An important goal of this site is to provide a resource through which students can "learn from London Town" by working with primary source information and by using some of the techniques which the professional scholars currently studying the town use. In this section of the web site, they may pursue lessons which consider a variety of historical documents as evidence.

A Life From Documents

These documents present students with the challenge of researching the life of a London Town resident, Captain Anthony Beck. Piecing together the biography of a person who lived in colonial Maryland requires patient detective work. No one document tells the whole story. Each document presented here contributes a bit of information to the story of this man, who was among the best recorded of London Town's residents. Tracing the course of his story offers students an opportunity to enrich their understanding of life in colonial Maryland as well as an opportunity to evaluate the sources used and challenges faced by colonial historians.

A Household From an Inventory

A second project students can undertake is to reconstruct Captain Beck's household from an inventory of his goods made after his death. His inventory can be read to reveal the furnishings of his home, the items he and his family used in everyday life, and a list of the individuals who made up his household. It provides a resource to hypothesize about furnishings, values, domestic equipment, consumer goods, the relationships among people in one London Town household, and the activities this household was equipped to undertake.

Glimpses of an Era From Newspapers

A third project students can undertake is to use issues of the Maryland Gazette to learn the details of Captain Beck's life as well as to make hypotheses about life in mid eighteenth-century Maryland. The events, advertisemtns and public notices of Annapolis and London Town offer important clues which students can use to consider which products, events and people were important to the readers of these issues of the Gazette.