Howard Zinn's "A People's History" of the United States has few peers among contemporary historical works. With more than 2 million copies in print, "A People's History" is more than a book. It is a cultural icon. While most historians aim to examine the full historical record, Zinn picks and chooses from it. Writing persuasively, he hides the…

We compared how 8 religious believers (historians and clergy) and 8 skeptics (historians and scientists) read a series of documents on 2 topics: the Biblical Exodus and the origins of the first (American) Thanksgiving. Readings by religiously committed historians differed from those of their non-religious peers. Navigating between the competing…

Teaching a way of thinking requires making thinking visible. Educators need to pull back the curtains from historical cognition to show students not only what historians think, but "how" they think. Given that many students believe that history is a single story to be committed to memory and that texts speak for themselves, teaching historical…

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…

How is historical knowledge transmitted across generations? What is the role of schooling in that transmission? The authors address these questions by reporting on a thirty-month longitudinal study into how home, school, and larger society served as contexts for the development of historical consciousness among adolescents. Fifteen families drawn…

The debate over national history standards is so fixated on "which history" that the importance of studying history is being overlooked. History humanizes us in ways that few other curricular areas can. Three classroom vignettes illustrate the difficulties of achieving mature historical understanding in a Disney/MTV-dominated culture. (53…