Historical ThinkingSince ancient times, the pundits have lamented young people's lack of historical knowledge and warned that ignorance of the past surely condemns humanity to repeating its mistakes. In the contemporary United States, this dire outlook drives a contentious debate about what key events, nations, and people are essential for history students. Sam Wineburg says that we are asking the wrong questions. This book demolishes the conventional notion that there is one true history and one best way to teach it. Although most of us think of history -- and learn it -- as a conglomeration of facts, dates, and key figures, for professional historians it is a way of knowing, a method for developing and understanding about the relationships of peoples and events in the past. A cognitive psychologist, Wineburg has been engaged in studying what is intrinsic to historical thinking, how it might be taught, and why most students still adhere to the one damned thing after another concept of history. 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. Arguing that we all absorb lessons about history in many settings -- in kitchen table conversations, at the movies, or on the world-wide web, for instance -- these essays acknowledge the role of collective memory in filtering what we learn in school and shaping our historical thinking. |
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LibraryThing Review
User Review - TLCrawford - LibraryThingWhen I picked up Samuel Wineburg’s “Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts” I was expecting it to be a historiography and was more than a little disappointed to find that it was more focused on ... Read full review
LibraryThing Review
User Review - ThothJ - LibraryThingIt was a good textbook for my clinical history class. I'm not sure that I would have ever thought to read it, without being induced to do so in a classroom setting. But having done so, I would recommend it to any all secondary and college history teachers. Read full review
Contents
3 | |
The Psychology of Teaching and Learning History | 28 |
CHALLENGES FOR THE STUDENT | 61 |
On the Reading off Historical Texts Notes on the Breach Between School and Academy | 63 |
Reading Abraham Lincoln A Case Study in Contextualized Thinking | 89 |
Picturing the Past | 113 |
CHALLENGES FOR THE TEACHER | 137 |
Peering at History Through Different Lenses The Role of Disciplinary Perspectives in Teaching History | 139 |
Models of Wisdom in the Teaching of History | 155 |
Wrinkles in Time and Place Using Performance Assessments to Understand the Knowledge of History Teachers | 173 |
HISTORY AS NATIONAL MEMORY | 215 |
Lost in Words Moral Ambiguity in the History Classroom | 217 |
Making Historical Sense in the New Millennium | 232 |
Common terms and phrases
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