Too often, historians turn to records of constituent or legislative deliberations from the eighteenth century as a source to draw quotations from early American political figures, without questioning their accuracy.

This is why you need a plan: to read attentively but efficiently, and sustainably, without surrendering your book-life balance.

Part of the utility of the game is how many intersections can be addressed, a Choose Your Own Adventure of lesson planning.

As a teacher, the Black convention movement in the 1850s has helped me to broaden my story of the origins of the Civil War, especially the pitfalls to avoid when it comes to focusing too heavily on the controversy over slavery in the territories.

Understanding puzzles as agents of disorder runs counter to a common interpretation that associates puzzles with the quest for and ultimate affirmation of order.

The dispossession of Native lands for the purposes of organizing English tobacco plantations was a deepening and broadening of merchant capitalism in Virginia.

Especially in the early years, with no grammar books or dictionaries of spoken languages, missionaries relied heavily on their cultural know-how and linguistic expertise and came to learn about the nuances of Armenian culture through them.

What happens when we place furniture into a context of lively and fraught interaction?

To put it otherwise, we cannot naturalize or uncritically center the extant assemblage of materials. We must historicize and contextualize why certain belongings, stories, and memories are visible, and others much less so.

The Quaker spiritual journey, often invisible due to its silent, humble and individual nature, is illustrated in this map.

When facilitated responsibly, historical role-play can be an invaluable educational method because it encourages empathy and taking ownership of one’s participation in the classroom.

In “Learning to Read,” Harper prompts critical attention to textual materiality by depicting enslaved characters who advance their own literacy by exploiting white cultural expectations about the proper look of reading material.

“Most students recognize the value of having a textbook to provide an overview but see textbooks as boring, predigested, and avoiding all controversy.”

In 1849, Benjamin F. Roberts, an African American shoemaker, filed suit against the Boston School Committee after they refused to […]

John Stewart sat hunched in the wooden cage that swung from the ship’s horizontal mainyard, riding out a storm off […]

Once the students begin actively listening to the songs, their enthusiasm for the material grows.

In a dance, movement and steps are like words and sentences.

Methodical signs are artificial modes of visual communication based on spoken language. To their opponents, the methodical signers were wolves in sheep’s clothing.

ed books are not only a marvelous technology in their own right but are rich with lifelong associations… [But textbooks] are rarely regarded as anything other than databases.

April 28, 2008 End-of-the-semester blues Travel and end-of-the-semester workload issues have kept me off of here a little longer than […]

As with any decent varsity athletic program, an imperative of participation coexists alongside one of competition. At its best, History Day is genuinely inclusive.

What version of the past was this? Was I really getting a taste of what life would have been like for someone like Franklin during his many months at sea?

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each […]

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each […]

History teachers have gladly taken on the role of enabling citizenship, whether directly or indirectly. But that enterprise is undercut by standardized testing.

I’ve found myself feeling restless, and even irritated, with the reluctance on the part of some smart students to make any kind of active value judgments at all.

Kelley’s extensive research makes clear that the educated women of the early nineteenth century reveled in their learning…

Rarely has any figure in modern intellectual life so successfully harnessed the power of private institutions for public good, or achieved the fusion of thought and action, that Sizer did in his remarkable career.

I knew what I was doing was risky, and I knew that sooner or later I would make a mistake of one kind or another.

History matters.

I am driving off to the Society for Historians of the Early Republic (SHEAR) annual meeting in beautiful downtown Springfield, […]

“The New England Primer emerged from, in David E. Stannard’s phrase, ‘a world in which the presence of early death was everywhere.'”

The value of interdisciplinarity is something most of us within the academy are familiar with and to which many pay lip service. But here, there was no lip service. Interdisciplinarity was central to our entire enterprise.

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