With all of the time constraints and institutional pressures that teachers face, it may seem odd to suggest using an anomalous event such as the Christmas Truce to study the first World War. However, the uniqueness of this event helps grab the attention of students and, as the authors demonstrate, can be used both to illustrate the common…

Today's students grow up in a technological milieu of hand-held computers with high storage capacities, internet access, and the ability to shoot high definition photographs and video. As such, they are empowered to construct representations of the past virtually "on the run." In this article, the authors investigated the historical "and"…

This article presents a story about eighty-six ninth-grade World History and Geography students who authored a "how-to" book, while pretending that they were experts who lived in the past and had to explain how to do something relating to that time period. These students attended a large high school in the Midwest; the school's population is 55%…

Through an innovative course design for the capstone senior seminar, history majors at Virginia Tech have become published authors in recent years. Small classes of undergraduates have collaborated to create edited volumes of original historical essays that, at the end of the semester, are copied, bound, and distributed to class members. More…

As every history professor soon discovers, undergraduates often have trouble writing effective openings for their book reviews and research papers. some students hand in essays that begin with anodyne general pronouncements ("throughout history, some things have changed, while others have remained the same"), while others hand in essays without…

One modern definition of "corporate diplomacy" states "executives engage in the private sector version of international diplomacy... advancing their objectives through interactions with the leaders of other corporations, governments, analysts, the media and interest groups." The smog in Donora, Pennsylvania, brought the previously ignored issue of…

In 1894, eighteen-year-old Rachel Calof journeyed to North Dakota to homestead with her husband. She wrote that her husband "was convinced that our best chance to make something of ourselves was to avail ourselves of the offer of free land" and that homesteading "seemed a godsend to penniless people who otherwise could not hope to buy land." The…

Recent education research strongly endorses the notion that knowledge is discipline-based, dependent upon the ground rules and procedures of a particular field of study. Since reading primary sources is central to the discipline of history, many teacher preparation programs in history-social science devote substantial instructional time to…

To cultivate imagination and empathy among school students is a basic challenge for history teachers. This paper examines the relative roles of the teacher and student in nurturing imagination and empathy in the Singapore history classroom, specifically, through source-based studies. Both imagination and empathy are ways for students to think…

"Thinking Like a Historian" (TLH) is a tool for framing the past to teach students the elements of historical thinking while, at the same time, grounding students' knowledge of the past through inquiry and evidentiary support. The framework's design allows for a separation of the ways historians study the past from the ways historians organize…

In an attempt to increase college history majors' ability to analyze primary sources, the author set up a unique research project designed to tap into his students' personal interests, and which would utilize a specific method requiring them to grapple with primary source materials in an unfamiliar, though hopefully more profitable fashion. The…

Scholars have long recognized that the Great War produced a remarkable amount of artistic and cultural expression ranging from poetry to painting to novels to architecture. This cultural production, both during and after the war, reflected a deep need to define and understand the tremendous destruction caused by a war that demanded a level of…

Although most teachers believe that "students should write at least one in-depth paper during high school," the independent research paper is disappearing from high school curricula in the face of two competing pressures: the need to prepare for high-stakes tests and student "senioritis." In many high schools, the senior year has become "a…

At the end of Spring term 2008, the author gave the students in her "Gender and Sexuality in the Ancient World" class their final exam. The format was a take-home essay, in which she asked them to respond to an article by Amy Richlin. The article lays out a range of ways to approach the topic of "women in antiquity"--different epistemologies,…

As history teachers attempt to bring student thinking processes in line with that of historians, one of the major recommendations that appears in the end notes of nearly every study on the subject, and every set of state curriculum frameworks, is the injunction to partner with historic sites and museums to help students "learn about history." But…