Daniel J. Boorstin was a distinguished historian at the University of Chicago from 1944 to 1969; later he served as librarian of Congress. A prolific author throughout his 89 years, Boorstin saved several unpublished manuscripts. His cogent observations on college lectures are resurrected here. For Boorstin, the widespread definition of great…

How might historians of education bring joy to their work and make our scholarship of use to the world? This article suggests returning to Welland Hendrick's 1909 "A Joysome History of Education." This minor but well-circulated text uses humour and irony to poke fun at some of the more obtuse, sacrosanct, and self-righteous aspects of…

This article explores the use of turning points in history teaching. Historians describe instances of pivotal change as turning points. Identification of a turning point is a judgment of historical significance. The research demonstrates this by analysing an example from classical historiography. Inclusion of a turning point at the start of…

Alarmed by his students' random use of causal language in their essays, James Edward Carroll resolved to help his students improve their understanding of causal processes. Carroll decided to introduce his students to the metaphors that historians use to describe causation in the historiography of the Salem witch trials. By modelling how historians…

Brian Simon (1915-2002), an influential Marxist historian and educationist in Britain, had been campaigning for comprehensive education from the late 1940s to the 1960s. In the early 1970s, followed by a rapid expansion of comprehensive schools since the issue of Circular 10/65, comprehensive education was under attack by the Conservative…

This article provides a historiographical survey of significant African American historians researching, writing, and interpreting Black people's education history. At the heart of this article are the following questions: Who were the African American historians of education who produced this work? What has been the significant scholarship of…

In this 2020 Organization of Educational Historians Presidential Address, Davis shares a bit about her own life experiences, talks about what it has meant and means to be Black in America, and challenges educational historians to rise to this momentous occasion and provide the world with their expertise as keepers of precious stories and…

Experimental archaeology is a vibrant and fascinating field that offers great opportunities for hands-on student learning in history. Although it is typically taught by archaeologists and anthropologists, it is certainly accessible and easily adapted to history courses. In addition to teaching "Introduction to Experimental Archaeology"…

This paper revisits the main thoughts of the Filipino historian and social critic Renato Constantino on the role of education in the formation of a neocolonial and postcolonial consciousness. It suggests that Constantino's critical stance towards education embodies a type of philosophizing about education that centers on the problematization of…

The historical turn in social science has prompted scholars to engage with the work of historians on a large scale. Here, social scientists face two standard problems of selection bias: confirmation bias and convenience sampling. So far, the record of dealing with these problems has been poor, and little has been done to specify how social…

Since the early 2000s, the use of the term presentism has rapidly increased in both the historical discipline and public discussions of history. Most recently, presentism has been widely discussed and debated in articles about the pulling down and defacement of statues in countries around the world inspired by the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.…

Purpose: This paper centers a decolonial and Indigenous methodological approaches to educational history research. This research offers how "Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples" by Linda Tuhiwai Smith impacts one education historian's scholarship alongside conversations of historiography concerning the Lumbee…

The COVID-19 outbreak at the beginning of the 2020s not only marked a dramatic moment in world health, but also the start of manifold and entangled global crises that seem to define a watershed moment with severe effects on education. Pandemics we know are recurrent events. Faced with COVID-19 some historians have looked to previous pandemics to…

In this 2022 Organization of Educational Historians Presidential Address, Platt states that in the face of a world fettered by anti-intellectualism, racism, sexism, homophobia, and class disparity; as well as harmful state legislation that hampers academic freedom, heightens political disunion, and frustrates social justice; it is essential that…

The written artifacts of nineteenth-century Virginian Robert Reid Howison (1820--1906) lend themselves to an analysis of Howison as a self-directed, lifelong learner, and non-traditional educator as evidenced through his scholarship stemming from his vocational roles as lawyer and minister as well as his work as a historian. Howison's…