To explore questions in history and to construct historical narratives, historians work with evidence from the past. This approach to teaching history (inquiry involving the use of evidence) is an accepted part of the research on history teaching and is promoted widely in standards frameworks and practitioner publications as "good history…

To prepare students for participation in a pluralistic, democratic society, history curriculum should help them develop mature ideas about why multiple accounts of the same events exist. But how can we know if we are successful? In this article, we describe work on the design, validation, and piloting of a paper-and-pencil instrument called the…

This manuscript, written with the educator in mind, describes the Youth Historians in Harlem (YHH) program, a twenty-week after-school history program that engaged urban students in history by immersing them in aspects of the historical process. Throughout the program, a group of Black male high school students were apprenticed as historical…

The question "what if?" has been asked by historians for generations. This article explains how history teachers can use students' own what-if questions to enhance their historical knowledge and understanding by offering educators a step-by-step plan for utilizing counterfactual history into their classrooms. Additionally, the author offers a…

This article details a professional development program focused on the use of essential questions in reframing U.S. history learning experiences in elementary, middle, and high schools. Teachers identified four problems in designing and teaching engaging, relevant, and challenging U.S. history lessons. Each problem was addressed through the…

The purpose of this study was to analyze the evolution of geography in the United States' K-12 education system throughout the Nineteenth Century to understand the causes of variations, shifts in focus, and relative importance placed on geography. A broad theoretical framework, based on the work of sociologists of education and education…

Literacy skills taught in the elementary grades establish a good foundation but are not adequate for the demands of secondary content curriculum. In history, preservice teachers must be prepared with a solid content base along with the pedagogy for teaching that content. To better teach and enhance student writing, preservice teachers need to…

This article discusses the founding of "The Social Studies" by Albert E. McKinley. The author briefly introduces McKinley's life and examines the evolution of the magazine. He identifies the conflicts and struggles between the historians and social studies educators for the magazine. The author concludes that the magazine has served both history…

As historians and publishers scrambled to revise American history textbooks in the wake of the 1960s, textbooks increasingly strove to include the experiences of African Americans and avoid dangerous racial stereotypes. After the Civil Rights movement and decades before scathing criticism of textbooks for their inability to address racism in…

This article examines the meaning given to the study of history from the ancient Greeks to the modern day. Emphasis is placed on the idea that history does not merely chronicle facts but attempts to interpret why events occur and their significance to the past, present and future. (DE)

In this article, the author explores the conceptual framework of South Korea's high school world history curriculum, and the problems it has faced related to Eurocentrism and Sinocentrism. Through a description of the development of current and past curriculua, the author intends to make clear that in the traditional conceptual framework of Asia…

Identification of the tasks of a historian are outlined and emphasis is placed on the need for students to understand his objectives, processes, limitations, techniques, and goals. (JB)

Social studies instruction in the elementary school is sometimes far removed from the students' daily lives, and teachers continually search for ideas to create more meaningful learning experiences. That is especially true when students study history, which can often be distant, abstract, and impersonal. As many classroom teachers realize,…

Elementary students can learn how to take an interpretive approach to learning history so that they can construct knowledge about collective past experience in ways that provide a meaningful context for understanding present experience. Like historians, children communicate their interpretations to others by telling or writing stories in which…