A study examined the relationship between writing activities and historical learning by elementary school students. Subjects in schools in the San Francisco Bay area were drawn from third-grade classrooms from a predominantly working class neighborhood, a mixed fourth-grade class of mostly limited-English-proficient children of immigrants from Southeast Asia, and a fifth-grade class in a predominantly White, middle-class school. A history curriculum was developed especially for the project and consisted of multiweek units that provided language arts instruction as well as in-depth historical study. A group of 16 students from each class were chosen to reflect the socioeconomic mix of the school. Data included baseline interviews, writing products, student journals, and taped student-teacher conferences. Results indicated that (1) third-grade students already had a store of information and mental images about historical topics; (2) fourth-grade students had a coherent sense of chronology that functioned independently of dates and historical time concepts; (3) students varied greatly in their understanding of the term "history"; (4) changes in understandings of "history" differed significantly among the three groups of students; (5) a majority of the limited-English-proficient fifth graders did not manage to see the world through the eyes of a person from the historical time period in any meaningful sense of the term; and (6) successful perspective-taking among students in the middle-class fifth-grade classroom involved construction of explanation as well as the description of point of view. (Contains 48 references.) (RS)