"Why do people hate history classes?" That is a common question that the author, like countless other history instructors, poses to his students on the first day of class. From a recent survey of the author's "Introduction to Asian American History" course, which the author has taught at the University of California, Los…

A classroom examination of the featured historical article announcing North Carolina's ratification of the Constitution can springboard into a lesson on federalism, the Bill of Rights, and the ratification process.

Field study and field courses are integral to the discipline of geography. While there are many forms that a field course might take, in this paper we draw on two university-level field courses in the U.S. Southwest to propose a road trip pedagogy for field study. We reflect on the particular resonance of the road trip in the American West and how…

Until the beginning of the 21st century, the Tulsa Race Massacre was omitted mainly from the social studies curriculum and state-mandated standards in the United States. However, the featured lesson provides a valuable springboard to explore the historical perspectives and injustices against the Black community in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on May 31, 1921.…

This paper investigates the historical context, internal content, and educational significance of Higher Arithmetic, a 1919 mathematics text by David Eugene Smith and George Wentworth, which has been insufficiently studied. Through historical and content analysis, this study reveals the authors' intention to provide a review and extension of…

Maria Montessori's visit to California in 1915--her second visit to the United States--coincided with multiple events in the region: San Francisco's Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE), San Diego's Panama-California Exposition (PCE), and the National Education Association of the United States (NEA) annual meeting in Oakland. Her visit…

In the United States of America, democratic education has evolved philosophically over 200 years from Jeffersonian ideas of educated citizenry to Deweyan principles of democracy as a "mode of associated living." In contemporary society, Dianna Hess has written about democratic education as a process of deliberative democracy. Yet the…

Following the American Civil War, several school music series were published to serve the needs of graded schools. These gradually became more popular than the single-volume songbooks previously used in public schools. Yet, school songbooks by Ransom Hubbard Randall and other authors continued to be used in the public schools as late as the 1920s.…

There is a renewed interest for the use of inquiry in social studies classrooms; though, research has long shown numerous benefits. This lesson seeks to utilize the inquiry method to invigorate the social studies curriculum as well as explore a controversial topic of gender equality in historic representation. Women are often underrepresented in…

The 1971 passage of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment to the US Constitution was a significant step in advancing voting rights that offered a new route for young people to participate in public life. While met with enthusiasm in many quarters, the question of where a substantial segment of the youth vote--college students--would cast their ballots was a…

The author argues that, in the early 1920s, many urban White Americans saw in the Arctic an escape from a world of rapidly expanding technology and became captivated by images of Inuit communities. To pass down an antimodernist form of imperialism to children of the period, educators used lead ethnographic "Escimo" figurines, which…

The author examines the therapeutic value of puzzles for adults during two major crises in the United States, the Great Depression of the 1930s and the COVID-19 pandemic of the early 2020s. Each period saw a huge surge in jigsaw puzzling throughout the country, she finds, and in both cases people turned to home-based leisure activities, either for…

In this article, the authors discuss a month-long research study where sixth grade students researched three women for the half-century after the U.S. Civil War War that worked to change their respective communities to address public issues: Jane Addams, Clara Lemlich, and Ida B. Wells. The sixth graders read a picture book for each of the three…

The author provided a brief exploration into the origins of racial/ethnic categories and facilitated a linkage between a colonial past and the present. She encouraged educational researchers and practitioners to adopt an understanding of Latinidad beyond a pan-ethnic model of identity by making critical colonial connections. She underscored how…

Immersion into fiction is associated with many educational and social benefits. The current study compared read-alouds of a historical fiction novel and a nonfiction textbook to determine whether differences were observed in student's transportation, content learning, and socio-emotional development. In all, 41 students between the ages of 9 and…