This article explores PowerPoint slideshow's capacities for introducing history teachers and students to the pictorial and digital turns for representing and narrating the past. Based upon this research, the author argues that image-dominated PowerPoint slideshow provides teachers and students with a unique and powerful tool for composing and…

In this article, the authors describe how a time capsule project helped students at Ridgedale Elementary School in Knoxville, Tennessee understand the nature of events and the relationships of events in a segment of history. The time capsule preparation motivated students to hypothesize about important events and significant artifacts of their…

The article outlines a deficit in Holocaust education: The motives of the perpetrators and bystanders are often not dealt with. In order to explore these motives, interviews with former Nazis were conducted and evaluated in the "Geschichte und Erinnerung" (History and Memory) research project; two of the findings are presented here. Subsequently…

Few scholars have achieved the level of recognition and respect among the wider public as Howard Zinn. This should not come as a surprise, given the "unconventional" ways that Zinn embodied and enacted his scholarship. He often took his teaching and writing into those seemingly restricted spaces of popular protest, converting words into…

This paper presents a discussion of Howard Zinn's intellectual and political ideas. Through the analysis of selections from his immense body of work, several interrelated themes emerge. Drawing more attention to these notions of dissent and democracy is crucial to revitalizing education at all levels and vital to advancing the public discourse…

Maintains that, although historiography and historical interpretation of the American Revolution have led to new questions and new answers, historians have become more sensitive to the complexity of that event and era. Presents an extended annotated bibliography of research and writing about the American Revolution. (CFR)

Asserts that the study of history involves more than the passive absorption facts, dates, names, and places. Maintains that real historical understanding requires students to engage in historical thinking, to raise questions, and to marshal evidence. Describes skills for five types of historical thinking. (CFR)

This study investigated social studies achievement as a result of utilizing a multimedia-based American history software program (Ignite Early American History, 2003) to augment textbook and lecture materials for seventh-grade middle school history students in an ethnically and linguistically diverse urban school district. The instructional…

This study describes and analyses the conceptions of primary teachers and secondary teachers of Physics-Chemistry, Biology-Geology and Geography-History with respect to the concept of heritage and its teaching and learning, taking the model of teacher-researcher as the theoretical referent. The data collection instrument used was a questionnaire,…

The French Revolution can be a difficult subject to teach. Students often struggle to relate to events that happened more than two hundred years ago in France. In this article, the author suggests three key causes for the failure of the revolution that social studies teachers can focus on when teaching this topic. He also provides several stories…

Literacy is a basic element of the discipline of history and of traditional secondary history instruction. However neither the growing body of research on learning with texts nor modern learning theories support the traditional literacy practices that are taking place in many secondary history classrooms. Nor are classroom literacy practices a…

The "New Humanities" has called for new ways of engaging with Humanities texts; the European Science Foundation is just one major research funder to demand that the Humanities contribute to interdisciplinary collaborations. Meanwhile, traditionally trained disciplinary academics have resisted bringing traditional texts into…

On May 5-6, 2007, FPRI's Marvin Wachman Fund for International Education hosted 41 teachers from 17 states across the country for a weekend of discussion on Living Without Freedom. The Institute was held at and co-sponsored by the National Constitution Center and the National Liberty Museum in Philadelphia. Individual sessions included; (1) The…

Counterfactuals are routinely used in physical and biological sciences to develop and evaluate sophisticated, non-linear models. They have been used with telling effect in the study of economic history and American politics. For some historians, counterfactual arguments have no scholarly standing. They consider them flights of fancy, fun over a…

History matters. It matters not only because people can learn from the past, but because the present and the future are connected to the past by the continuity of a society's institutions. Today and tomorrow's choices are shaped by the past. And the past can be made intelligible only as a story of institutional evolution. This story focuses on the…