As a discipline, history sometimes gets a bad reputation because many students believe that it is all about memorizing long lists of dates, disputes, and dead people's names. Too often history teachers reinforce this belief by emphasizing historical content over the reasoning skills and disciplinary practices that historians engage in daily and…

In this article, Jacob Olivey describes his department's efforts to both diversify their Key Stage 3 curriculum and secure greater curricular coherence. Building on a large body of research and practice, Olivey sought new forms of curricular coherence through the selection and sequencing of substantive content across the curriculum. He reflects on…

With a focus on methods courses, this article makes a case for social studies teacher educators to employ in their pedagogy an intersectional perspective. I ask social studies teacher educators to consider critical history monographs, specialized book-length studies that center on marginalized perspectives, as pedagogical tools that complement…

Content-area standards foreground the importance of reading and writing across the disciplines. With this in mind, it is important to examine the beliefs and practices of teachers who successfully integrate literacy in content-area courses in order to provide models for others. This paper examines beliefs and practices of two novice secondary…

This article is a guided inquiry into past and present uses of war powers. From the Constitutional framers' intent through Thomas Jefferson's adaptation to modern presidents' implementation, students extract meaning from the best available evidence. Evocative primary sources--some of which are contemporaneous to modern readers--and engaging…

This case study reports on a history teacher in a multicultural classroom in the Netherlands who is confronted with students' conflicting perspectives on a sensitive topic, namely the Holocaust. We have used Dialogical Self Theory in combination with the historical multiperspectivity framework to make sense of the teacher's considerations and…

The beginnings of Polish emigration to the British Isles date back to the 16th century, but a particularly large Polish diaspora was established after World War II when many soldiers stayed in Great Britain because they could not return to communist Poland for fear of persecution. The largest wave of emigration, however, occurred after Poland…

Thinking is the essence of human existence, unquestionably the highest product of human evolution. Yet it is not possible to convey coherently to students the sum and attainment of all humanity's knowledge. Students would be incapable of absorbing such an enormous quantity of knowledge (corresponding to current developments in individual academic…

The culture wars concerning what history should be taught in U.S. schools are often played out through the release of new state or national history/social studies standards or the textbooks aligned with those standards. Despite their oft-politicized status, every state now has history standards. However, these standards take on different forms in…

The constraints of history learning in the Indonesia curriculum are the weekly time is only one hour of lessons and the material is quite dense, if delivered with an explanation and discussion the time is not enough. Therefore, it was sought how to get all material delivered and students not bored. Learning this model is done to condition students…

In the early twentieth century St. Louis' public schools for Black children enjoyed a robust reputation, perhaps second only to those in the nation's capital. Herman H. Dreer, a "public school man," provided direction for those institutions similarly called to lead various segments and forces within the larger Black community…

Determined to do justice to the complexity of the seventeenth century, as a messy but crucial period in British history, and to develop their pupils' disciplinary understanding of how and why interpretations of the past are constructed, Dan Keates and his department set out to exploit the rich seam of interpretations of Cromwell. The quest to…

As museums strive to become more welcoming and accessible, house museums occupy complex positions. The Frick Collection's scale is more intimate than that of many art museums; the general stability of the installation renders the collection more familiar, and the taste on display is personal and idiosyncratic rather than authoritative. As…

At the beginning of the 19th century, history education has found its place as an independent course in formal education institutions, since then it has undergone many reforms and revisions but none of these reforms has solved its chronic problems. In discussions on how to solve the problems of teaching history, one of the most important issues is…

Preparing students to be effective citizens is a longstanding goal of public education. Historical content provides illustrative opportunities for civic learning. Teaching about the Holocaust exemplifies this approach. Employing an experimental research design with 865 secondary school students, we analyze effects on civic outcomes from learning…