Examining the political activism of high school students provides a window to fully understand the rich history and resistance of young people of color from South Central Los Angeles who blazed the trail in many crucial battles during the civil rights era. Researching John C. Fremont High School's history shows that the high school reflects a…

Living history, and/or reenactment, brings the lives and experiences of a past age into the modern era to provide a contextualized interpretation of long-gone cultures. Academic literature suggests that presentations by properly trained living historians at historical sites and museums are connected to more positive visitor experience and…

In this article, the authors trace their writing instruction through the 2016-2018 school years. They begin by describing how they framed the foundations of historical work and the importance of this framing for the later production of historical narratives. Then, the authors discuss how they integrated traditional literacy instruction with…

Historical thinking, a term that encompasses a diverse set of definitions and competencies, calls on students to replicate the work and cognitive processes of historians by analyzing and interpreting evidence and making logical conclusions based on this evidence. Given this emphasis on discipline-specific skills, "sources" (especially…

Analytical reading and writing are embedded in a disciplinary approach to history instruction and present opportunities to extend students' literacy practices. U.S. educators and researchers have come to rely on the Document-Based Question (DBQ) to assess and develop students' historical knowledge and argument writing. However, this task has been…

In this article, the authors detail a curriculum unit used by Ms. Brown and a second English Language Arts (ELA) teacher, Ms. Smith, with their high school students. The unit centered on a comparative genocide framework developed by the Comparative Genocide Project at Arizona State University. The framework detailed seven key themes common across…

The investigation of time is at the heart of historians' pursuits. Many also recognize the importance of space, since the chronology of action and ideas necessarily occurs in the physical world. The conscious integration of time and space has found growing favor among scholars recently as the "spatial turn" has influenced research across…

Over the last twenty-five years, the Minnesota Historical Society, the University of Minnesota Libraries, and Minitex have developed a partnership centered on creating pathways to higher education by engaging local middle school and high school students in immersive programs at academic libraries. These activities vary in scope and content, but…

Disciplinary literacy encompasses not only the ability to read the texts of a discipline, but also to engage in the practices and discourse of that discipline. At the center of the discipline of history is inquiry. For these students to move from their ninth grade expectations about history toward the authentic discipline of history, they would…

Regular incidents of police brutality towards African Americans, who continue to experience high poverty and incarceration rates, illustrate that the tragic and divisive effects of racism are still present, even 150 years after slavery in the United States was officially ended. In fact, ongoing struggles for racial justice in the United States and…

Historians of American foreign relations are continuing to expand the ways in which they approach the Cold War. The range of perspectives has evolved thanks to the influence of emerging fields and new emphases in history. The end of the Cold War revealed the many ways in which the conflict was a protracted global war. But it also brought a renewed…

Graphic novels (book-length works of fiction or non-fiction that use the conventions of a comic book to tell a story or convey information) can embed images within that primary flow. The text boxes and recurring images of the single graphic novel flow can incorporate maps, photographs, timelines, primary sources, and images within the panel…

Engaging in student-centered learning with primary sources has become a priority in the teaching of history in classrooms throughout the educational spectrum. Approaching photographic evidence in the history classroom through a contextualized and systematic method of analysis is one way of involving students actively in their own education while…

Developing disciplinary literacy in history requires that classrooms become an environment where students can engage in discursive practices typical of the profession. Disciplinary literacy refers to the specialized ways of reading and writing used in history to construct historical arguments and ways of reasoning. Learning history includes using…

Assessing students' historical understanding has been a long-standing challenge in history education. One of the widely used tools for accomplishing this task is the large-scale standardized test, the results of which are used as an indicator of student knowledge and skills in the social sciences/history. At the national level, the National…