Book excerpt: Writing the American Past reproduces dozens of untranscribed, handwritten documents, offering students the opportunity to transcribe, decipher, and interpret primary sources. Documents include diary entries from Massachusetts in the 1690s, a woman detailing the Great Awakening, an eighteenth-century treaty with Native Americans, a journal describing antebellum train travel, and a letter by a slave Skillfully teaches students to engage with the raw material of pre-1877 US history: the written document An introduction and headnotes to each document contextualize the sources and provide a foundation from which the student can explore the material