History textbooks are less likely to be complete renderings of the truth than a series of stories textbook authors (and the many stakeholders who influence them) consider beneficial. Sam Wineburg describes how the process of writing history textbooks often leads to sanitized and inaccurate versions of history. As an example, he describes how the…

This article presents a survey designed to investigate what young people know about history. The survey was administered to 2,000 high school juniors and seniors across all 50 states. The students were asked to "jot down the names of the most famous Americans in history," with the caveat that they could not include U.S. Presidents or First Ladies.…

The debate over national history standards is so fixated on "which history" that the importance of studying history is being overlooked. History humanizes us in ways that few other curricular areas can. Three classroom vignettes illustrate the difficulties of achieving mature historical understanding in a Disney/MTV-dominated culture. (53…