This practical resource shows you how to apply Sam Wineburgs highly acclaimed approach to teaching, "Reading Like a Historian," in your middle and high school classroom to increase academic literacy and spark students curiosity. Chapters cover key moments in American history, beginning with exploration and colonization and ending with the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Thinking Like a Historian: Rethinking History Instruction by Nikki Mandell and Bobbie Malone is a teaching and learning framework that explains the essential elements of history and provides "how to" examples for building historical literacy in classrooms at all grade levels. With practical examples, engaging and effective lessons, and classroom activities that tie to essential questions, Thinking Like a Historian provides a framework to enhance and improve teaching and learning history. We invite you to use Thinking Like a Historian to bring history into your classroom or to re-energize your teaching of this crucial discipline in new ways. The contributors to Thinking Like a Historian are experienced historians and educators from elementary through university levels. This philosophical and pedagogical guide to history as a discipline uses published standards of the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the National Council for History Education, the National History Standards and state standards for Wisconsin and California.

A look at how to teach history in the age of easily accessible—but not always reliable—information. Let’s start with two truths about our era that are so inescapable as to have become clichés: We are surrounded by more readily available information than ever before. And a huge percent of it is inaccurate. Some of the bad info is well-meaning but ignorant. Some of it is deliberately deceptive. All of it is pernicious. With the Internet at our fingertips, what’s a teacher of history to do? In Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone), professor Sam Wineburg has the answers, beginning with this: We can’t stick to the same old read-the-chapter-answer-the-question snoozefest. If we want to educate citizens who can separate fact from fake, we have to equip them with new tools. Historical thinking, Wineburg shows, has nothing to do with the ability to memorize facts. Instead, it’s an orientation to the world that cultivates reasoned skepticism and counters our tendency to confirm our biases. Wineburg lays out a mine-filled landscape, but one that with care, attention, and awareness, we can learn to navigate. The future of the past may rest on our screens. But its fate rests in our hands. Praise for Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone) “If every K-12 teacher of history and social studies read just three chapters of this book—”Crazy for History,” “Changing History . . . One Classroom at a Time,” and “Why Google Can’t Save Us” —the ensuing transformation of our populace would save our democracy.” —James W. Lowen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me and Teaching What Really Happened “A sobering and urgent report from the leading expert on how American history is taught in the nation’s schools. . . . A bracing, edifying, and vital book.” —Jill Lepore, New Yorker staff writer and author of These Truths “Wineburg is a true innovator who has thought more deeply about the relevance of history to the Internet—and vice versa—than any other scholar I know. Anyone interested in the uses and abuses of history today has a duty to read this book.” —Niall Ferguson, senior fellow, Hoover Institution, and author of The Ascent of Money and Civilization

This provocative book challenges the status quo in history eduction by proposing that isolated facts from the past be replaced by knowledge relevant to the future. Not a classroom teaching guide, this book examines the fundamental premises and practices that underlie the work of every history teacher from grade school through graduate school.

This four-part volume identifies the problems and issues in late 20th and early 21st-century history education, working towards an understanding of this evolving field. It aims to give both students and teachers insights into the best way of developing historical understanding in pupils.

Whether he is comparing how students and historians interpret documentary evidence or analyzing children's drawings, Wineburg's essays offer rough maps of how ordinary people think about the past and use it to understand the present. These essays acknowledge the role of collective memory in filtering what we learn in school and shaping our historical thinking.