • Think of different sources you might look for to tell the story in the episode. How would you find them? Might they lead you to a different argument?

    • Choose one of the primary sources we used in The Last Archive and analyze it for yourself. How does that source help you answer the guiding question of that episode?  Sample Primary Source Analysis Worksheet.

  • What will be the most important primary sources when the COVID-19 episode of The Last Archive comes out in fifty years? Pick a few documents (could be journals, TV or radio news clips, drawings, tweets, newspaper articles) you think we will want to keep in the Archive.

  • Make a timeline of the last century and populate it with moments when the world of knowledge changed, in some big way. What forces drive change?

  • Do you have an archive? What’s in it? Make an inventory! Ok, back up: What is an archive? Write a definition. See if you can figure out what our definition is. Is yours the same as ours? (A tip: you could make a list of all the things we say we have found inside the Last Archive.)

  • If you don’t have an archive, this is a good time to create one!

    • Gather artifacts that document your experience of the coronavirus pandemic. History is everything, so consider the physical artifacts that represent your experience: city public health posters, grocery store receipts, photographs of closed businesses, or of people practicing social distancing. How would you archive this moment in history?

    • Libraries and museums like the Brooklyn Historical Society are collecting digital and physical artifacts. Check if your local library, museum, or historical society is collecting similar artifacts, or start collecting your own!

  • Or, you could add stuff to the Last Archive! Can you find any additional sources that would help us answer one of the guiding questions to one of our episodes? Where would you start looking? Also, if you find something, let us know!

    • Check out one of the following public archives and see if you can hunt down another clue. How does that source help you answer the guiding question of that episode?  Sample Primary Source Analysis Worksheet.

  • If you were to invent a “lie detector,” what form would it take? Would it be a machine? An app? A jury of your peers? Design one!

    • Pick something in the news, something controversial. Make a list of sources you could look to to find out if it’s true. Then rank those sources in order of most credible to least credible. Then make a list of methods you might use to evaluate those sources. Then decide whether that list is really a sequence, a set of steps you’d need to take. This is probably a crazy-interesting list! Ask some questions about your list, and take a look at other people’s lists. Are these sources you’ve listed using the same foundation of facts? What different kinds of arguments are they making? How are they making them?

  • Interview a family member and submit your work for an oral history project. Everything has a history. AND SO DOES EVERYONE! Me, I like the motto of the Southern Oral History Program: “You don’t have to be famous for your life to be history.” Oral histories are invaluable sources for historians to learn from previously unheard people. They fill out the historical record. Before you get started, ask yourself some questions. What about a person’s life makes it history? Where do the events in each of our lives intersect with bigger events, in everyone’s life? That’s one of the weird things about this moment in time, the COVID-19 pandemic: Somehow people get a sense of how much more closely tied together all of our histories are. How will you decide which member of your family to interview? The person who’s the best talker? The person who tells the best jokes? The person who’s travelled farthest? Those are your decisions. Historians make those decisions all the time. And then other historians use those interviews all the time. You might consider using StoryCorps Connect, a new app developed by StoryCorps to do long distance interviews during the pandemic.

  • Produce your own mini-episode of The Last Archive. We had a lot of fun creating the audio world of The Last Archive. We would be so happy if you would send them to us at lastarchive@pushkin.fm! Here are some resources to help you create your own podcast:

  • Free advice on how to make podcasts:

  • Historical audio: Internet Audio Archive

  • Fun sound effects: www.freesound.org 


Be sure to check out our Guiding Questions, episode by episode.