This was an opportunity all good historians dream about. A large box crammed with artefacts about a soldier who fought in the First World War, just begging to be read, studied, sorted and organised. Being faced with such a wealth of uncatalogued primary evidence could have proved daunting enough without the added demand of crafting from the archive a meaningful resource for use in the classroom. This is, however, exactly what the authors did, drawing on their understanding of how to sequence students’ learning about the past around questions which shape it and give it conceptually focused meaning. The result was a sequence of lessons which cleverly intertwines the particular experiences of Private Reg Wilkes with more general perspectives about the war. Furthermore, students are encouraged to grapple with ‘real’ source material in order to draw meanings from it. As the authors put it, suddenly the students were not looking at just another source about how muddy the trenches were, but at a letter that was actually written in those muddy trenches. This is ‘personal’ history at its best.