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The article discusses the profound influence of academic structures, specifically within history departments, on shaping educational outcomes. The focus is on redesigning history courses and curricula to better serve diverse student populations and align with evolving educational needs. Examples from initiatives like the History Gateways project illustrate how departments can lead efforts to improve student learning and success. By utilizing curricular analytics and fostering departmental collaboration, history departments can address systemic challenges and ensure the relevance and vitality of their programs in the face of demographic shifts in higher education.

The article discusses the revision of the curriculum in history education, with the goal to offer a curriculum that is more inclusive and committed to antiracism. It notes that history students were surveyed. Additional topics mentioned include allowing for academic freedom, revising scholarly literature, considering the function of history education, and implementing the changes.

The article discusses how history departments are increasingly engaging in collaborative discussions to reform their curriculum, focusing on improving pedagogical practices and making significant impacts on student learning. It highlights the influence of initiatives like the American Historical Association's Tuning the History Discipline project and the importance of data analytics in guiding curriculum changes. Despite challenges, such as declining majors and racial reckonings, departments have fostered collegiality and implemented innovative teaching strategies. The article underscores the value of fostering strong learning communities within departments and the potential of curriculum analytics to improve student retention and success. Overall, it expresses hope and collective commitment to enhancing history education despite current challenges facing the humanities.

A personal narrative is presented in which the author discusses teaching American history in Cuba.

An introduction is presented to a series of articles that focus on how to teach American history in alternative spaces.

The article focuses on an apprenticeship approach to teaching narrative complexity within history education. The author explains that this approach includes historical thinking and how it relates to democracy, the importance of disciplinary tool building, and the ways in which U.S. history narratives can be used as weapons.

The article focuses on how expert knowledge and democratic practice can be utilized within history education. Topics include the relationship between electoral politics and grassroots movements, Chicana/o studies frameworks, and do-it-yourself underground publications know as "zines."

The article focuses on U.S. survey courses within secondary education and higher education and how they reflect democratic politics.

The article explores how to teach about the U.S. presidency of Donald J. Trump within history classrooms. Topics include the importance of fact-based history teaching and bias, a comparison to teaching about the Vietnam war, and ideas about teaching recent history.

A personal narrative is presented which focuses on combining English and history to teach narrative writing.

A personal narrative is presented which focuses on the research essay as a means to engage students with effective history assignments.

A personal narrative is presented which focuses on public writing both in and out of the history education setting.

The article focuses on reimagining writing in history courses. The authors discuss their experiences teaching history, examine the importance of writing in history education, and explore how creative writing can benefit students in composition and historical analysis.

The article focuses on college students and their experiences with writing history essays. They authors compare their college experiences, discuss how writing is history, and explore the relationship between writing and thinking.

An introduction is presented in which the authors discuss a special section dedicated to varieties of student historical writing.

An introduction is presented to a special section on college-level textbooks and teaching in U.S. history, noting articles on topics including general education and history in Utah, the professionalization of history education, and collaboration among history educators in secondary and higher education contexts.

The article discusses the state of the academic field of sports history. The author examines the contributions sports history has made to history, developments in methodology that have impacted sports history, and the cultural significance of sports and sports history in the U.S., particularly concerning concepts of labor, capitalism, and class, religion, and race. The article also discusses the role of journalists in sports history, academic professionalism, and the cultural approach to sports history.

The article presents a discussion of the coverage, or survey, model of teaching history and provides examples of ways in which this teaching method has been criticized by educational scholars since the late 1800s. It chronicles the development of survey history courses for general education in U.S. colleges that were based on content knowledge, describes efforts to reform introductory history courses by using the history lab method which focused on historical analysis, and discusses how factual knowledge and cultural literacy have shaped ideas about history curriculum reform since the 1980s. Other topics include criticisms of history textbooks as well as the development of specialty disciplines in the study of history such as women's, social, and non-Western histories.

The article presents an interchange that explores teaching, researching and the conceptualization of Latino history within United States history. Interchange members include Adrian Burgos Jr., Donna Gabaccia, María Christina García, Matthew Garcia, Kelly Lytle Hernández, Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, María E. Montoya, George J. Sánchez, Virginia Sánchez Korrol and Paul Spickard. Topics discussed include the presidential address given by Vicki Ruiz at the 2006 Organization of American Historians, popular narratives of U.S. history and minorities in the history profession.

The article presents the author's personal reflections on his experiences teaching U.S. history at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon in 2009. Details are given describing premise and central themes of his course "Introduction to American Studies," highlighting questions regarding the students' perceptions of what "America" was. Discussion is particularly given noting the influence of the U.S. military presence in the area with the Iraq War and the War on Terror. Additional subjects discussed include the benefits and pitfalls of comparisons between U.S. history and other nations' histories, encountering and critically examining American cultural mythology, and the centrality of ideology in the understanding of history.

The article discusses the historiography and evolution of studies of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln. The author talks about how declining sales in the publishing industry are affecting university presses. The author also suggests different approaches to Lincoln studies, including biographies of neglected figures. Another suggested field of study is the demonization of Lincoln during his own time. Inconsistencies in Lincoln studies are also mentioned. The article "Lincoln 2.0," by Matthew Pinsker, published within the same issue, is frequently cited.

The article responds to a preceding essay by Thomas W. Zeiler on the state of U.S. diplomatic history as a field, and its re-entry into the mainstream of historical study through an increased focus on international history, or the study of the United States in the global context. The author takes issue with Zeiler's wish to retain the state and state power as topics of central relevance for the study of diplomatic history; she argues that power and the state have never been a focus only of diplomatic history, and that furthermore, foreign relations scholarship has explored important areas not shaped by state power.

The article responds to a preceding essay by Thomas W. Zeiler on the state of U.S. diplomatic history as a field, and its re-entry into the mainstream of historical study through an increased focus on international history, or the study of the United States in the global context. The author takes issue with Zeiler's focus on the centrality of the state and state power, and with the idea that diplomatic historians have led their own field back to the mainstream. She argues that in many ways they were pushed by other subdisciplines, such as ethnic, postcolonial, borderlands, transnational, and world history.

The article responds to a preceding essay by Thomas W. Zeiler on the state of U.S. diplomatic history as a field, and its re-entry into the mainstream of historical study through an increased focus on international history, or the study of the United States in the global context. The author finds Zeiler overly optimistic about these developments and discusses three potential risks that they raise: the return of a belief in American exceptionalism among U.S. diplomatic historians; methodological difficulties raised by trends in transnational research; and related difficulties in producing genuine historical syntheses.

The article responds to the preceding essay by Thomas W. Zeiler on the state of U.S. diplomatic history as a field, and its re-entry into the mainstream of historical study through an increased focus on international history, or the study of the United States in the global context. The author argues for not allowing the field to go out of balance in the opposite direction, through too much focus on international politics at the expense of U.S. domestic affairs. He argues for the importance of U.S. policy and politics, using the history of the Vietnam War as an example.

The article discusses the transnationalization or internationalization of historical writing, with historians from different countries cooperating and collaborating with increasing ease and frequency. In particular, the article traces this trend among American historians, examining their interest in world or global history, exploring patterns in American historiography of situating the United States in a global context, and also discussing contrary trends among historians whose focus is exclusively national.

The article examines students' historical thinking skills and preconceptions about historical study in the U.S. The author also interviewed history department colleagues to ascertain those historians' conceptions of the bottlenecks to student learning. A central bottleneck cited in the interviews involved the misconceptions about history as a discipline. Students may view the textbook as the central source from which all factual answers for exam emanate, while professors see textbooks as secondary tools providing students with a general narrative that must be compared to scholarly writings.

The author talks of his experiences teaching a one semester class in Latina/o American history survey class for undergraduates at the Oberlin College. He starts by admitting his failure in his first attempt to teach such a class in 2000. Not only was it his first class that he planned and taught on his own, but he had no textbook to help organize his lectures. He now teaches his class by dividing the different Latina/o groups and teaching each group's history as a separate "unit." He feels his class challenges previous conceptions about "traditional" American history that were basically a white biased dialogue with a few Indians at the beginning and some prominent Blacks featured towards the end. He includes discussions of sexual politics since he feels this is a major theme of Latina/o studies.

The author talks of her experiences teaching a gay and lesbian American history survey class for undergraduates at the Santa Clara University. Her class "Gays/Lesbians in U.S. History," is an upper level course that meets both the American history and the university's gender/ethnic core requirements. She has found the class appeals equally to both men and women. She defends her role as a teacher of "LGBTQ," or lesbian/gay/bisexual/ transgendered/queer studies, even though she is married and avowedly heterosexual.

The author talks of her experiences teaching a two part African American history survey class for undergraduates at Swarthmore College. Her classes are "African American History, 1500-1865" and "African American History, 1877-Present." She actually uses the end of the first class to open up a discussion about the U.S. Civil War and the end of slavery, as well as the effects of the Reconstruction. She starts her second class with a more detailed discussion of Reconstruction. She uses the classes as a way to teach students about the history and development of racism. Many students take it for granted that racism has always existed.

The author talks of his experiences teaching an American Indian history survey class for undergraduates at the University of Wisconsin, Madison for seven years. His class was one of a few classes at the university that met an initiative that undergraduate students meets certain requirements for ethnic studies. The author would conscientiously incorporate the term "American Indian" into his classroom as a way of forcing attention to the traditional connotation that both terms hold independent of each other, and the "tension" created by using them together. The author also talks about the difficulty of grouping all the native groups under one broad heading for study. In the twenty-first century, the U.S. government recognizes over 560 independent Indian groups.

The article records an extended conversation conducted online among a number of scholars and experts in which they discuss the legacies of the Vietnam War, including its impact of history and historiography. They note the importance of the emergence of scholarship from the Vietnamese, presenting that side's viewpoint of the concerning their wars with France and the United States. They compare and contrast the Vietnam conflict with the later wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The participants in the discussion are David Anderson, California State University, Monterey Bay; Christian Appy, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Mark Philip Bradley, Northwestern University; Robert K. Brigham, Vassar College; Ted Engelmann, Vietnam veteran and photographer; Patrick Hagopian, Lancaster University, England; Luu Doan Huynh, Institute of International Relations, Hanoi; Marilyn B. Young, New York University.

In this article the author examines the study of the history of consumers and consumption in the United States. Examining 2 books on the history of American consumption, "The Marketplace of Revolution," by T. H. Breen and Lizabeth Cohen's "A Consumer's Republic," the author concludes that both show consumption to have a political facet. However, he feels that the study of consumption in the United States has not studied encompass questions on the impact of consumption on power structures, the degree of autonomy inherent in the act of consuming and consumer understanding of the significance of consumption. The author is of the opinion that without these and other factors added to research, consumption and the history of it are trivial subjects for close study and that their growth as disciplines tells more about intellectual and academic trends than a historical one.

In this article the author challenges an assertion made in another article in the journal, one that rejected consumption as a historical factor in the fight for political freedom in the 18th century American colonies. He states that consumer behavior has meaning when examined in specific historical contexts. He connects consumption with production and suggests that consumer choice could be transformed into a means of political rebellion, using the period immediately before the outbreak of the American Revolution as an example. The acceptance of consumer sacrifice before and during the revolution was also a political act.

The article explains that questions of teaching and learning quickly became central to their thinking about how to engage their students in using visuals and new media to develop a sophisticated approach to history. The authors report research into student learning that responds to three developments. First, the scholarship of teaching and learning, or the pedagogical turn in the profession, treating student work as evidence to be evaluated using discipline-specific research methods. Second, the pictorial turn in culture studies prompts historians to reconsider the significance of images in the construction of historical understanding. Finally, the digital turn in the profession encourages scholars and students to experiment.

The article explores how the author has radically restructured the most traditional of courses, the U.S. history survey, in light of the scholarship of teaching and learning. But the course is not unique. So much experimentation is going on that one wonders whether historians might not be close to establishing a signature pedagogy for the introductory history course. A signature pedagogy is what beginning students in the professions have but history engineers typically do not: ways of being taught that require them to do, think, and value what practitioners in the field are doing, thinking, and valuing.

The article presents a conversation among historians James L. Baughman, Catherine Brekus, Mary L. Dudziak, Nancy F. Koehn, Susan E. Lederer and Jonathan Zimmerman, who work in six different professional schools, business, divinity, education, journalism, law, and medicine. The career path of the historians and how they became historians in a professional school, was discussed. Some of the historians agree that historical study have a different purpose in a professional school than it has in a college of liberal arts. According to Zimmerman, history inform public policy as well as professional practice. Baughman and Koehn agreed that teaching history in a professional school does not make them a better teachers but such, affects their teaching method, materials, and orientation in the classroom.

Examines the role of textbooks in teaching the U.S. history survey courses. Features of the Syllabus Finder, a free Web site that allows instructors to search for courses on specific topics and to study how history is taught across the U.S.; Factor that determines the likelihood that a course relies exclusively on textbook; List of most used textbooks in U.S. survey courses.

Discusses problems concerning the assessment of the performance of history education in the U.S. Outcome of education goals adopted by the U.S. Congress for 2000; Views of education reformer and public school advocate Horace Mann on teaching political history; Impact of history and civics education on the quality of citizenship.

Discusses several issues concerning history education in the U.S. Aspects of the historic sense presented by J. Carleton Bell, managing editor of the "Journal of Educational Psychology", and colleague David F. McCollum; Results of a large-scale test of factual knowledge in U.S. history of Texas students from 1915 to 1916; Information on a survey about ignorance in history shown by college freshmen published in the "New York Times" on April 4, 1943.

Provides information on utilizing electronic opportunities when teaching U.S. history. Factors influencing electronic opportunities for innovations in U.S. history teaching; Issues on historical content on the Internet and filtering information; Impact of information technology on how and when students learn.

Discusses the state of electronic supplements, either CD-ROM or online Web sites, for various college-level U.S. history textbooks. Brief history of electronic resources for the teaching of U.S. history; Description of cartographic history; Application of the imaging technology to teaching history.

Features 'America Unbound,' an electronic textbook on history published by the Digital Learning Interactive. Impact of electronic media on history teaching; Advantages of 'America Unbound'; Primary sources used in the textbook; Limitation of the textbook.

Deals with the use of oral history in teaching the history of the United States (U.S.). Two themes that can be used in lectures about the history of the U.S.; Advantages of oral history over traditional teaching sources; Lessons from the assassination of former U.S. President John F. Kennedy.

Attempts to demonstrate how experiential learning can benefit the practice of history. Perspectives wherein experiential learning was explored concerning acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

Surveys the history textbooks in the United States that project radicalism. How the radicals in the 1960s have sought to influence the writing of history textbooks pursue their aims; Comments from Forrest McDonald, professor at the University of Alabama; Samples of the textbooks.

Presents a course syllabus for teaching the history of childhood, adolescence and youth in the United States. Discussion on the social history in the United States; Samples of books, films and literary materials on childhood.

Presents information on the the teaching of history. Citing H-Net, H-Grad, and H-Teach which are electronic mail listings; Benefits of teaching via the Internet.

Presents information on United States' history and the teaching of Reconstruction to history students. Conflicting white and black goals or attitudes during the Reconstruction period after 1865.

Presents information on the potential impact of information technology on academic historians. View that students may no longer be interested in the written word; Benefits of information technology; Background information on the author.