Students need the thinking skills necessary to function in today's complex society and in an ever increasingly interdependent world. Social studies, through its various disciplines, is the appropriate place in the school to develop and practice the critical thinking skills needed to evaluate government policies and possible solutions to…

One topic that is frequently taught at any and all grade levels is elections, particularly during presidential election years. There are numerous organizations that produce materials and maintain websites to help students at all grade levels learn about and even participate in mock election activities. There is, however, one aspect of elections…

On May 17, 2004, the United States will observe the fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. By invalidating the doctrine of "separate but equal" in the field of public education, a doctrine that had been approved by the same court nearly sixty years earlier in Plessy…

The Supreme Court's opinion in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case legally ended decades of racial segregation in America's public schools. Originally named after Oliver Brown, the first of many plaintiffs listed in the lower court case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, KS, the landmark decision actually resolved five separate…

This article provides the details of the chronological events surrounding the establishment of a Governing Council in Iraq in July 2003 by the United States, acting as the leader of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) that administers Iraq. The following topics are discussed in the article: (1) The Composition of the Governing Council; (2)…

Barbara Petzen began working as a part-time outreach coordinator at Harvard University's Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) a week before September 11, 2001. She was finishing her dissertation in Middle Eastern studies, specializing in the Ottoman Empire and Arab history, and thought it would be a good job to have while she completed her…

This article explores possible responses related to the concern many social studies teachers have: how can reticent students be encouraged to become active participants in classroom issue discussions? Several assumptions underlie this need: discussion is essential to a democracy; the citizenship purpose of social studies can be achieved, in part,…

How many names of women from American history can the average, recent high school graduate come up with? How does this number compare with the number of males she or he can name? These are the kinds of questions that informed Janice Trecker's classic study of U.S. high school textbooks. They were also the basis for the research in Sadker and…

It appears that the worst name a person can be called is "politician." And the worst thing a person can be accused of doing is "compromising." This article asserts that negative attack-ad campaigning, so prevalent in recent years, has made the vocation of politician appear less attractive to young citizens. It indicates that the difference between…

On January 18, 1803 President Thomas Jefferson asked Congress to fund an expedition to the source of the Missouri River. This expedition would become known as the Corps of Discovery, which would spend twenty-eight months exploring, studying, and documenting the wonders of the western frontier. Led by Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark,…

In 1852, Commodore Matthew C. Perry of the U.S. Navy sailed to Japan with instructions to deliver a letter from President Millard Fillmore to the Emperor. The letter eventually led to the 1854 Treaty of Kanagawa and the opening of Japan to trade with Western nations. The State Department's letter book copy of the letter is featured in this…

In a clear-cut victory for campaign-finance reformers last December, a sharply divided U.S. Supreme Court upheld virtually the entire Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA). McConnell v. FEC, No. 02-1674 (slip opinion available on the web at www.supremecourtus.gov). The Court's 298-page ruling rejected the free speech and other…

Haitians had expected 2004 to be a year of celebrations marking the 200th anniversary of independence from France following the only successful slave revolt of its time. Instead political violence exploded early in the year and armed gunmen took over cities demanding President Jean-Bertrand Aristide resign. Just as the rebels prepared to move in…

The difficulties teachers encounter when trying to promote high quality discussion among students undoubtedly contribute to the brevity and rarity of such discussions. Teachers report that discussions fail because only a few students have usually completed the necessary preparatory work for effective participation, because some students…

Richard Paxton recently wrote an article for Phi Delta Kappan titled "Don't Know Much About History--Never Did," which gives an historical perspective to what has often been a very "presentist" debate. In the article, Paxton examines responses to poor student scores on formal and informal history surveys in 1917, 1943, 1976, 1987 and 2002.…