The primary purpose of this article is to analyze how the origin of the Cold War is represented in Turkish history textbooks for general secondary school education for the twelfth grade. The author examined three history textbooks, which are only approved by the Ministry of National Education (MoNE) for teaching the course of Contemporary Turkish…

This article examines attitudes of the Croatian final grade high school students towards the burdensome legacy of the Second World War and Croatian war for independence (1991-1995). Following the theoretical framework of memory studies, and implementing the concept of postmemory, we have developed a structural model connecting ideology and legacy…

At the dawn of the 21st century--when your author, who is now an educator, was in college--the United States was the sole global superpower. But the world changed with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as well as other events that remade the world in which current students now study. As an educator, I can explain that the structure of…

In this article, the authors begin by describing a classroom activity from part of the Diplomacy Challenge unit in their Problem-Based Learning (PBL) Advanced Placement (AP) World History Curriculum when students discover and analyze the history of the Early Modern Era (1450-1750). In this article, they explain how they have adopted PBL, its…

Due to the particular experiences of the African continent and its peoples, and the myriad of ways these experiences have been interpreted, appropriated, and reclaimed, there are a pressing series of epistemological, pedagogical, and ethical challenges, especially for those who wish to include African content in predominantly non-Africanist…

Anna Dickson and her department sought a solution to the challenges posed to their pupils by the expanded curricular scope of the new GCSE. In particular, they wanted to address the difficulties their pupils experienced in understanding the Cold War. Dickson outlines here how she drew on the work of other history teachers theorising about the…

This article analyses the Francophonie strategy to foster diversity of cultures and multilingualism in a globalised world. The first part of the article provides the analyses of the historic role of the French cultural and educational model in the diplomatic relations. Then the article refers to the context of the Second World War and the American…

On May 1, 2011, a group of U.S. soldiers boarded helicopters at a base in Afghanistan, hoping to find a man named Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden, the leader of the al Qaeda terrorist network, was responsible for a number of terrorist attacks around the world, including those of September 11, 2001, that killed nearly 3,000 people in the United States.…

This article argues that instructors should adopt a more multicultural perspective when designing syllabi for and teaching undergraduate courses in International Relations (IR). The examination of teaching practices in IR draws on the personal experiences of the authors as foreign natives and instructors of IR at two American universities. The…

On March 28-29, 2009, FPRI's Wachman Center hosted 43 teachers from across the country for a weekend of discussion on teaching the nuclear age. In his opening remarks, Walter A. McDougall observed that although students today are not made to crawl under their desks in air raid drills, that atomic power remains, and it is still necessary to raise a…

The legacy of crimes committed during the Second World War in East Asia is still a stumbling block for reconciliation and trustful cultural relations between South Korea, China and Japan. The presentation of this issue in history school books is in the focus of a heated public and academic debate. This book written by historians and pedagogues…

To understand world politics, one must appreciate the context in which international systems develop and operate. Pedagogy studies demonstrate that the more active students are in their learning, the more they learn. As such, using computer simulations can complement and enhance classroom instruction. CIVILIZATION is a computer simulation game…

A unit on China's ethnicities provides students rich opportunities to explore multiple themes in the social studies while helping them to develop a deeper understanding of recent events in western China. Studying China's ethnic minorities encompasses such topics as stereotyping, cultural diversity, the creation of ethnic identities, and key…

An attack by Japanese naval aircraft on the USS "Panay" in 1937, which the Japanese government declared accidental and for which it paid compensation, caused a crisis in U.S.-Japanese relations. A little-known dimension of the incident was the expression of spontaneous sympathy and apologies by Japanese citizens to the U.S. embassy in…

This essay is based on the author's presentation at the Wachman Center's July 26-27, 2008 history institute, co-sponsored and hosted by the Cantigny First Division Foundation of the McCormick Tribune Foundation. For Europeans, World War I remains the epochal event of the twentieth century. For Americans, the war falls between two much larger and…