This exploratory study combined the process of modified analytic induction with a mixed methods approach to analyze various factors that affected or might have affected participating teachers' decisions to use or not use various primary source based teaching strategies to teach historical thinking skills. Four participating eighth and ninth grade…

In this article we identify opportunities for students to use timelines and textbooks to meet standards. Through the use of timelines, textbooks, and selected activities, upper elementary and middle school students are able to (1) be engaged in content area reading and writings; (2) understand large themes in social studies including time,…

History teaching in schools has long been in a state of deep crisis. Students do not like history nor do they know it. This dismal state of history teaching has required the attention of experts in the realm of school history instruction and curricula design who have made a large number of proposals to improve its standing in schools. These have a…

Flora Wilson argues here for the importance of maintaining a fascination with history as an academic subject for experienced, practising history teachers. Just as medical professionals keep their knowledge up to date by reading the latest research, so too, Wilson argues, should history teachers remain engaged with current historical scholarship,…

Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" is the nation's best-known work of American history. It is also the nation's best-selling survey of American history, having sold two million copies since its publication in 1980 and still selling about 125,000 paperback copies yearly. The fifth and current edition covers America up…

For a long time, Advanced Placement and other advanced-level U.S. history courses at the high school level were modeled after the collegiate survey course. However, the last two decades or more have seen some significant changes in the teaching of U.S. history at undergraduate and high school levels. Many of these changes at the high school level…

State and national educational initiatives have increased expectations for students' historical thinking and civic involvement. Guidance for relevant, purposeful classroom experiences with age appropriate, rigorous content has never been clearer, yet teachers still feel unprepared. Towards these ends, the authors direct attention to the antecedent…

University instructors preparing prospective sixth- to twelfth-grade history teachers often realize it can be difficult to condense the extensive information these individuals need for their future profession into one or two courses. Teacher preparation programs are forced to juggle requirements for program accreditation with their ethical…

In this mixed-methods study, we use a postcolonial framework to investigate how state standards represent Indigenous histories and cultures. The research questions that guided this study include: (a) What is the frequency of Indigenous content (histories, cultures, current issues) covered in state-level U.S. history standards for K-12? (b) What is…

Jamestown is at the heart of any teaching and learning of colonial American history. Stories of John Smith and Pocahontas are learned by elementary and secondary students across the United States. In Virginia, Jamestown is first taught in third grade and revisited five more times from historical, political, economic, and geographic perspectives.…

On the day before the Thanksgiving school recess in 1912, teacher L. Thomas Hopkins made an unusual admission to his small American history class at Brewster High School on Massachusetts' Cape Cod. He told his students that he knew they disliked the course. He confessed that he, too, disliked how the course was going. Following a short period of…

In this article the author speaks to the teaching of Barack Obama in U.S. schools. Drawing from scholarly literature on the heroification of American historical figures in public memory, the author argues that focusing on Obama's firstness as an African American may lead students to have incomplete and misleading understandings of what the…

In high school American history classrooms all over the country, the Civil War is a staple in the curriculum. Of course, that is to be expected given the pivotal place that the Civil War occupies in the nation's history. Indeed, it is not unusual for high school teachers to devote weeks of instruction to exploring the causes leading up to the war,…

The dismissal of students' backgrounds by the educational system has a deep effect on communities of color, perpetuating a system that sets them up for academic failure. Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012) created terminology for the process of systematic fragmentation, which she describes as an act of dismissal on a macro-level. This article…

Engaging in student-centered learning with primary sources has become a priority in the teaching of history in classrooms throughout the educational spectrum. Approaching photographic evidence in the history classroom through a contextualized and systematic method of analysis is one way of involving students actively in their own education while…