When you read a historical account about an event, you may or may not remember all of its details. As a student of history, it's more important that you remember the main ideas in the account, though particularly vivid details may stick with you more easily.
Remembering the main ideas as you read history not only helps you do well on history exams and projects--it also helps you make sense of other events. After all, you are likely to read or hear about events that are similar to--or even caused by--an event you read about weeks or years before. If you can remember the main ideas well enough to see how events are related, you will become a much wiser person in how you think about and react to life.
How do you hang on to the main ideas in what you read? The best strategy for most readers is to summarize as you read. To summarize, you simply stop and think about what you just read, and instead of making a list of events in your head, you write a sentence about those events. (You can write this sentence down as notes on paper, or type it into a Word file, or just say it to yourself or someone else.)
Give it a try. Click the Read Me button to see the full text of the FBI's account of the Lindbergh case. Then click the Activity button to open a worksheet where you can type a short sentence that summarizes each section of the report. When you have summarized all of the sections, save your version of the worksheet and submit it to your teacher.
