Troubling signs about the state of humanities in higher education are not new, but the steady decline in humanities majors is cause for concern. The humanities, however, play a critical role in society and public life, promoting citizenship and public engagement along with valuable skills. There are untapped opportunities for expanding history,…

By some estimates, over 1.2 billion tons of soil was blown across the Great Plains during the height of the Dust Bowl. The so-called "black blizzards" these massive dust storms caused suffocated cattle, sickened children, and destroyed thousands of family farms. Formerly prosperous farmers, unsure why they had such bad luck, wondered if…

When teaching the Civil Rights Movement in elementary classrooms, heroic figures such as Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. tend to dominate the curricular landscape. While it is essential for students to learn about their contributions and struggles, it is equally important to frame the broader injustices they were combating. In this article,…

In the 2020s, there are both societal and academic reasons to reflect on the field of history of education. In this article, we focus on the issue of the social, which remains central to the field as we acknowledge that society shapes education and education shapes society. By exploring the social on theoretical, methodological and broader…

This paper addresses the question of what role the historical discipline might play in informing the selection of substantive knowledge for school history curricula. In the process, it seeks to clarify the usefulness and limitations of Young's social realist theory of powerful knowledge in the case of school history. The paper proposes that…

Food is perfectly positioned to link students' lives to the deep and broad historical forces around them. Like everybody else, students procure and consume food on a daily basis, use it to mark special occasions, share it with friends, enjoy or dispute it with families, all perhaps without ever considering its potential for historical analysis.…

"What 'is' marketing?" Perusal of the marketing literature reveals that "marketing" has been defined and characterized in multiple, often inconsistent but typically ambiguous, ways that have evolved over time. The present essay argues that characterizing marketing as a transdisciplinary body of knowledge formally captures its…

The Misak people of Colombia are respected worldwide for recovering their ancestral Land, revitalizing their native language and culture, and building an education system from pre-school to university centered in traditional values and worldviews. Through this oral history with Gerardo Tunubalá Velasco, Misak educational leader and co-founder of…

Much has been written in recent years about how historical scholarship can be used to shape practice in the classroom. As an historian of the medieval period now working as an history teacher, Dhwani Patel offers a fresh perspective on these debates. During her PGCE year, Patel found herself reflecting on how the lenses and methodologies that…

Teachers value students' close reading of and text-based writing about diverse texts while eliciting their awareness of the world, privilege, and power. Carefully selected literature coupled with primary sources can bridge the classroom and society. To engage modern students in America's racialized past and present, this article guides teachers to…

Southern United States folk music is rich in not only sound, but in voices of the past. Folk songs were created by working class individuals who described aspects of their life in connection with societal issues and events. Folk songs, now digitally archived, can serve as primary historical sources that can be used to enhance the secondary social…

Silos are an undeniable and unavoidable reality of knowledge production, particularly within academia. For those who choose to navigate between disciplinary boundaries, as opposed to within them, it is not uncommon to find similar concepts developing in parallel in two or more completely different fields of study. These silos tend to be not just…

Scholars have long identified fostering democratic citizenship as a primary purpose of public schooling in the United States, as schools should intentionally prepare students with the knowledge and skills needed for active, informed democratic citizenship. In addition, global interconnectedness has reshaped needed civic competencies to participate…

In this chapter, I explore how the study of grammatical gender has been a prime example of the impact that boundary crossing can have on the understanding of a phenomenon by creating nuance through the incorporation and juxtaposition of multiple perspectives. In the first section, I start with a description of grammatical gender and its different…

Teaching economic history requires the study of how to combine the economists' modeling and statistical methods with the methods used by historians and the other social sciences. It often involves learning how to search for quantitative data from a variety of sources and then building panel datasets that match the data found with existing…