EDSITEment resources offer some useful materials designed to help students and teachers work with primary sources. Students need to be aware of the effect of point of view and the potential for bias in such sources.

In this lesson, students use firsthand accounts in learning about the Black Death.

If desired, and you have sufficient time for more presentations, you can make six groups with two groups assigned to each challenge. Create three student groups to work on Activity 3, The Dark Path of the Black Death.Students needing general background on life in the Middle Ages can view the exhibit The Middle Ages offered by the EDSITEment resource.This witness' account (written ten years after the fact by Michael Platiensis (1357) can be accessed through a link from EDSITEment website Geoffrey Chaucer. Be sure to remove the first sentence, which ends with the word 'Messina,' and the sentence beginning 'When the inhabitants of Messina discovered,' as they reveal that Genoese traders first brought the disease. Prepare a handout forВ a Description of the Plague.What happened in a Europe already beginning to transform? In this lesson, students analyze maps, firsthand accounts, and archival documents to trace the path and aftermath of the Black Death. Such a radical alteration in population in any place, at any time, would likely set off dramatic changes in society. The disease was caused by the bubonic plague, which was spread by rats, whose fleas carried the plague bacilli from the East along trade routes until it penetrated almost all of Europe, killing at least one out of every three people. Then the Black Death cut a path-both literal and figurative-through the middle of the 14th century. Centralized political authority was becoming more powerful. Poor harvests-also due to cooler, wetter weather-led to famines. Population increases had led to overuse of the available land. Cities grew in importance, though most of the population was still rural. In the first half of the 14th century, Europe was undergoing significant changes.

Black death game