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…

Some historians still hold back from assigning literature out of concern for historical accuracy, but using fiction and popular culture is no longer unusual and, if anything, using novels may be seen as outdated in some circles. The author suggests that one way to reinvigorate the use of the novel when teaching history is to center a class on only…

Efforts have been made among scholars from Japan, South Korea, and China since the 1980s--on both private and state initiatives--to narrow the gaps in their historiographies and to cultivate mutual understanding. This article offers an extensive discussion of the author's history project, "A Student Project of Writing a Common History…

The aim of this article is to examine the frameworks that educators use, especially how they conclude teaching and learning about genocide, and to suggest readings and other sources for use. The narrative arc that educators establish by choosing where to begin and where to end is a powerful indicator of their course goals and teaching rationales.…

Responding largely to the impact of industrialization and urbanization on American society, educators across the country embraced the "school gardening" and "nature study" movements advocated by Dewey. Promoted in varying degrees as ways to enhance learning, yield food for their schools, build character, and improve…

In this article, the author will start with discussing what the scholarship of teaching and learning in history has to say about the role that epistemological inquiry should play in the history classroom. The author will then describe the history classroom through the lens of students' beliefs about the nature and source of historical knowledge…

Despite the Civil Rights Act and the social revolutions of the era, the term "sex discrimination" was unknown in the 1960s. Discrimination on the basis of sex was rampant in America, especially when it came to women's employment in higher education. After being turned down repeatedly for full-time teaching positions at the University of…

The moment many students begin to get excited about history is when they realize that much historical knowledge is contested, enmeshed in a productive argument that never ends and therefore endlessly fascinates. Such an epiphany might occur at any time. But a frequent catalyst is classroom debate, a formalized contest that dramatizes and vitalizes…

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…

Students who think critically about sources, crosscheck facts, and perceive alternative perspectives are better prepared for civic engagement--all skills among the specialized literacies that historians employ. Over the past twenty-five years, researchers have identified these and other cognitive processes historians use as they read. During this…

Since the late 1960s, the fields of indigenous and environmental history have boomed. In the United States these large, nuanced, and often-overlapping historiographies have provided college educators with enormous scope to re-evaluate the past and contextualize contemporary political and social issues related to Native peoples and the environment.…

This article reports on the findings of a learning and teaching project exploring the application of flipped classroom models, funded by Macquarie's Faculty of Arts. Scholarship on the impact of flipping in tertiary institutions has been focussed mainly on the sciences rather than the arts. This article reports on the author's early experiments…

History departments in universities across the country are facing acute pressure to increase enrollments. In this article, the author describes an effort to boost history enrollments that they have spearheaded over the past couple of years: teaching the history of engineering online. In particular, the author would strongly encourage history…

In this essay, I compare "Django Unchained," directed by Quentin Tarantino in 2012, which relies on common tropes about slavery and largely silences the experiences of enslaved women, to "Daughters of the Dust," directed by Julie Dash in 1991, a film that focuses on black womanhood in the post-Reconstruction era on the eve of…

This article evaluates an alternative model for a history survey that three U.S. history faculty at California State University at Los Angeles have developed. In this course, students sit in groups of four or five for most of each class session and a small team of history M.A. students or advanced history majors serve in the classroom as…