From the website: "What I found difficult was supplementing over five hundred years of global environmental history with primary sources. Not having documents from the past left the syllabus feeling incomplete, both pedagogically—it’s a lot harder to explain how historians use sources if students don’t have any to read—and because the strangeness, difficulty, poignancy, and sheer diversity of human experience that historical documents convey was missing. Partway through my first semester teaching the course, feeling woeful about the state of my syllabus, my wonderful colleague and mentor Nancy Jacobs suggested what would become a solution to the primary source conundrum. As she explained, she’d faced a similar issue in her African history courses in the past. So instead of teaching without primary sources or making do with the limited options available, she made finding more and richer sources one of the course assignments. As a class project, it taught key research skills while also giving students freedom to pursue specific topics of interest. It made clear not in a theoretical but a practical way how the dynamics of colonization and political power make some sources easier to access than others."