The personal essay--a paper in which a student brings in his or her own experience or concerns--is probably familiar to most historians. Teaching at the City University of New York, the author has found grading personal essays somewhat perplexing. They are sometimes written in response to an assignment that does not call for personal reflection.…

Once adapted to the context of the classroom, the tenets of successful counterinsurgency offer teachers a potent intellectual framework for conceptualizing teachers' efforts to build effective active learning communities together with their students. In this article, the author describes a counterinsurgency analogy that shares essential features…

The author is always looking for material to use in her campaign to end the educational "back-atcha" cycle. It is a multi-generational process, wherein unsophisticated fact-centered high school instruction turns out students resilient against understanding historical discipline despite their college courses; these students then go on to…

In teacher's idealized history classroom, students are abuzz with questions. They are eager to jump into a serious analysis of primary sources. They relish additional opportunities to engage historiographical debates. They are, as teachers like to say, "thinking historically." While there are few easy ways to create these idealized…

In the era of globalization, American education remains committed to the idea that all citizens can and should be educated, though this goal may be more comforting than practical. But today's task lies in reaching for the quality standards that made American education the envy and model of the world. This challenge faces every discipline…

Treasures await students and researchers on the shelves of libraries and archives across the country, but unfortunately they often remain unknown to the "modern" researcher who limits his/her research to using the Internet. The process of physically going to the library stacks and browsing the shelves in a subject area is on the decline…

In 1999, the City University of New York (CUNY) abolished remedial programs in its four-year colleges and began to rely on standardized test scores as criteria both for exiting remediation and for admission to bachelor's programs. By doing that, the university has in effect eradicated its three-decade-old "open admissions" policy, argue…

Worldwide web technology is a perfect match for teaching about history. The technology boosts teachers capacities because it gives its students access to the documents that reveal the processes of historical change, and it helps students develop better analytic skills by learning to interpret documents. This amazing conjuncture of new technology…

The distinguished Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter possessed a scholarly imagination unusually open to fresh approaches to illuminating the past. In the seven years that separated the publications of "American Political Tradition" (1948) and "The Age of Reform" (1955), Hofstadter absorbed new intellectual…