Ronald Evans describes and interprets the continuing battles over the purposes, content, methods, and theorectical foundations of the social studies curriculum. This facinating volume: addresses the failure of social studies to reach its potential for dynamic teaching because of a lack of consensus in the field; links the ever-changing rhetoric and policy decisions to their influence on classroom practice; and helps to clarify the meaning, direction, and purposes of social studies instruction in schools.

This sourcebook contains more than twelve hundred easy-to-follow and implement classroom activities created and tested by veteran teachers from all over the country. The activities are arranged by grade level and are keyed to the revised National History Standards, so they can easily be matched to comparable state history standards. This volume offers teachers a treasury of ideas for bringing history alive in grades 5?12, carrying students far beyond their textbooks on active-learning voyages into the past while still meeting required learning content. It also incorporates the History Thinking Skills from the revised National History Standards as well as annotated lists of general and era-specific resources that will help teachers enrich their classes with CD-ROMs, audio-visual material, primary sources, art and music, and various print materials. Grades 5?12

A distinguished international group of scholars traces the history of the social sciences, describes the recent debates surrounding them, and discusses in what ways they can be intelligently restructured in light of this history and the debates.

Social justice is a matter of life and death. It affects the way people live, their consequent chance of illness, and their risk of premature death. We watch in wonder as life expectancy and good health continue to increase in parts of the world and in alarm as they fail to improve in others.

This volume is a direct result of an international conference that brought together a number of scholars from Europe and the United States to discuss their ideas and research about cognitive and instructional processes in history and the social sciences. As such, it fills a major gap in the study of how people learn and reason in the context of particular subject matter domains and how instruction can be improved in order to facilitate better learning and reasoning. Previous cognitive work on subject matter learning has been focused primarily upon mathematics and physics; the present effort provides the first such venture examining the history and social science domains from a cognitive perspective. The different sections of the book cover topics related to comprehension, learning, and instruction of history and the social sciences, including: *the development of some social sciences concepts, *the teaching of social sciences -- problems and questions arising from this cognitive perspective of learning, *the comprehension and learning from historical texts, *how people and students understand historical causality and provide explanations of historical events, and *the deduction processes involved in reasoning about social sciences contents. This volume will be useful for primary and secondary school teachers and for cognitive and instructional researchers interested in problem solving and reasoning, text comprehension, domain-specific knowledge acquisition and concept development.

From the late nineteenth century until World War II, competing spheres of professional identity and practice redrew the field of history, establishing fundamental differences between the roles of university historians, archivists, staff at historical societies, history teachers, and others. In History’s Babel, Robert B. Townsend takes us from the beginning of this professional shift—when the work of history included not just original research, but also teaching and the gathering of historical materials—to a state of microprofessionalization that continues to define the field today. Drawing on extensive research among the records of the American Historical Association and a multitude of other sources, Townsend traces the slow fragmentation of the field from 1880 to the divisions of the 1940s manifest today in the diverse professions of academia, teaching, and public history. By revealing how the founders of the contemporary historical enterprise envisioned the future of the discipline, he offers insight into our own historical moment and the way the discipline has adapted and changed over time. Townsend’s work will be of interest not only to historians but to all who care about how the professions of history emerged, how they might go forward, and the public role they still can play.