Excerpts from the Account Book of John Partridge Bull

Now that you have a sense of how to read the account book as a primary document, test your skills...

Each of the seven account book excerpts listed to the leftcontains information that will help you understand John Partridge Bull's role in Deerfield society: the types and nature of his interactions with other community members; the range of his skills and the community's dependency on those skills; and any trends in his trade over time.

This portion of the activity can be approached in several ways: by assigning class teams to delve into different excerpts, by going through the excerpts as a class, or by working individually to explore all of the excerpts in preparation for discussion as a class.