Young children can engage in close reading, critical thinking, and historical thinking when age-appropriate texts are coupled with discipline-specific tasks. Prior knowledge is an impediment, though. Primary elementary learners simply do not have much of a historical schema. Because of primary elementary students' familiarity with Thanksgiving,…

The author discusses their experiences teaching an upper-division seminar course in a traditional face-to-face setting, and re-designing a "long eighteenth century" survey course for delivery online. The article thus explores spatial strategies in both face-to-face and online courses, and suggests ways in which they can be particularly…

As a graduate instructor for HIST 152: United States Since 1877, the author structures the entire course around the motif of the newspaper. She models her curriculum after the newspaper both visually and symbolically and uses it as a theme throughout the class. The newspaper is not a gimmick or cliche, but rather a recurring stylistic theme, an…

History teachers are frequently frustrated in their efforts to promote class discussion. Class discussion is useful to deliver or reinforce content and to explore or share ideas. Yet teachers learn quickly that they cannot expect good discussion, especially good whole-class discussion, to take place when they want it to. One approach to the…

This article is an exploration of how the new early American cultural history can be employed in the first half of the standard American history survey. The author discovered that the New Cultural History can be an outstanding tool by which to introduce a highly culturally diverse student population to the multiracial, multicultural, and…