About History Lab: "Teaching with Livingston"

As more and more primary source documents are discovered, analyzed, and digitized, students of history can examine first-hand accounts of pivotal times in our nation’s history. Through Livingston and the men and women, free and enslaved, in his world, we can gain a deeper perspective and understanding of life, politics, government, society, economics, and religion in colonial North America as well as in the early nation during its foundational period and its early development into the first half of the 19th century.

Through these documents, along with the available secondary sources, we can reconstruct the lives, experiences, and understandings of a variety of individuals, from those who were the leaders of our nation and the societies and cultures that dominated our nation’s foundation to those that they employed as wage laborers as well as those they enslaved.

In this virtual “History Lab,” users will find primary and secondary sources through which one can “do history:” by reading the thematically arranged sources, users can explore the world of William Livingston and weave together a more complete, more inclusive, and more accurate understanding of that world. As documents were written in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, note that these documents and the transcriptions of them contain language that was in common usage in that time period that may be upsetting to modern readers and students of history.

Attached to each topic are sample discussion and essay prompts (as well as New Jersey, AP®, and National Student Learning Standards, K-12) to guide educators in how to use these sources in course instruction.

These documents are drawn from the published Papers of William Livingston, manuscript holdings at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Liberty Hall Collection at Kean University. In addition, resources can be found at the New York Public Library, and in other smaller collections. For a complete list of sources on William Livingston’s World, see the Bibliography page.