Historical Thinking

Front Cover
Temple University Press, 2001 - Education - 270 pages
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 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.

From inside the book

Selected pages

Contents

Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts
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
Copyright

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Page 171 - Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests ; which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates ; but parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole ; where, not local purposes, not local prejudices ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole. You choose a member indeed ; but when you have chosen him he is not a member of Bristol,...
Page 89 - I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the black races. There is a physical difference between the two, which in my judgment will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality, and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference. I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong, having the superior position.
Page 97 - I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so ; and I have no inclination to do so.
Page 98 - But in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.
Page 97 - I hold that notwithstanding all this there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, — the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man.
Page 102 - By the way, a fine example was presented on board the boat for contemplating the effect of condition upon human happiness. A gentleman had purchased twelve negroes in different parts of Kentucky, and was taking them to a farm in the South. They were chained six and six together. A small iron clevis was around the left wrist of each, and this fastened to the main chain by a shorter one, at a convenient distance from the others, so that the negroes were strung together precisely like so many fish upon...
Page 102 - In this condition they were being separated forever from the scenes of their childhood, their friends, their fathers and mothers, and brothers and sisters, and many of them from their wives and children, and going into perpetual slavery, where the lash of the master is proverbially more ruthless and unrelenting than any other where; and yet amid all these distressing circumstances, as we would think them, they were the most cheerful and apparently happy creatures on board.
Page 100 - That is to say, inasmuch as you do not object to my taking my hog to Nebraska, therefore I must not object to you taking your slave. Now, I admit that this is perfectly logical, if there is no difference between hogs and negroes.
Page 102 - ... children, and going into perpetual slavery, where the lash of the master is proverbially more ruthless and unrelenting than any other where; and yet amid all these distressing circumstances, as we would think them, they were the most cheerful and apparently happy creatures on board. One whose...
Page 104 - God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb," or in other words, that he renders the worst of human conditions tolerable, while he permits the best to be nothing better than tolerable.

About the author (2001)

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

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