Teaching about slavery entails teaching about the archive. Punctuated with silences, scattered with compelling details, and laden with descriptions that oscillate between racist, harrowing, and heartbreaking, runaway ads provide a glimpse into the lives of enslaved people. The details embedded within them--or omitted from them--can also provide…

As a young child, Barack Obama learned about the civil rights movement from his mother. Obama's mother strove to instill in her multiracial son pride in being more than just literally African American. There is much to learn from Obama's history, understood both as the story of his life and as what Obama himself has said about his past and the…

When his department chair asked him a few years ago to take over as faculty advisor to their university's chapter of the Phi Alpha Theta history honor society, the author readily accepted. Not only would it provide a great opportunity to get to know some of their best students better, it would also help a junior faculty member like himself fulfill…

The author has known Gary Nash as a friend since 1969, but she only began to work with him as a colleague in 1989, when he invited her to join the National Center for History in the Schools (NCHS) as it was just forming. During the seven years she spent as Assistant and then Associate Director of the NCHS, they shared the extraordinary experience…

It is as a longtime client, softball teammate, colleague, traveling companion, and friend that the author writes this article to honor Gary Nash. He has known him in varied guises in five different decades, and on five continents, with Africa coming in 2009. In this article, the author recalls some of his memories of Gary over five decades.

In recent years, the use of primary sources in the history and social studies classroom has been increasingly promoted as a necessary and welcome practice, one designed to improve the quality of history education and to encourage student interest and engagement. Although some K-12 educators have been wary of adopting the use of primary sources,…

The active participation of women in the field of American history dates back to the earliest writings on the subject. The rich and long history of women writing, teaching and researching in the field of American History, however, is obscured by narrow disciplinary definitions of what actually counts as history and who is qualified to represent…