The National Memorial for Peace and Justice (NMPJ) opened in Montgomery, Alabama, on April 26, 2018. The memorial provides a sacred site where people can gather and reflect on America's history of racial injustice and represents an essential milestone in the ongoing process of racial reckoning in the United States. As Alabama has historically been…

Typically, when a community's historical materials encounter a large academic library's archives, the engagement is transactional: they sign forms, they hand over their archives, and we assure them that their materials will be valued by researchers. These procedures make assumptions about comfort with gift agreements (what if communities seek…

The 1619 Project by "The New York Times" asks American History teachers to revise their history curriculum to recognize the influence of Blackness, and of slavery, as foundational to the development of the United States. In this article I share a practical approach, including lesson plans and learning activities, to a similar revision of…

Deaf education and American Sign Language emerged in Connecticut during the early 1800s as part of a reactionary social and political agenda that included church control of government and public schools, antifeminism, anti-Catholicism, and, the topic of the present article, White nationalism. Topics discussed include the racist views of early…

The purpose of this study is to construct a concise historical narrative of the development and characteristics of African American styles of marching band. While some extant research studies have been published in this area of study, the focus has been primarily on individual exemplary teachers or university band programs. In this article, much…

December 1, 2015, marked the 60th anniversary of Rosa Parks' arrest for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery bus in 1955. This incident sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the mid-20th century civil rights movement. A century before Parks' act of resistance, African American schoolteacher Elizabeth Jennings was…

This paper reports results from a six-state study of 62 USA social studies classrooms. We examined the extent to which intellectually challenging authentic pedagogy was present in study classrooms, the characteristics of classroom practice at different levels of authentic pedagogy, and how those characteristics may promote or inhibit high levels…

This study examined the 4th-grade National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) assessments (history, geography, and civics) and 3rd- and 4th-grade social studies standards from nine randomly selected states and organized the content around three global concepts (conflict, movement, discovery) and six specific concepts (war, rebellion,…

Exploring controversial and difficult events and issues with young children can be challenging. The Civil Rights Movement is an abstract, perhaps remote, issue for young children today. However, it is an important part of our country's history and a theme worthy of study. This article suggests ways to use photographs to explore this mature subject…

This article examines the historical relationship between political power and the pursuit of education and social equality from the Reconstruction era to the present. The chief argument is that education equality is historically linked to and even predicated on equal political power, specifically, equal access to the franchise and instruments of…

Drawing on theories of multi-modality and critical visual literacy, this article focuses on images that five-and six year-olds painted in a class-made book, Voice on the Bus, about racial segregation. The article discusses how children used illustrations to convey their understandings of Rosa Parks' bus arrest in Alabama. A post-structural view…

Corn clubs played an important role in improving agriculture at the turn of the 20th century. Corn clubs were local organizations consisting of boys who cultivated corn on one acre of land under the supervision of a local club leader. The purpose of this historical research study was to document the organization, operation, and outcomes of corn…

How at moments of dramatic change and a shifting social context do political actors alter their public identities? Put differently, how do political figures respond when positions with which they have been closely identified are no longer morally and electorally defensible and must be altered? Responses to identity challenge within institutional…

Collaboration is one of the most important aspects of the role of the school librarian in the twenty-first century, but, for many reasons, collaboration is challenging to implement. Some classroom teachers may not know how students benefit from the classroom-school library collaboration. Others may be unwilling to relinquish control of their…

This essay reviews two books on Julius Rosenwald and the Rosenwald Fund and places them within the historiography of the Fund. "Julius Rosenwald: The Man Who Built Sears, Roebuck and Advanced the Cause of Black Education in the American South," is a biography written by Peter M. Ascoli. The book entitled "The Rosenwald Schools of…