This article is an epistemological reflection on memory practices in the construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction of collective memories of a historical event involving collective violence and conflict in formal and informal spaces of education. It focuses on the 1947 British India Partition of Punjab. The article engages with multiple…

The present plays an important part in history education, in particular in efforts to make the study of the past relevant for today. This contribution examines how the relationship between past and present is dealt with in current Flemish secondary history education by analyzing 190 written history exams for the 11th and 12th grade. Ten percent of…

In a famous 1960 paper, Wigner discussed "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences." I suggest that the effectiveness of mathematics in producing successful new theories and surprising discoveries is even more unreasonable than Wigner claimed. In this paper, I present several historical case studies to…

This article focuses on university students' understanding of the concept of nation. First an analysis of this concept from a historiographical point of view is presented. This allows for distinguishing between different conceptions of the nation related to 3 main approaches: the romantic, the modernist, and the ethnosymbolic approaches. Based on…

Technological innovations and inventions are changing society and world culture so fast that it's often difficult to keep up. This article provides many web sites that will provide classroom teachers or even full social studies departments with information and lesson plans to integrate the importance of inventions and technology into their…

The present-day independent Republics of Croatia and Slovenia went through a number of changes and different socio-political systems in the 20th century. At the beginning of the previous century they were parts of Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy, then of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (the Kingdom of Yugoslavia), and after World War II they…

During the period under investigation (1825-1862), Egypt was a dominion of the Ottoman Empire and attracted the attention and interest of all European states that had been displaying their military and commercial superiority for a long time. In the nineteenth century, Egypt was not only destitute of schools, but had also entered a rapid…

Several studies show that students experience more and more difficulties managing the measurements of electrical values in alternating current and that they have trouble making links between theory and practice. They find it difficult to give meaning to root mean square (RMS; or effective) values, which are not understood as average values and are…

Egyptian history textbooks are examined through the prism of historical thinking dimensions and skills, utilizing a critical discourse analysis. The analysis focuses on how the textbooks portray two historically significant events: the advent of Christianity (ca. 33 CE) and Islam (ca. 641 CE) to Egypt. It reveals that the historical narrative…

African American history is often taught poorly in high school U.S. history courses. However, we know little about how Black students perceive and experience this situation. I use a refined racial socialization framework and interview data with 32 Black college students in the Northeast to investigate how familial racial socialization shapes their…

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…

This article examines the ways in which Rousseau's "Emile" continues to speak to us in the twenty-first century. In the first part, I examine the concept at the heart of Rousseau's theory of education: "negative education" or the process of de- or unsocializing individuals and of putting them in touch with the nature of things…

After the Civil War (1861-1865), the United States faced a problem of "reconstruction" similar to that confronted by other nations at the time and familiar to the US since at least the Mexican-American War (1846-1848). The problem was one of territorial and political (re)integration: how to take territories that had only recently been…

Museums in the United States have historical significance, which adult educators are beginning to study. Receiving less attention to date, however, is the work of African American history museums. This descriptive case study sought to gain an understanding of the adult education work in one African American history museum--The Calaboose: The…

This article focuses on how history as a concept is understood by first-year BA Education students. Students were asked to respond to the following questions: 'what is history?', 'what is history to you?' and 'who writes history?' Verbal and written consent was obtained from the students to participate in the study. Their answers demonstrated a…