This commentary is an edited transcription of a historic and dynamic discussion on "Reckoning with Anti-Asian Violence" among a distinguished panel of elected legislators, community leaders, and academic researchers. This discussion took place virtually as a presidential session during the annual meeting of the American Educational…

Heggert and Flowers (2019) offer important insights into how social media provides students with important opportunities to engage in meaningful civic engagement and political activism. They argue that students are more politically active than some recent studies would have us believe because they are utilizing social media platforms, methods not…

In this essay the author addresses the struggles of teaching a special topics course, Black Freedom Movement Education, in the midst of a global pandemic and Donald Trump's proposed ban on anti-racist training and critical race theory. The educator framed the course under the conceptual lens of stealin' the meetin'--a Black Antebellum practice of…

The author argues that in order to create space for authentic multicultural engagement in the face of Eurocentric norms, teachers should form discussion groups that follow five basic guidelines: engage, don't enrage; be comfortable with negative emotion; watch for and change unproductive language; talk about everything; and engage in classroom…

Narratives encompass ways of thinking historically and several skills of the historian, and Tom Holt believes it is imperative that educators teach--and their students learn--how to construct historical narratives. Understanding and constructing history as narratives opens up the historical project for students. Moreover, demonstrating how…

The chapters on the 1960s and early 1970s in recent editions of secondary-level United States history textbooks have done an impressive job in getting beyond the traditional political narratives of presidential administrations to include the movements of protest and reform based on citizen activism. But despite their laudable efforts to broaden…

In this historical study, the author argues that the impact of the 1916 Committee on Social Studies report on the disciplinary integrity of the U.S. history curriculum in secondary schools has been greatly exaggerated. Although the history curriculum was refashioned during the 1920s and 1930s as a result of the 1916 report, many of these changes…

Just as people focused on education in the United States call for more content-rich curriculums, elementary schools in many areas have squeezed history and social studies out of their school day. When social studies is taught, it's often characterized by overreliance on a textbook and "covering" isolated facts; extended, engaged reading…

Magna Carta, that great cornerstone of American liberty, has been in the news lately. Put up for sale by three-time U.S. Presidential candidate Ross Perot in December 2007, the 1297 version of Magna Carta displayed in the National Archives was sold to financier David Rubenstein for $21.3 million. While its sale demonstrates the cash value of the…

The experience of 9/11 prompted a transformation in one secondary teacher's approach to teaching controversial subjects based on the relevance to today's students. Soon after that fateful day, this teacher found a purpose and rationale for developing a very demanding curriculum on 9/11, and relates how his teaching unit has evolved by expanding…

This article describes the personal and pedagogical contexts for the development of a 9/11 curriculum. The author relates his own experiences learning of the event and teaching it soon afterwards and the subsequent development of a nationally distributed 9/11 curriculum.

Professor Howard Zinn was arguably America's best-known historian, despite the dismissive if not caustic response his book, "A People's History of the United States," elicited from historians. In Zinn's narrative the protagonists of history are "blacks, Indians, women, and working people of all kinds ... ordinary people trying to…

In teacher's idealized history classroom, students are abuzz with questions. They are eager to jump into a serious analysis of primary sources. They relish additional opportunities to engage historiographical debates. They are, as teachers like to say, "thinking historically." While there are few easy ways to create these idealized…

In this article, the author appropriates from Clint Eastwood's film simply to organize a few remarks on his experience working with Gary Nash on the project to develop the U.S. national standards for history back in the mid 1990s. Sound bites are a powerful political tool, and it did not take them long to realize that the attacks on the standards…

When the author proposed a spring course on major topics in African-American history, drawing a large enrollment was her chief concern. She had previously taught the course under a different title at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a campus with a sizable African-American presence among students and faculty members. She now teaches…