Big news for K-12 history teachers! The Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) is “spinning out of Stanford University” to become the Digital Inquiry Group (DIG), an independent nonprofit organization. Here’s more: Here are some frequently asked questions that I took...
historical thinking
Current contributing editor Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn receives a “notable mention” in the 2023 edition of Best American Essays
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn‘s essay, “Pastlessness,” was published in the Summer 2022 issue of The Hedgehog Review. See her published work at Current here, including her most recent piece, “Remembering the University’s Mission.” She is an original member of the Current board...
When was America great?
Donald Trump wants to “make America great again.” But when was America great? Was it 1776? The Gilded Age? The 1950s? The 1980s? “Greatness” is not a historical category of analysis. We can certainly report on people in the past...
Historian Drew Gilpin Faust: “Education asks you to change”
I am trying to get former Harvard University president Drew Gilpin Faust on The Way of Improvement Leads Home Podcast, but I think her publicist is ghosting me! 🙂 I am hoping that Faust might be willing to consider smaller...
Do you want to make the past more interesting for your students? Focus on contingency.
In my book Why Study History (revised second edition coming in March 2024!) I introduce students and other readers to Thomas Andrews and Flannery Burke’s five Cs of historical thinking. They are change over time, context, causality, complexity, and contingency....
Episode 116: “Historical Thinking for a Democracy”
If you’ve listened to this podcast over the years you know that we champion “historical thinking” as one of our best hopes for sustaining and preserving American democratic life. In this episode we talk with Zachary Cote, the Executive Director...
John McWhorter on the Florida African American history curriculum
I took a little heat for my take on the Florida African American history controversy. Last month I wrote: The standards were much better than I expected. If I was a high school teacher in Florida I could easily work...
Responding to the critics of my piece “Kid Gloves” (1619 Project)
It looks like my feature we published on Friday at Current received some attention on Twitter. I’m glad people are reading it and, for the most part, taking it seriously. For the record, here is everything I have written at...
Are historians attacking the right without asking about the left?
Johann Neem, professor of history at Western Washington University and the editor of the Journal of the Early Republic, thinks so. And he is absolutely right Here is a taste of his review of Kevin Kruse’s and Julian Zelizer’s edited...
“The Bartons are surrounded by tools but that fact doesn’t make them historians anymore than my tool collection makes me a mechanic.”Â
Warren Throckmorton on David Barton, Tim Barton, and Wallbuilders: I have tools and gadgets and parts that I don’t know how to use. Some of those tools are left over from my dad and some seem to have just appeared...
We have a cover!
The cover of the second edition of Why Study History : Reflecting on the Importance of the Past is here! The book will be available in early 2024....
Arthur Brooks: “Google isn’t grad school”
According to public intellectual Arthur Brooks, the internet has created “an explosion of nonsense.” He’s right. Let’s take my discipline of American history for example. If you read this blog, you know that there is a lot of bad history...
Historian Barbara Fields on the 1619 Project
Here is the Columbia University historian on how to think historically about 17th-century Virginia:...
Virtue and historical thinking
I am presently writing on a book on conservatism and religious liberty. As I have worked on this book, I have been immersed in the thought of Peter Viereck (1916–2006), especially his books Conservatism Revisited: The Revolt Against Ideology (1949),...
How to teach the history wars
I think it’s fair to say we are in the midst of another round of history wars. Today’s so-called “activist historians” invoke a usable past to preach political and social agendas, while more traditional historians (of all political persuasions–from Trotskyite...
“The issue is not white supremacy, the issue is which whites will be supreme”
[History] cuts a lot of the bullshit. If somebody can just say “white supremacy,” it releases them from having to talk about something that my mentor C. Vann Woodward pointed out many years ago in discussing the disenfranchisement movement in...
On the “fuzzy border” between history and journalism
As a trained historian who serves as the co-founder and executive editor of an online website of opinion, I resonated with New York Times reporter Clay Risen’s recent piece at Perspctives on History: “Professional Crafts: The Fuzzy Border between History...
Historical thinking is often paradoxical thinking
WHYY in Philadelphia recently hosted an interesting conversation between Dolly Chuch, a psychologist, and Hasan Kwame Jeffries, a historian. Chuch argues that it is difficult to get people to accept the fact that two seemingly contradictory ideas can exist at...
Mintz: History should be relevant, but not at the expense of nuance and complexity.
Check out Steven Mintz’s piece at Inside Higher Ed. Anyone who reads this blog will know that I agree with him. I’ve staked a lot on Mintz’s claim in the title of this post A taste: I understand that at...
Sam Wineburg explains historical thinking in less then two minutes
Learn more about Wineburg here. How much are historians today “reconciling” contradictory voices and seeking to build “coherence out of a pile of evidence that in some ways is not coherent”?...