Resources

Book Talk I

Reading Assignment

  • Sam Wineburg—Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past
    • Chapter 1: “Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts
    • Chapter 3: “On the Reading of Historical Texts”, and
    • Chapter 4: “Reading Abraham Lincoln”
  • Keith C. Barton—“’Bossed around by the queen’: Elementary students’ understanding of individuals and institutions in history” and “Narrative simplifications in elementary students’ historical thinking”
  • Keith C. Barton and Linda S. Lestik—“’It wasn’t a good part of history’: National identify and students’ explanations of historical significance”

Stanford History Education Group: Reading Like a Historian Web Site

The Reading Like a Historian curriculum engages students in historical inquiry. Each lesson revolves around a central historical question and features sets of primary documents modified for groups of students with diverse reading skills and abilities. The curriculum teaches students how to investigate historical questions by employing the reading strategies of sourcing, contextualizing, corroborating and close reading. Rather than simply put historical facts to memory, students evaluate the trustworthiness of multiple perspectives on issues ranging from King Philip's War to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and make historical claims of their own backed with documentary evidence.

Units cover the following periods in American history:

  • Colonial
  • Revolution and Early America
  • Expansion/Slavery
  • Civil War and Reconstruction
  • The Gilded Age
  • American Imperialism
  • Progressivism
  • World War I and the 1920s
  • New Deal and World War II
  • Cold War
  • Cold War Culture/Civil Rights

Historian Faculty

David PaceDavid Pace—Professor of History, Indiana University, is the recipient of the American Historical Association’s Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching Award. Author of Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Bearer of Ashes and coauthor of Studying for History.