This article explores how a curricular intervention that merges antiessentialist historical content and historical inquiry plays a role in how students complicate the narrative of racial progress. The 3-day curricular intervention centers on "Mendez v. Westminster," a case about 1940s Mexican American school segregation. The content and…

The purpose of this qualitative, single case study is to investigate how teacher-created curricula addresses key Native American events in early U.S. history and to determine if such curricula provided students with accurate representations of Native American content. To do this, we used discourse analysis to consider the meanings of words and…

This paper uses literary analysis of 21 st century U.S. history textbooks and the theoretical frameworks of post-colonial theory, racial pedagogical content knowledge, and critical race theory to argue that students at urban schools continue to be "made ahistorical" by classroom instructional conditions that devalue history instruction,…

James Loewen has revised "Teaching What Really Happened", the bestselling, go-to resource for social studies and history teachers wishing to break away from standard textbook retellings of the past. In addition to updating the scholarship and anecdotes throughout, the second edition features a timely new chapter entitled…

This article discusses offering the History of the American Deaf Community class several times since 2012 at the University of Virginia. While I change the syllabus each time, I have found a few constants in my approach: I stress that students work with primary sources whenever possible, that they read influential secondary texts, that they watch…

This article engages an important, but difficult conversation about the erasure of indigeneity in narratives, curriculum, identities, and racial projects that uphold settler colonial logics that fall under the rubric of Hispanic, Latina/o/x, and Chicana/o/x. These settler colonial logics include violence by these groupings against Indigenous…

In gathering and circulating histories, the Filipino American National Historical Society (FANHS) enacts both community publishing and self-publishing models, as they have been defined in literacy studies. As a community institution situated within a larger constellation of counterpublics and dominant publics that have often overlooked, erased,…

The purpose of this article is to synthesize research on the benefits and use of games, role-plays, and simulations, whilst providing examples practicing teachers may wish to use in their classroom. Therefore, the article presents a discussion of key previous research on the use of games, role-plays, and simulations in secondary history…

There are significant apertures between the history told within historians' scholarship and teachers' curricular resources. The Civil Rights Movement (hereafter, CRM) of the 1950s and 1960s did not start with Rosa Parks' arrest in Montgomery, though it was a spark that inflamed a long-smoldering fire. Nor did it end with Dr. King's dream in…

We charted how one educator's use of proleptic language--or language that invoked students' imagined future identities as if they are fully realized in the present--situated students in communities of academic and professional practice, both within the tangible community of the classroom and within those intangible communities consisting of…

Students today are used to a rich visual dimension of living. Students carry with them to school each day devices that allow them to capture their lives in real time. This is possible because of the hard labor of men who toiled for hours to capture for time immemorial images that have become engrained in the American narrative. When teaching the…

Just as July 4th celebrations are set to begin, ACTA's new report, "No U.S. History? How College History Departments Leave the United States out of the Major," reveals that less than 1/3 of the nations leading colleges and universities require students pursuing a degree in history to take a single course in American history. Only 23…

In this article, the author describes how the hottest show on Broadway, "Hamilton," teamed up with a nonprofit organization and a major foundation in an attempt to reinvent how American history is taught--and motivate 16-year-olds to interact with primary documents from 240 years ago.

Pizza serves as a powerful example of historical themes such as immigration, cultural exchange and urbanization. In the post-WWII United States, Trenton, NJ, and other cities were gradually being transformed by suburbanization, the rise of fast food, and changes in family living related to women's entry in large numbers into the paid workforce.…

In this article we outline the importance of reinserting the voices, experiences, and contributions of Black women as critical citizens into the narrative of the modern-day Civil Rights Movement. In order to examine the history of Black women as critical civic agents, teachers must interrogate how Black women's raced and gendered identities…