Down the foggy ruins of time: Bob Dylan and the concept of evidence

No edition of Teaching History devoted to creativity could be complete without returning to the riches that popular songs offer to historians and history teachers alike. The five Bob Dylan songs that Christopher Edwards explores here are chosen not merely for their ‘literary qualities' and ‘emotional charge'; they also provide a powerful commentary on the US Civil Rights Movement of the early 1960s and were - arguably, at least - integral to the tumultuous events of that period. While fully recognising their creative power and capacity to capture students' interest, Edwards' greatest concern is to exploit their potential as evidence. More specifically, building on the understanding that Lee and Shemilt's research has given us of students' misconceptions about the use of sources (TH 113), Edwards sets out to explore how compelling collections of this kind can be used quite deliberately to help students develop more powerful ways of thinking about our knowledge of the past.