• 272 pages
  • 6 x 9
  • 8 tables 3 figures 3 halftones
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  • Price: $30.95
  • EAN: 9781566398565
  • Publication: Mar 2001
  • Price: $30.95
  • EAN: 9781439903018
  • Publication: Mar 2001

Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts

Charting the Future of Teaching the Past

Sam Wineburg
  • Winner of the Frederic W. Ness Award, The Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2002

Since 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 an 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.

Reviews

"This is a wide-ranging and at times inspirational work."
History of Education

"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."
New York Review of Books

"Historians, especially academic historians, who normally avoid the literature on history education for its banality, thin research base, or ideological cant will overlook this book at their peril. Sam Wineburg brings both a burning concern for the state of history instruction and a wide knowledge of history to his research agenda."
The Journal of American History

"Wineburg's work is part of a broader effort to move beyond general features of teaching and learning and to examine the unique aspects of education in specific academic disciplines."
Anthropology and Education Quarterly

"The author of this collection is passionate about the teaching of history. ...students are encouraged to put themselves into the shoes of the people whose actions they are studying in order to arrive at their own understanding of what they had done."
The Historian

"Teaching the Mind Good Habits" by Sam Wineburg, The Chronicle Review, 11 April 2003.

About the Author(s)

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

In the Series

Critical Perspectives on the Past

No longer active. Critical Perspectives on the Past, edited by Susan Porter Benson, Stephen Brier, and Roy Rosenzweig, is concerned with the traditional and nontraditional ways in which historical ideas are formed. In its attentiveness to issues of race, class, and gender and to the role of human agency in shaping events, the series is as critical of traditional historical method as content. Emphasizing that history is itself an interpretation of material events, the series demonstrates that the historian's choices of subject, narrative technique, and documentation are politically as well as intellectually constructed.