Secondary school history textbooks in South Korea, Japan, and the United States have long struggled to give meaning and significance to the war waged on the Korean Peninsula between 1950 and 1953. Comparing commonly-used, contemporary history textbooks from each of these three nations, this analysis suggests that students on both sides of the…

Jon Carl's vision is simple: get students passionate about history by turning them into historians. To accomplish this, he created a class centered on documentary film-making. Students choose a topic, conduct research at local libraries, write a script, film video interviews, and create video segments of four to 15 minutes. District technology…

On an earlier column titled "What I learned at the NCSS Annual Meeting," the author wrote about the Internet-oriented materials and resources featured at the 2006 NCSS convention in Washington, D.C. Having received many e-mails from readers telling him that they appreciated having the opportunity to see which companies, not-for-profit,…

Although the Vietnam War ended more than thirty years ago, historians remain as divided on what happened as the American people were during the war. Mark Moyar maps the ongoing battle between "orthodox" and "revisionist" Vietnam War historians: the first group, those who depict Vietnam as a bad war that the United States should…

The national secondary review promises new possibilities for innovation in curriculum design and the learner experience in Key Stage Three. With its emphasis on flexible curriculum frameworks and active pupil learning, this may create new avenues for the promotion of a frequently neglected area of the secondary pupil experience--the creative…

The purpose of this study was to investigate and characterize current practice in secondary history education and its relationship to best practices. In this phenomenological study, the author examines the pedagogy of three high school history teachers and the extent to which their current methods exhibited recent thinking on best practices in…

Jennifer Dorman was in a fix. Teaching ninth-grade US history at Holicong Middle School in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, Dorman wanted to tap into her students' interest in creating "something of value not just for their teachers, but something they could share with other students and people." But that required something a conventional paper-based…

The popularity of VHS and DVD over the past two decades has greatly expanded the influence of history movies, watched by millions of adolescents in homes and classrooms. This paper examines two secondary U.S. history teachers' instructional uses of history motion pictures in their classrooms. Ray used The Patriot (2000) to teach history as stories…

Interdisciplinary work across the humanities and social sciences is moving beyond analysis of any one nation in isolation and instead placing urgent questions in the larger matrix of the Americas as a hemisphere. But little attention has been given to the overarching methodological, institutional, and pedagogical issues resulting from the growth…

This multiple case study examined the efforts of six elementary school teachers in their implementation of new instructional strategies in their fifth grade social studies classrooms following their participation in a weeklong Summer Institute focusing on American history. The study was guided by one grand tour question and one sub-tour question.…

This study emerges from a professional development workshop the authors conducted with elementary, middle, and high school teachers. The article highlights of responses of workshop participants, particularly their response that the law was about assimilation, in the context of "The General Allotment Act of 1887" and the Hopi Indian…

One way that people learn, remember and communicate is visually. We combine past experiences with new visual information to construct meaning. In this study, elementary teachers introduced their students to the peoples and places of the ancient silk routes using illustrations from two children's picture books, "Marco Polo," written by…

The historical fiction novel straddles the factual and the fictive recreation of past motivations that animate historical events. Through reading a work of historical fiction, Ursula Hegi's novel "Stones from the River," Kent den Heyer and Alexandra Fidyk offer a theoretical consideration of the following questions and their classroom…

Geography is firmly established as a separate discipline within British higher education, a position founded on its strength in the country's school system throughout the twentieth century. This position has enabled the discipline to prosper and it has been at the core of many intellectual developments. With changes in the nature of universities,…

It is not too early to ask what legacy the Teaching American History grants will leave behind. Put another way, when all the money is spent, when all the seminars are done, when all the professional development has ended, what evidence will there be that the program ever existed? Will historians in the future look back at the evidence left behind…