Interpret primary and secondary sources within their historical context to create and communicate a claim about the Black Death

Learning goal: Examine historical events and issues by interpreting primary and secondary sources within their context, and use that interpretation to create and communicate a claim or position. This lesson teaches Ohio's 2026 social studies standard for Grade 7, published in July 2026. The Ohio Department of Education and Workforce anticipates that districts will begin implementing the 2026 standards in the 2027-28 school year.

Primary and secondary sources. A primary source was created during the period being studied or by someone who took part in or witnessed the events: a chronicle, a letter, a law, a tax record, a painting, a coin, a gravestone. A secondary source interprets or summarizes the past from evidence, usually written later by someone who was not there: a textbook, a museum essay, a historian's book or an encyclopedia article. The label depends on the question. A history of the Crusades written in 1850 is a secondary source about the Crusades but a primary source about how Europeans of 1850 understood them. Always write down your question first, then decide which kind each source is for that question.

Why context matters. Context is the set of circumstances in which a source was made: who made it, when, where, for whom, for what purpose, and what the maker knew or believed. A source read without context is easy to misread. A medieval chronicler who says a disaster was a punishment from God is not being foolish; in fourteenth-century Europe, before germs were known, that explanation fit what educated people believed. Interpreting a source within its context means asking what the source meant to the people who made and read it, before asking what it tells us now. Five questions help: Who created it? When and where? For what audience and purpose? What did the creator know, believe or want? What does it leave out?

The event: the Black Death, 1347–1351. In 1347 a deadly epidemic reached Mediterranean ports, including Sicily and Constantinople, after spreading along trade routes from Central Asia and the Black Sea. Over the next four years it spread across the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. In 2010 a team of scientists (Stephanie Haensch, Barbara Bramanti and colleagues) reported DNA and protein signatures of the bacterium Yersinia pestis in skeletons from Black Death mass graves in northern, central and southern Europe, confirming that the epidemic was plague. Historians' estimates vary, but many estimate that roughly a third or more of Europe's population died, with some regions losing about half. Cairo and other cities of the Islamic world suffered similar losses.

Three sources in context.

1. **Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron, introduction (written about 1349–1353).** Boccaccio was a Florentine writer, and most scholars think he was in Florence when the plague struck in 1348, although his exact whereabouts that year are not certain. His introduction describes the city: the sick abandoned, the dead buried in trenches, ordinary rules of behavior breaking down. Kind: primary, written at the time by a Florentine who very probably saw the epidemic. Context: the Decameron is a book of stories told by young people who flee the city; the grim opening sets the scene for the fiction. His description is valuable evidence of what a Florentine writer saw and felt, but he was a storyteller with literary goals, not a census-taker, so we should not treat his numbers as counts.
2. The English Ordinance of Labourers (1349) and Statute of Labourers (1351). After the plague, the English king and his council (in the Ordinance, 1349) and then Parliament (in the Statute, 1351) ordered workers to accept wages at the levels paid before the plague and punished employers who paid more. Kind: primary, official laws. Context: the laws were written by landowners and the king's government, who were employers. A law can forbid something that rulers only fear will happen, so the ban alone does not prove wages rose. But the Ordinance's own text complains that because so many had died, many workers "will not serve unless they may receive excessive wages": that is evidence of employers' complaints about wage demands. To conclude that workers actually received more, historians corroborate the laws with wage records. The laws show the perspective of employers, not workers.
3. A modern historian's account of the plague's economic effects, for example a chapter of the economic historian Christopher Dyer's Making a Living in the Middle Ages (2002) or a textbook section your teacher provides. Kind: secondary. Context: written centuries later, after comparing tax rolls, manor records, wage accounts and chronicles from many places. It can show patterns no single witness could see, such as wages rising across many regions. Its weakness is that it depends on which records survived and on the historian's interpretation, so it should name its evidence.

From interpretation to a claim. A claim or position is a statement about the past that you support with evidence and that someone could dispute. Build it in four moves: (1) state the claim in one sentence; (2) give evidence from at least two sources, labeled primary or secondary; (3) explain how each source's context affects what it can prove; (4) answer the strongest objection. Then communicate it clearly: a written paragraph, a short talk or a poster, with sources named so others can check them.

A fully worked model. Question: did the Black Death change life for surviving workers in England? Claim: The Black Death gave surviving English workers more bargaining power, because so many workers died that labor became scarce. Evidence: the Ordinance of 1349 and Statute of 1351 (primary) show the government trying to hold wages down and complaining that workers refused to serve without higher wages, so workers were at least demanding more; a named historian's study of English wage records (secondary), such as the chapter on the late 1300s in Christopher Dyer's Making a Living in the Middle Ages (2002), cited by chapter and page, is the evidence that wages in England actually rose in the decades after 1348. Context: the laws were written by employers, so they reveal employers' worry, not workers' views. Objection: the laws tried to stop wage increases, so maybe workers gained nothing. Answer: the laws show only what employers tried to do; whether wages rose anyway is a question for the wage evidence in the named historian's study, so the student cites the pages where that evidence is given. If it shows increases, the laws limited but did not stop the change.

The misconception. Students often think primary sources are automatically true and secondary sources are only opinions. Both must be interpreted in context; a primary source may be one-sided, and a careful secondary source may be better informed than any single witness.

Worked example 1 — label the source for the question: Question A: "What happened in Florence in 1348?" Question B: "How did nineteenth-century artists and writers imagine the Middle Ages?" A painting of plague victims made in 1860 is secondary for Question A (made five centuries later) but primary for Question B (made by a nineteenth-century artist). Boccaccio's introduction is primary for Question A. The student writes the question beside each source before labeling it.

Worked example 2 — read a source within its context: Consider an illustrative example of a common kind of source: a chronicle written by a monk in 1349 says the plague was sent by God as punishment for sin. Out of context, a student writes: "The monk was wrong, so the source is useless." In context: the monk wrote before germs were understood, for readers who shared his religious beliefs, and his explanation shows how people of the time understood disaster. The source is weak evidence for what caused the plague but strong evidence for how people of the time explained it and why many turned to prayer and processions.

Worked example 3 — revise a claim using context: First claim: "Boccaccio proves that everyone in Florence abandoned their families." Context check: Boccaccio was writing the opening of a work of fiction and describing the worst behavior he saw; he also mentions people who cared for the sick. Revised claim: "Boccaccio's account, written by a Florentine writer of the time who very probably saw the epidemic, shows that fear of the plague broke many normal bonds of family and community in 1348, although his literary purpose means his description may emphasize the worst cases." The revised claim is supported and limited by the source's context.

Source-in-context organizer (representation task): For each of the three sources in the lesson, complete a row with these columns: source; primary or secondary (for the question "How did the Black Death affect European society?"); creator; date; audience and purpose; what the creator knew, believed or wanted; what the source can show; what it cannot show.

Independent performance: Using at least three sources your teacher provides about one event from the lesson's period (the Black Death, the Crusades, the Mongol conquests or another), create and communicate a claim in a 250–350 word paragraph or a two-minute talk with notes. Success criteria: (1) your claim is one sentence that someone could dispute; (2) you use at least one primary and one secondary source and label each for your question; (3) for each source you explain one feature of its context and how that affects what it can prove; (4) you answer the strongest objection to your claim; (5) you communicate clearly, naming each source so a listener could check it. Exchange with a partner, who checks for any sentence that treats a source's opinion as a proven fact and either marks it or explains why none was found.