Tutorial 2: Evaluating Primary Sources

Social and cultural distance

Sometimes people may be in the right place at the right time to experience an event and still be unable to offer useful testimony due to their social and cultural distance from it.

Check those types of testimony where you would expect social distance to be a problem.

Account of the GI experience by a veteran of the Vietnam War.
Account of a West African religious ceremony by a European colonialist.
Account of Cherokee life by a 19th century homesteader.
Account of the Great Depression by a Dust Bowl refugee.