Table of Contents

Introduction: Understanding Historical Understanding Part I: Why Study History? 1. Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts 2. The Psychology of Teaching and Learning History Part II: Challenges for the Student 3. On the Reading of Historical Texts: Notes on the Breach Between School and Academy 4. Reading Abraham Lincoln: A Case Study in Contextualized Thinking 5. Picturing the Past Part III: Challenges for the Teacher 6. Peering at History Through Different Lenses: The Role of Disciplinary Perspectives in Teaching History 7. Models of Wisdom in the Teaching of History 8. Wrinkles in Time and Place: Using Performance Assessments to Understand the Knowledge of History Teachers Part IV: History as National Memory 9. Lost in Words: Moral Ambiguity in the History Classroom 10. Making (Historical) Sense in the New Millennium

Promotional Information

How do historians know what they know?

About the Author

Same Wineburg is Professor of Cognitive Studies in Education and Adjunct Professor of History at the University of Washington, Seattle.

Reviews

"Sam Wineburg has not merely contributed to our understanding of how history is created, taught and learned; he has nearly singlehandedly forged a distinctive field of research and a new educational literature. This volume brings together a decade-long record of conceptual invention and methodological creativity." oLee S. Shulman, President, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education Emeritus, Stanford University "With this volume, Sam Wineburg firmly established his place as the pre-eminent North American researcher in history education. His chapters range from insightful scholarly mediations to innovative empirical studies. He examines the knowledge and practices of historians, history teachers, and young people, as well as the vibrant field of research that has recently developed around these issues. Historical Thinking makes a vitally important contribution to our understanding of how we think and learn about the past." oPeter Seixas, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Education, University of Brutish Columbia "Historical Thinking is intellectually substantive, integrative, and timely. In the midst of all the talk about new technologies, distance learning, and standardized testing, his fine-grained inquiries into learning and knowledge are a sobering reminder that educators have a lot to learn about learning." oRandy Bass, Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship, Georgetown University "This is a wide-ranging and at times inspirational work." oHistory of Education "Arguing that we all absorb lessons about history in many settingsoin kitchen table conversations, at the movies, or on the world-wide-web, for instanceothese essays acknowledge the role of collective memory in filtering what we learn in school and shaping our historical thinking." oNew York Review of Books