Currently, no research exists that teases apart and compares how pre-service teachers within different national educational settings begin to reorganize, reconstruct and transform their own experiences, knowledge and perspectives on history and history teaching as they negotiate the process of learning to teach history. This comparative case study sets out to examine this gap in the literature by investigating how two pre-service teachers' understanding of history and their evolving construction of self as history teacher influenced their everyday pedagogical performances as beginning history teachers in England and the Commonwealth of Virginia in the United States.