A reenactment is the recreation of a scene, time period, or event as authentically as possible by a group of people. An educational reenactment takes the in-depth cultural experience of participating in a reenactment and joins it with the educational structure of a social studies classroom. Reenactments can be as varied as historical…

This article describes a unit of study about Colonial America given in Lubbock, Texas, in which fifth grade students learn about the crafts system by becoming apprentices for a time. The students apply to apprentice with a master crafts person, a mentor, and learn some basic methods of a craft. Mentors are typically students' relatives, friends of…

This paper is an analytic essay that examines the treatment of the Cherokee Trail of Tears in a North Carolina fourth grade textbook. I begin by offering a satiric look at an imaginary textbook's treatment of the Holocaust that is based closely on the actual narrative of the Trail of Tears written in the fourth grade text. Following this, close…

Stimulated by social scientists' and especially social psychologists' contributions during World War II, as well as by America's post-war economic and population growth, the period from 1945 to 1970 was widely viewed as a "Golden Age" for American social science. Interdisciplinary social psychology arguably was in the vanguard of these…

Historicalthinkingmatters.org, a collaboration between the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, pioneers of online historical resources, and Stanford University's History Education group, a research center that investigates the teaching and learning of history, addresses the problem of an abundance of historical texts and a…

When the author first came to Virginia Tech years ago, she realized that family was a value shared by administrators, faculty, and staff. Here, there is a deep caring and sense of responsibility for the well-being of students. As an instructor and a staff member of the Undergraduate Academic Affairs Office in the College of Liberal Arts and Human…

In June, Congress enacted the Post-9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Act, commonly called the GI Bill of Rights for the 21st Century. Supporters claim that it does for current veterans what was done for those who served in World War II. The expansion of educational benefits to veterans should be applauded. Any attempt to equate the economic and…

This article presents a social studies unit plan taught to fifth graders in a gifted resource class that infuses technology into student-centered activities. The unit demonstrates how the teacher and students were able to use the technology to learn about life during the Klondike Gold Rush. The goal of the unit was to show how the Klondike Gold…

As part of the continuing series of the Reviewing Policy section, this article examines some of the recent literature on the creation-evolution controversy. These controversies are placed within a larger analysis of the growth of authoritarian populist movements in the United States. The article then focuses attention on debates both over a number…

This dissertation describes the teaching methods and educational philosophies of natural philosophy instructors at several of the colleges in colonial and early national North America. It finds two distinct approaches: the demonstrative, in which the instructor centers the course on visually engaging lecture-demonstrations, and the catechetical,…

Ever since War Department propaganda films set the mold, historians have pretty much followed: the road to Pearl Harbor began in 1931 with Japanese aggression in Manchuria. Any "revision" regarding the War in the Pacific has its own set of problems--engendering controversy, often running up against patriotic sentiments and the tendency…

In the 1930s, years of injudicious cultivation had devastated 100 million acres of Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico. This was the Dust Bowl, and it exposed a problem that had silently plagued American agriculture for centuries--soil erosion. Farmers, scientists, and the government alike considered it trivial until Hugh Hammond…

This article explores sites of tension and influence between the New Mexico land grant movement and Chicano nationalism. While these efforts diverged often in terms of aims and strategies, they nonetheless found common ground, shaping arguments and providing support to each other during critical years. Moreover, central to their convergence was a…

For nearly a decade, Dr. Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez and a small army of students and volunteer colleagues around the country have been aggressively chasing and documenting a rapidly vanishing chapter of American history--the American Latino and Latina experience during World War II. Along the way, they recorded nearly 600 interviews of about two…

American presidents are regularly called upon to share their thoughts, ideas, and sentiments both with the nation and the world. This prompts the questions: How are these speeches written? Who writes them? What other resources, texts, conversations, and experiences do presidents use to help them create these famous speeches? Who helps the…