The field of Latin American history has gained prominence in American higher education over the past several decades, yet its integration into undergraduate curricula remains uneven and the absence of sustained engagement with Latin American perspectives reinforces flawed assumptions about whose knowledge matters and which people and places…

Panama's struggle to define its independence amid overlapping pressures from empire, migration, and internal hierarchies mirrors the experience of its counterparts in the Americas. Panama's history provides a compelling framework for teaching students the contradictions of empire, race, and sovereignty. This article presents lessons that offer new…

By the end of a semester at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, students have received around 40 hours of in-class instruction for a three-credit course. In the modern Latin American survey course taught by the author must therefore, in 40 hours, the equivalent of an average work week, have to cover 200 years of Latin American history. Ideally,…

In recent decades, Amazonia has attracted the attention of environmentalists who see it as central to contemporary crises ranging from climate change to biodiversity loss. Environmental degradation has increased markedly during the global Great Acceleration, a period that began in the middle of the twentieth century. In that time, a sharp increase…

As the intersections of sport, culture, and politics attract growing scholarly attention, incorporating sport and physical culture into the history classroom becomes a vital and timely pursuit. Examining sports in Latin American history provides educators with a framework to engage students in critical themes such as colonization, state formation,…

This study explores what affordances and challenges teacher candidates experience and consider pedagogically in an individual virtual reality (VR) history experience versus a collective VR history experience and what potential they see in using VR technology in their future history teaching. Study participants were teacher candidates enrolled in a…

Since the release of ChatGPT, concerns about artificial intelligence (AI) and its capabilities and impact on education at all levels have been voiced by instructors in disciplines ranging from computer science to composition to history. This article explores two specific examples from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) that provide…

A standard learning outcome for students in humanities courses, from middle school into higher education, is to craft clear, specific arguments based on evidence. A common assignment to develop and assess this learning outcome is the take-home essay. Generative AI models, such as ChatGPT, Copilot, and Grammarly, are quickly able to generate such…

This article describes the account of a "European Queens" course as an example of the intellectual growth available to both the professor and the student when an instructor uses engaged, responsive teaching to address apparently incommensurable understandings of a given topic. The author outlines how the study of premodern queens relates…

Empire and its related themes of conquest, colonization, decolonization, and cultural imperialism loom large in the teaching of any history course on European, African, Asian, or Latin American history. "How to Hide an Empire" by Daniel Immerwahr argues that the image (North) Americans have of their nation is that of what scholar…

Historians sometimes view teaching and community engagement as peripheral to research. Self-reflection on the design of assignments, pedagogy techniques, and students' work aids teachers as they refine their teaching, and it can also inform research questions and methods. Teaching, research, and community engagement do not have to be separate…

Educators in history must find new and creative ways to attract students to programs, and horror cinema can provide a unique opportunity to bring social and racial justice issues into the classroom and engage with critical social theory. This article describes how the author created a course at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock--called…

This article details an experiment with flipped/hybrid courses that was guided by questioning how history units across the nation's colleges and universities can curb enrollment decline, improve student experiences, and impart to students the value of studying history and why it should remain an essential part of college curricula. A team of…

Contextualization involves weaving together an interpretation of a document that situates it within its historical context. This study explores how undergraduate students approached the complex cognitive task of contextualizing historical documents. As part of their professional preparation to teach secondary social studies, undergraduate teacher…

This article aims to assess how historical thinking, as defined in the research literature and practiced in schools, can be accessed by analyzing physical spaces. Since the 1990s, "historical thinking" has typically been associated with doing the work that historians do, meaning analyzing documents, weighing evidence, and making…