Creating Lives

"Creating Lives," adapted from an assignment created by Edith Sheffer (Stanford University), challenges students to "get inside the minds" of historical actors – to understand the mentalities and experiences of the people whom we are studying and to understand how the world looked through their eyes, a world that is very different from our own. Doing that effectively requires empathy and imagination. For this part of the website, students will create a fictional historical character (being given only a birth year and country/region of birth) and then write a journal or memoir from the perspective of that character.