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The author examines the therapeutic value of puzzles for adults during two major crises in the United States, the Great Depression of the 1930s and the COVID-19 pandemic of the early 2020s. Each period saw a huge surge in jigsaw puzzling throughout the country, she finds, and in both cases people turned to home-based leisure activities, either for financial reasons or because of lockdowns. Contemporary accounts from the two periods form the basis for the discussion. In both cases, the surge in puzzling reflected both the demand by consumers and the relatively easy entry of new small-scale producers into this area of playthings. Advertising played a major role, too, via premiums given to purchasers of consumer products in the 1930s, and more recently through social media and the Internet.

In 1752, the American polymath Benjamin Franklin supposedly flew a kite near the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to confirm that lightning had the same properties of common electricity that electrical machines produced and Leyden jars served to store. Illustrations, vignettes and paintings frequently portray the famous experiment, showing Franklin, with a boy, flying the kite in an open field and amid a storm. Nonetheless, little is known or said about the elements of these illustrations and the reference the illustrators used to portray the experiment. This paper aims to discuss these matters in a thoughtful study of seven nineteenth-century illustrations depicting Benjamin Franklin's kite experiment. I will show that the account by Joseph Priestley in his "The History and Present State of Electricity," published in 1767, influenced these illustrations. I indicate that due to this influence, the illustrations present several departures from Franklin's original account, leading to a mistaken iconography of how the experiment took place. I conclude with a discussion on how this study can contribute to a better use and understanding of illustrations depicting scientific episodes in science classrooms.

One of the critical issues facing Historians today has been the emergence of Strong State regimes and the politicized pseudo history they produce in countries claiming to adhere to democratic norms. The attack on the Capital of the United States was based on a series of lies about voter fraud supported by President Donald Trump and members of Congress. Countering ideology based on a complete disregard for truth is now of paramount importance in the United States. This paper studies Trump's promise to Make America Great Again (MAGA) as a further evolution of Lost Cause mythos that began after the Civil War. The original story casts the enfranchisement of African Americans as a failure touting white supremacy and the righteousness of Jim Crow laws. How can History teachers counter these highly politicized myths? I suggest that the methodology of our profession may provide us with some important tools. John Dewey underscored the importance of critical inquiry to the preservation and advancement of democracy. Teaching students how to think historically goes a long way in the process of producing citizenry who are ready to participate in civil society. To that end I conclude this essay with a course that I teach entitled "Witches, Aliens, and Other Enemies." The course is designed to set moments of mass hysteria and paranoia in the American narrative against the background of reason and rational legal law utilizing the Salem witch hunt at the end of the seventeenth century and the "red scare" following World War II as case studies to stimulate student exploration.

February 12, 1924, is a landmark date in the annals of American music. The story of that snowy afternoon in New York has become almost legendary -- and the tale has undoubtedly become embellished in its telling and retelling over the past 100 years. The occasion was a concert titled "An Experiment in Modern Music," presented by Paul Whiteman and his Palais Royal Orchestra. According to program annotator Hugh C. Ernst (Whiteman's business manager), the so-called experiment was to be "purely educational," and it was Whiteman's aim to demonstrate "the tremendous strides which have been made in popular music" in the previous decade or so, with the apparent goal of increasing the presence of American vernacular music in the concert hall. The "jazz concerto" became "Rhapsody in Blue," by far the most memorable feature of the "Experiment in Modern Music." The mythology surrounding a notice had appeared in the "New York Tribune" announcing that the concert would be evaluated by a panel of judges "who will pass on 'What Is American Music?'" The notice went on to say that "George Gershwin is at work on a jazz concerto." The "jazz concerto" became "Rhapsody in Blue," by far the most memorable feature of the "Experiment in Modern Music." The mythology surrounding the work quickly developed, but as with many myths and urban legends, the story of "Rhapsody in Blue" has its basis in fact. The original manuscripts in the Music Division of the Library of Congress tell part of the story. These manuscripts start with several undated sketches for the opening theme of "Rhapsody in Blue" in a manuscript sketchbook that dates from 1924 and 1925. The only complete manuscript for the "Rhapsody" in Gershwin's own handwriting (fifty-six pages, for piano solo, with the jazz band part reduced for a second piano) has the date January 7, 1924, on its first page; this date is only three days after the "New York Tribune" announcement on January 4. "Rhapsody in Blue" has inspired much scholarly inquiry over the years. But if Whiteman hoped that his "Experiment in Modern Music" might help to bring American popular music into the concert hall, he could not possibly have imagined the extent to which the new "jazz concerto" would become world famous through recordings, sheet music, articles, and books, and that it indeed would become an iconic representation of its era. If challenged to compose for an "Experiment in Modern Music" concert today, as the author proposes, what might students create?

College expansion throughout the twentieth century was accompanied by the growth of a profession centered on supporting student learning and development. Higher Education and Student Affairs (HESA) programs multiplied across the United States to train these professionals with a focus on administration, leadership, and student affairs. As recommended by the Council for the Advancement of Standards in Higher Education and related professional organizations, the more than 280 programs in existence today typically include a course on the history of higher education. For the vast majority of HESA students, this is the only graduate-level history course they will take. For this study, the research team consisted of two faculty members -- one a historian and one a higher education professional -- and two graduate students who collaborated with the intention of deepening student engagement with history through an authentic digital assessment. This article examines the impact of the authentic digital assessment on student engagement, inquiry, research skills, and awareness of audience within the broader context of the history of higher education in the United States.

In this article, Sohyun An presents a lesson that she was invited to teach at an elementary school in Georgia for the celebration of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month. As a social studies teacher educator and mother of Asian American children attending the school, she has worked with some of the teachers to advance critical social studies education. The lesson she designed and taught centered on two Japanese immigrants, Frank Matsura (1873-1913) and Shoki Kayamori (1877-1941). Matsura and Kayamori migrated to the U.S. in the early 1900s and settled in Washington and Alaska, respectively. They embedded themselves in the communities of Indigenous peoples, white settlers, and other migrant workers and became photographers, recording the daily lives of the people. She chose Matsura and Kayamori because their stories and photographs address "westward expansion," a topic that the fifth graders had already learned about in previous social studies lessons. She also chose them because their stories provide a powerful counterstory to the narratives at the time.

This article focuses on the reform-driven efforts of three elite White women from Athens, Georgia, during the progressive era. Laura Blackshear, Mary Ann Rutherford Lipscomb, and Sarah Hunter Moss were pivotal in the creation and development of the Tallulah Falls Industrial School, which aimed to educate children in the North Georgia mountains through industrial training, including craft education. My investigation of the historical and place-based context that formed the basis for rural reform efforts suggests that practices aimed at "good," such as building model industrial schools in rural Georgia, were intertwined with efforts to maintain systems of White supremacy, patriarchy, and classism. Using Massey's theorization of spatial politics, I highlight how Blackshear, Lipscomb, and Moss's efforts were entangled in the complicated spatial relations of the places in which they pursued reform, and I suggest that art educators become attuned to and responsible for the spatial contexts they are navigating.

Seventh-grade students engaged in a guided historical inquiry about slavery, freedom, and unfreedom. The teacher carefully intertwined historical content, close reading, critical thinking, and text-based writing -- both extemporaneous and refined-- during Social Studies. Students scrutinized primary sources to build their historical schemas over the course of a week. They then engaged in the writing process during a week-long assessment. Students formulated emerging historical understandings through extemporaneous text-based writing, which were later used to draft, revise, and resubmit evidentiary and narrative essays. Findings revealed disparate degrees of criticality, complexity, and clarity between narrative and evidentiary essays. Teachers and researchers can gain rich, nuanced understandings from close examinations of students' reading, thinking, and revised writing.

Two movies about events in 1963 and 1972 are discussed. They are Rustin and Shirley. The movies concern the actions of Bayard Rustin in organizing the March on Washington for Peace and Jobs and the actions of Shirley Chisholm in organizing her campaign for the Presidency of the United States. The events took place more than half a century ago. They are important historically, but they are rarely referred to in relation to current issues. The participation of Rustin and Chisholm are almost forgotten by the general public. The appearance of the movies suggests the possibility of renewed interest in those events and those times. The significance of the events and the movies is explored, and their relevance to current issues is discussed.

This article seeks to determine how and why countermemory shifts from being a fringe narrative to being a part of the U.S.'s collective narrative. We establish two complementary--and often interlocking--reasons for this shift: 1) The role of media portrayals in film and series, and 2) The impact of grassroots community-engaged public memory efforts. In the examples we study, media portrayals preceded community-engaged memory work, but these findings must be analyzed in context with the community work as part of larger rhetorical ecologies. In our research, it becomes evident that media representations can initially inspire community interest, helping groups organize and craft memory sites to shift narratives within a larger socio-political context.

This qualitative case study research explores the discursive practices of three White secondary US history teachers while teaching about the "Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka" Supreme Court decision. Using critical discourse analysis as a methodology, this study examines teachers' use of naming, verb tense and presupposition to explore the subtle differences in meaning conveyed to students about the "Brown" decision and how these differences correspond with teachers' historical knowledge and beliefs about the goal and role of teaching history. In revealing these discursive differences in historical narratives, this study demonstrates how master narratives of American progress rooted in hegemonic Whiteness are upheld or disrupted, and sometimes both. This study supplements existing research about the teaching and learning about the history of "Brown" and raises questions about the different historical narratives presented to students even when purportedly covering the same topics.

This study explores how undergraduates, as historical thinkers, learn to interact with history and construct their understanding of the past, and examines the role that primary and secondary sources play in narrative construction and revision. Using the African American civil rights movement as a content focus, participants used images to create initial narratives that reflected their understanding of the movement. Half the participants then read an essay on the movement written by a prominent historian, and the other half examined 18 primary sources that reflected the historian's interpretation of the movement. Participants then each created a second narrative, again selecting images to depict their understanding of the movement. The results of the study suggest that even as students work with primary sources, they need an effective narrative framework based on recent scholarship to forge powerful counter-narratives that transcend outdated interpretations and historical myths. In terms of teaching and learning about the lengthy struggle for racial justice in the United States, simply encouraging teachers and students to 'do history' and conduct their own online research is unlikely to change persistent narrative structures that continue to enable and excuse systemic racism.

This article explores the historical narrative developed by the two most popular Christian school publishers (A Beka Book and Bob Jones University Press) at their founding in the mid-1970s. Specifically, they promoted the idea that it was exclusively white Anglo-American men who heroically created the United States by separating order from chaos. The publishers utilized this story to direct the home and Christian school pupil to save and protect what their ancestors created. The importance of such messages gave meaning and ideology to white conservative evangelicals who have come to think of themselves as "real Americans" fighting the ongoing culture wars.

Analytical reading and writing are embedded in a disciplinary approach to history instruction and present opportunities to extend students' literacy practices. U.S. educators and researchers have come to rely on the Document-Based Question (DBQ) to assess and develop students' historical knowledge and argument writing. However, this task has been criticized for not being disciplinarily authentic and is often not accessible to lower grade levels. Relatively recent policy initiatives in the United States emphasize disciplinary thinking and communicating conclusions through inquiry (in the C3 Framework for Social Studies State Standards) and argument writing (in the Common Core State Standards), so the challenge is to find writing opportunities that address both demands simultaneously. Through interviews with historians, the authors identify aspects of a common writing assignment (the DBQ) that are consistent and inconsistent with promoting historical thinking and writing in U.S. schools. The interviews are then used to propose guidelines for assignments and assessments that could give students more authentic opportunities to write and think historically. The authors also share assignments they have developed and tested that embrace such guidelines and explore the implications of those assignments for classroom use.

Despite decades of research to the contrary, public discourse continues to insist on the direct power of curriculum to shape student learning, rather than acknowledge the complex and situated ways that teachers and curricular materials interact to shape enacted instruction. In this paper, we use a model of curriculum enactment to illustrate the complex factors influencing this interaction between teachers and curriculum. We examine how two teachers enact two different lessons on racial history and ask whether and how this interaction led to opening or closing of opportunities for interpretation. Our analysis led us to generate three types of historical interpretations that were potentially available for discussion across these two lessons: (a) "textual" interpretations centred on how a particular text should be understood; (b) "political" interpretations centred on how history should be remembered in the present; (c) "structural" interpretations centred on causal explanations for racism. The results of this study suggest that developing teacher knowledge for facilitating discourse about racial history will need to be steeped in enactment and contextualized in teachers' broader identities and experiences.

National History Day (NHD), a non-profit organization based in College Park, Maryland, is widely known for the National History Day Contest, in which students conduct historical research and submit their projects at local and state levels, with top students invited to the National Contest. Participation in NHD demonstrates that students learn history when they extensively research and write about it. The NHD contest is not a secondary school version of Trivial Pursuit. It is not a "bee" in which students memorize information that they later recite in response to questions. Rather, it requires that they thoroughly and deliberately examine the world of the past through direct contact with original materials, including documents, photographs, film, newspapers, interviews, and visits to historic sites, such as battlefields, monuments, and memorials. By engaging with such resources, students can understand the motivations of individuals who lived in a particular time and place, why past events unfolded as they did, and how they continue to shape the present.

Throughout the 1840s and '50s, localized and specialized periodicals serving specific regions, religions, pastimes, and vocations inundated the American magazine market (Lupfer 249). The vast majority of these publications were short-lived; Heather A. Haveman, a sociologist who in 2015 conducted a quantitative analysis of historical American magazines, estimates that the average lifespan of a magazine between 1840 and 1860 was a mere 1.9 years (29). As book historian Eric Lupfer says, "most were risky ventures-- undercapitalized, poorly advertised, haphazardly managed, and with limited circulation" (249). However, magazines with the stability and capital of a sponsoring publishing house, as opposed to independent upstarts, could withstand the challenges to the fragile and rapidly changing publishing industry: After 1840 the production of magazines became ever more bound up with the production and promotion of books, newspapers, and other printed materials. Book publishers began issuing their own house magazines, magazines printed advertisements for newspapers and books, and the text generated by editors and contributors flowed freely between them all. (Lupfer 250) One publishing house thrived by implementing this business model: Harper & Brothers. The New York City-based giant grew to be the largest publishing house in the world by 1853. It spent the 1850s producing books written by English authors and then serializing these same stories in their periodical "Harper's Monthly" (Harper 91). The magazine was successful not only because of the desirable content that circulated though the Harper & Brothers publishing house but also because of the way the content was curated and marketed; unlike most of its localized competitors, "Harper's Monthly" aimed to have something for every reader across the country ("A Word"). The publishing house had the capital to push the periodical nationwide through newly established transportation and distribution networks, and it had the content to intrigue subscribers. [Portz-Prize-Winning Essay, 2017.]

Statues are in the news. Controversies are swirling around the slave trader and philanthropist Edward Colston in Bristol, Confederate generals, soldiers and leaders in the United States, and the sculpture in honour of Mary Wollstonecraft in Newington Green in North London. In some cases, the attacks have been physical as well as verbal, and such moves have provoked counter-moves in defence of certain statues or statues of a certain kind. People are paying attention to and reflecting on monuments that they might normally pass by without a glance or thought. Nor has the conversation simply been about the authorised and unauthorised relocation or dismantling of statues: there has also been considerable enthusiasm for erecting new ones. In this paper, I argue that it is healthy to have such debates and important in a functioning democracy. However, before we can consider why some statues and monuments have become so controversial, and how best to resolve the controversies, we first need to understand the many different reasons why statues might be erected in the first place, and why they might continue to be valued and preserved. We also need to consider secondary intentions in their creation, and other social functions they might serve, whether intended or not. We need to reflect on the who, how, where and when of statues before we can understand their defacement or destruction.

In recent years, the removal of monuments which glorify historical figures associated with racism and colonialism has become one of the most visible and contested forms of decolonisation. Yet many have objected that there is educational value in leaving such monuments standing. In this paper, I argue that public monuments can be understood as speech acts which communicate messages to those who live among them. Some of those speech acts derogate particular social groups, contributing to their marginalisation in much the way that slurs do. Comparing derogating monuments to slurs is also productive in suggesting morally appropriate responses to their harms. I explore the limits of the use-mention distinction in relation to the harmfulness of slurs and apply this to show that attempting to recontextualise harmful monuments in situ--by, for example, changing the text on an accompanying plaque in order to retain the monument for its educational value--will not solve the problem in most cases. I conclude that the removal of slurring monuments, or their relocation to museum exhibitions dedicated to presenting a more critical view of history, is a more robust and reliable way of protecting against harm, and that this consideration outweighs any purported educational value in leaving monuments in place.

Adding further insight into how historical thinking can be used as a lens to examine debates about difficult historical events and philosophies, Gabriel Reich's piece on continuity, change, and historical consciousness shifts the focus to the U.S. context. Reich points out that in the case of Confederate monuments, their greatest power may be in the way they have become part of the scenery in cities and small towns in the U.S. South and beyond. Historicizing them can help students to connect the past to the present, to see that what is "natural" is the result of historical contexts, and the choices people made within those contexts. That epiphany, cathartic for some, disquieting for others, is a moment where growth has a chance to begin.

This article reports on Year 2 of a three-year project to assess historic site-based teacher professional development programs. The intended focus was assessing pre-post Q-sorts and interviews of 29 teachers regarding how they see their work at historic sites affecting their professional development. However, data analysis revealed exceptionally large shifts in teacher experiences both from previous year's administrations and in-year pre-post administrations. These shifts were attributable to programmatic changes museum educators (MEs) made, instigated by the first rounds of evaluation, rather than changes in teachers' stances. Thus, this article reports on the changes that MEs made in the program between Y1 and Y2 and the critical role that MEs play in supporting teachers' professional development and the ways in which their understanding/misunderstanding of teachers' needs drive programming. Herein the authors examine the influence of the assessment process on MEs' evolving understanding of their roles as teacher educators.

Courses: Rhetorical criticism, public address, persuasion, public memory theory, argumentation. Objectives: Through analysis of public controversies about Confederate monuments on college campuses, students will: (1) explore the concept of "public memory," how groups of people form shared interpretations of the past; (2) examine how monuments act as rhetorical texts that embody disparate public memories for different groups of people; and (3) engage in rhetorical analysis to learn how public memories are often constructed to serve present interests rather than to preserve accurate accounts of the past.

Struck by their sixth-form students' self-doubt when asked to make an historical claim, teachers Carina Ancell and Alan Kunna went in search of ways to build their students' confidence. A fruitful discussion with university lecturers Toby Green and Chris Dillon, about the challenges faced by first-year undergraduates in seminar discussion, led to a joint-venture in trialling the Harkness method with both school and university students. In this article Ancell and Kunna explain how they used small-group and whole-class discussions at their comprehensive sixth-form college to help students learn to orient themselves within an historical community. Green and Dillon show how the Harkness method encouraged undergraduate students to evaluate the strength of their claims in collaboration with others. The authors' reflections on the joint-venture led them to make a case for using the Harkness method to improve the transition of post-16 students from school classroom to university seminar.

People are routinely involved in remembering the national past and imagining the national future, especially when making political decisions. These processes, however, have not been explored extensively. The present research aims to address this lacuna. In 2 experiments (N = 203), participants were asked to remember and imagine events that involve the United States. Later, they rated these events in terms of phenomenal characteristics, valence, and perceived agency (circumstance, self, other-people, nation). Their responses were also coded for specificity and content. Past and future responses correlated for specificity, phenomenology, valence, and the four domains of perceived agency. Despite this strong correspondence between past and future thinking, there were also differences. Future responses were less specific and more positive than past responses. Moreover, people thought that they themselves and their nation will have more control over their nation's future compared with the control they attributed to themselves and their nation over its past. The bias to be more optimistic about the nation's future was partly explained by this tendency to see the nation as more agentic in the future. Taken together, these results reveal striking similarities and divergences between autobiographical and collective mental time travel. The present research provides an exploration for the newly emerging field of collective mental time travel.

After an accomplished military career leading up to and during World War II, Truman Smith (1893-1970) was seemingly forgotten. His name was seldom mentioned after the war until his memoirs were published posthumously in 1984. History shows Smith to be an astoundingly successful figure in military intelligence. This article provides a biography on the military career of Truman Smith.

Particularly for Americans, patriotic history is a kind of glue for an extraordinarily diverse republic. Civic education requires students engage with their history--not only to know whence conventions, principles, and laws have come, but also to develop an attachment to them. This article looks at how American history should educate, but also inspire.

"Black history is American history," is a popular phrase used by a multitude of people seeking to legitimate Black history to the general population. The motto is usually a two-fold response to concerns about the disregard of Black history. First, "Black history is American history" is used to criticize (and in some cases educate) Black History Month's utility. The slogan is used as a reminder that Black history education should be a yearly project, not a novelty taught only during February. Second, the phrase is used to discourage plans for separate K-12 Black history courses in schools. If segregated, a Black history course may be perceived as less important than the required history classes. Plus, many believe that the only way Black history should be taught is to seamlessly infuse Black history within the general American history narrative. Improving Black history in K-12 schools will need a concerted effort from policymakers and K-12 educators. For policymakers, altering the way the history curriculum is constructed. That means to move away from policies that promote historical uniformity (all histories are the same) and historical integration (add Black people into history without taking serious consideration of their voices and perspectives) to more historical contentiousness (a history that is comfortable with competing perspectives about the ethos of America). For school administrators, a detailed professional development plan is needed. This plan should consist of curriculum audits and ongoing professional learning plans for staff and the community that include sessions on Black history content and pedagogical content knowledge as well as teacher's dispositions and identity.

Peter Conolly-Smith, a history professor at Queens College, uses the textbook "The American Promise," since 1998, and now in its seventh edition. He has been using this book for twenty years, and it has accompanied him from one school to another, providing the backbone of his post-1865 survey course. The relationship he has developed with this text is complicated. He started out feeling great enthusiasm for the book, and he continues to recommend it to graduate students about to enter the classroom. However, the book also displays certain weaknesses, especially in its more recent editions. These weaknesses include what he later refers to as a "thinning" of the text, as well as an ideological shift that set in with the third edition and became more glaring with each new incarnation thereafter. These, along with changes determined by the academic textbook marketplace, are the subject of the second half of the article.

In light of increasing mandates to incorporate close reading of primary source historical documents at the elementary level, this study explored the reading difficulty level of the US Constitution with preservice elementary teachers using a traditional cloze assessment procedure. While best practice pedagogy of social studies has long included thoughtful reading of primary sources, new language arts guidelines situate the analysis of primary documents within formulaic quantifiable frameworks, often problematic to the pre-service teacher. With implications for reading and social studies, this paper explores several relevant issues to both pre-service teachers and the elementary classrooms they will teach in.

Despite the significant presence of Cuban children in the U.S. public schools since the late 1950s, no historical interpretation of their educational experiences exists. This essay is the first to develop such an interpretation. It sketches, in broad strokes, the role that Cuban exiles and Cuban Americans played in shaping their children's education in the U.S. from the late 1950s to the 1990s.

This study provides an analysis of data collected from Chihuahua, Mexico, and Ontario, Canada, educators on how United States (U. S.) policies are taught and discussed in their classrooms. Teachers and administrators were interviewed with regard to their respective curricula and classroom discussions. The researcher sought to gain insight on how historical and current U. S. policies are addressed. Participants responded to questions regarding how much time was devoted to U. S. policies in classroom discussions, how much open discourse exists in classrooms, what ideological differences are evident, and why Americans should be informed of perspectives in another country's social studies classrooms. The researcher uses border pedagogy and meliorism to analyze how educators present geographic, historic, socioeconomic, and political issues as they relate to U. S. classrooms. Addressed are implications for integrating perspectives in U. S. classroom discussions and, in turn, broadening the social studies curriculum in American schools. Moreover, this study seeks to provide additional insight for those who educate on common issues in U. S. classrooms.

In this article, inspired by Toni Morrison's evocative description of places that are "never going away" and events that "will happen again," the author explores the historical legacies of racism, law enforcement, and educational inequality in Covington, Kentucky. The author argues that these legacies can best be understood by juxtaposing and then reading across historical moments that share a geographic location. After establishing that Covington's police force, like so many in the Kentucky (Smith 2012), was likely founded to surveil and contain enslaved Black people in the Antebellum period, it is demonstrated that Covington public schools were created and maintained as racially separate and deeply unequal institutions for over a century. The author then examines two historical moments united by their Covington locale but separated by nearly fifty years: first, the author analyzes newspaper accounts of 1970 Black student protests and the white resistance these protests inspired; then, the author analyzes a 2014 lawsuit brought against a Covington school resource officer, who (the court found) used excessive force against an eight-year-old Latino boy and a nine-year-old Black girl. Ultimately, the author finds similarities in how children and families of color were portrayed by Covington school officials and law enforcement leaders in both accounts. Their actions, their words, and their very existence, were perceived and portrayed as threatening and violent. White violence, in turn, was explained and excused as precautionary, disciplinary--a safety measure. It is argued that these discursive representations, and the very real consequences these representations have had for Black and Brown students, are manifestations of Covington's long legacy of "unresolved social violence" against Black and Brown people (Gordon 1997). This paper concludes by proposing a methodology for reading history that explicitly seeks these legacies so that they might be disrupted.

Criticisms of Howard Zinn's work on U.S. History are examined in the context of increasing emphasis on the idea of "American exceptionalism" in contemporary political and cultural discourse, and particularly the insertion of American exceptionalism into revised social studies standards for the state of Texas. Analysis focusing on the difference between Howard Zinn's approach to U.S. History and the approach taken by his critic, Lynne Cheney, reveals that there is a fundamental difference in how change is viewed by Cheney, as the achievement of a single unified American people striving together to improve life for everyone, versus Zinn's history, in which changes have resulted from struggles among people with conflicting interests, values, and beliefs. The idea of U.S. history as the history of "one nation, indivisible" is found to be a core tenet of this present version of American exceptionalism, and it is observed how this view has been incorporated into the Texas social studies standards, not only in the provision that explicitly requires teaching of American exceptionalism, but also in provisions that were amended to no longer recognize progressive changes as resulting from the struggles of specific groups of people. The paper concludes with the observation that the choice for educators is not only a choice between truthful or untruthful history, but more fundamentally between conflicting purposes for social education in the schools. (Contains 18 notes.)

This paper presents a discussion of Howard Zinn's intellectual and political ideas. Through the analysis of selections from his immense body of work, several interrelated themes emerge. Drawing more attention to these notions of dissent and democracy is crucial to revitalizing education at all levels and vital to advancing the public discourse towards progressive goals. Howard's remarkable life and work are summarized best in his own words. His primary concern, he explained, was "the countless small actions of unknown people" that lie at the roots of "those great moments" that enter the historical record--a record that will be profoundly misleading, and seriously disempowering, if it is tom from these roots as it passes through the filters of doctrine and dogma. His life was always closely intertwined with his writings and innumerable talks and interviews. It was devoted, selflessly, to empowerment of the unknown people who brought about great moments. (Contains 1 note.)

In recent decades many people came to know Howard Zinn for his outspoken advocacy on a wide range of progressive causes, including civil rights, free speech, workers' rights, education reform, and opposition to U.S. imperialism. The author's own first encounter with Howard Zinn's special combination of scholarship and activism occurred several decades earlier, while he attended graduate school in the 1970s to study U.S. history. The first time the author read Zinn was in a short essay, entitled "Abolitionists, Freedom Riders and the Tactics of Agitation," in Martin Duberman's "The Antislavery Vanguard: New Essays on the Abolitionists" (1965). This essay guided the author to Zinn's "SNCC: The New Abolitionists" (Zinn 1964), one of his first monographs. In his essay Zinn attempted to stress the parallels between the early nineteenth century reformers who challenged not just slavery but the pervasive racial prejudice of their society and the recruits to the post World War II civil rights movement. In this article, the author talks about Howard Zinn and the socially conscious academic. He discusses how Zinn set an example to progressive academics not to retreat into their scholarship.

Every year, historians in the United States attend the American Historical Association (AHA), a conference that has met annually since 1884. The AHA draws scholars from all specializations, and it is the primary organization through which the profession is represented. In 1969, the conference met at the Sheraton Park Hotel in Washington, D.C. At the business meeting on the evening of 28 December, the radicals sought to take control of the organization. The minutes demonstrate the dangers of trusting narratives--even (or especially) those proffered as neutral accounts. They do not document the moment entirely, nor do they capture the participants' experiences of it. On the central event, the records are silent. What actually happened speaks to the issues of power, neutrality, and knowledge that were central themes in Howard Zinn's career. In those moments, Zinn, representing the Radical Historians' Caucus, sought to present a resolution to the members of the AHA. He grabbed a microphone and attempted to introduce it before the meeting's close. It denounced the twin evils of "the physical and cultural destruction of the Vietnamese people" and the "Black community at home". Before he had a chance to speak, John K. Fairbank intervened by wrestling the microphone out of Zinn's hands. The episode became known as the "Struggle for the Mike". In this article, the author talks about this episode and focuses on history of the profession, notions of objectivity, and citizenship. (Contains 1 note.)

Few scholars have achieved the level of recognition and respect among the wider public as Howard Zinn. This should not come as a surprise, given the "unconventional" ways that Zinn embodied and enacted his scholarship. He often took his teaching and writing into those seemingly restricted spaces of popular protest, converting words into protagonist deeds. The title of this essay is a modification of one of Zinn's own, "Historian as Citizen," which was published in the Sunday book review section of the "New York Times," September 25, 1966. In it, Zinn reflected on his two lives, "as historian, as activist," that began when he assumed a professorship in 1956 at Spelman, the historically Black women's college located in the South. While there are many lessons to be had from Zinn's work and legacy, it was his focus on making history transformative that should inspire educators and cultural workers. In this article, the author talks about Howard Zinn's legacy as citizen and/or activist.

A reenactment is the recreation of a scene, time period, or event as authentically as possible by a group of people. An educational reenactment takes the in-depth cultural experience of participating in a reenactment and joins it with the educational structure of a social studies classroom. Reenactments can be as varied as historical interpretation and imagination allow. Although many family vacations have made reenactment sites their destination of their vacations, and history clubs and gifted students have flirted with reenactment, there remains great untapped potential for use of historical reenactments as a way to teach about social studies. The reenactment described in this article focused on a twenty-year period of the French colonization in America (1741-1761). The French colonies of New France and Louisiana encompassed a large portion of North America--from the St. Lawrence River to the Great Lakes to the Mississippi watershed. This time period in U. S. history is relatively unexplored by textbooks, making it ideal for reenactment. This article explains a teacher-planned reenactment carried out during the school day and offers guidelines for teachers wishing to hold their own reenactments. (Contains 2 figures, 3 notes, and 12 resources.)