Despite limitations and challenges, teaching about difficult histories is an essential aspect of social studies courses and units across grade levels. This practical resource highlights stories of K-12 practitioners who have critically examined and reflected on their experiences with planning and teaching histories identified as difficult.…

In 2015, the mass murder of nine people in a South Carolina church by a White supremacist led to greater public questioning of symbols of the Confederacy. This questioning led to action in the spring of 2017 when four large Confederate monuments were removed in New Orleans, Louisiana, and the citizens of Charlottesville, Virginia, voted to remove…

Set during the Cold War and space race, this historical role-play focuses on Wernher von Braun's involvement in and culpability for the use of slave laborers to produce V-2 rockets for Nazi Germany. Students will grapple with two central questions. Should von Braun have been allowed to emigrate to the United States given his affiliation with the…

"American history," writer James Baldwin told a group of teachers in 1963, "is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it" (1963/1996, 227). Children, Baldwin argued, have "the right and necessity to examine everything." In particular, they need to…