Like Boston Massacre, this assessment requires students to consider the relative strengths and weaknesses of a document as historical evidence. Students with a sophisticated understanding of how to source a document will be able to explain that it might be useful because it is sworn testimony in a government investigation from an eyewitness. They will also point out that the witness as well as the state government of North Carolina may have had a vested interest in promoting the authenticity of the Mecklenburg Declaration and that the witness was also reporting events that had occurred roughly 50 years earlier, making the document less useful.
