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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
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...
Here is the Columbia University historian on how to think historically about 17th-century Virginia:...
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),...
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...
[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...
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...
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...
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...
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”?...
