Using AI to Create Primary Source Packets: The New Deal in the U.S.

The Experiment

While the New Deal was undoubtedly a transformative moment in U.S. History, it is also all too often taught as a series of programs without focus on who the system included or excluded. I wanted to replace the passive lecture with a primary source activity. This had the benefit of having students make the explicit connections based on original sources that the New Deal was structurally designed to exclude women and African Americans.

I prompted: “I am supposed to lecture on the New Deal in a couple of weeks for a U.S. History since 1877 course comprised primarily of upperclassmen who are History/International Studies majors. I would rather ditch the lecture and find a more engaging way to get them to understand the importance of the New Deal. Can you give me some suggestions?”

Claude suggested a primary-source analysis seminar, structured debate/devil’s-advocate panels, a case-study jigsaw, document-based problem-solving, or a legacy-and-long-arc discussion. I chose to go with the primary source packet centered on a structured debate, and I suggested focusing on the New Deal, which sought to reassert traditional gender and racial roles. This theme fits my own teaching and research interests, but you could easily choose any number of themes here.

We settled on the central discussion question: Was the New Deal a transformative expansion of federal responsibility, or did it reinforce and even institutionalize existing hierarchies of race and gender in American life?

Claude offered suggestions for primary source excerpts that explicitly addressed gender and race. It is essential here to verify all sources and ensure that the excerpts chosen are the best options. Do not blindly trust the LLM. Once I was happy with the documents, I asked Claude to create a Word Document with the five documents addressing race and gender in the New Deal.

What Happened

I started the class with a cold open. I put a short quote from Thomasville’s Times-Enterprise (a small Georgia newspaper) on the screen and asked students to spend two minutes writing a response to the question: “What do you notice?” to activate their thinking before we got into the discussion.

After, I separated my students into five groups of four or five, one per document. Each group had to identify the one or two most important sentences in their document and be ready to answer: What does this source tell us about who the New Deal was designed for? I gave them ten minutes to complete this.

Then I spent the next twenty minutes having each group report out briefly. I let the students talk, and I urged them to deepen their analysis by asking questions such as “Is that exclusion incidental or structural? What would have had to be different for this outcome not to have happened? Who is conspicuously absent from this document?”

I ended by posing the central question directly again: transformative expansion or reinforcement of hierarchy? I asked students to take a position with one piece of evidence.

For the final five minutes, I asked students to answer in one sentence: “What’s the most important thing the standard New Deal narrative leaves out, and why does it matter?” This served as an exit ticket, and it gave me a quick read on where everyone landed after our discussion.

The Limits

• The excerpts were good, but I think I would have used fewer voices and longer excerpts. Some felt rather disjointed.
• It took time for students to warm up to the debate in this activity.

Where I’m Taking This Next

• As mentioned above, I want to revise the primary source packet to include fewer voices but longer excerpts.
• It might be better to focus on race or gender rather than both, given the time limits.