When studying the lives of enslaved people like Penny, historians often have to look beyond the original intent of primary sources to discover what is useful but not explicit: the silences in the archive.  Enslaved people were not allowed to record their own stories; therefore, historians must look for clues about their lives in the documents left by the people who enslaved them.  This limits the available source material, but with practice, it becomes possible to see more than what may be evident on a first reading. 

In these lessons, we will be exploring the silences in the archive, using the framework established by Michel-Rolph Trouillot in his book, Silencing the Past. Watch the video and explore the documents before moving on to the exercises. Keep in mind that, in this type of work, the goal is not to find the right answer; it is to find better questions. Those questions will lead to further exploration and discovery as you work to do the work of history by interpreting the past through the available source material.