Sarah Laskow: One night in Tokyo, in the years before World War II, Hisako Koyama looked up, out into space, and saw a shooting star. It could have been passing moment, one that others would miss or quickly forget. For Koyama, the impression left by the streaking meteoroid was an inspiration. Without formal training, she … Continue reading How an Amateur Astronomer Became One of History’s Greatest Solar Observers →

Dumbarton Oaks: We are happy to announce that all seven volumes of Irfan Shahîd’s monumental Byzantium and the Arabs, published by Dumbarton Oaks Publications, are available for free download from our website. Irfan Shahîd knew even as an undergraduate at Oxford that the role of the Arabs in Roman history would be his life’s work. … Continue reading Irfan Shahîd’s history of the Arab’s interactions with Rome and Byzantium before the rise of Islam is available for download →

Sandra Stotsky, via Will Fitzhugh: “Advocates of a writing process tended to stress autobiographical narrative writing, not informational or expository writing.” It sounds excessively dramatic to say that Common Core’s English language arts (ELA) standards threaten the study of history. In this essay we show why, in the words of a high school teacher, “if … Continue reading Honoring the English Curriculum and the Study of U.S. History—Sandra Stotsky →

Journal-Sentinel: DEC. 9, 1965 Gov. Warren Knowles signs an open housing law that prohibits discrimination in the sale, rental or financing of housing. The law, a watered-down version of a measure proposed by Rep. Lloyd Barbee and other lawmakers, exempts owner-occupied properties with four or fewer units – leaving out the overwhelming majority of the … Continue reading Timeline: The marches that made history →

Eric Raymond: Looking back, we can see that between 1865 and around 1914 the Union and the former South negotiated an imperfect but workable peace. The first step in that negotiation took place at Appomattox, when the Union troops accepting General Robert E. Lee’s surrender saluted the defeated and allowed them to retain their arms, … Continue reading Unlearning History →

Roy Bragg: One of the seminal moments in Texas high school football history came in summer 1938 when Prairie Lea played Martindale in the state’s first six-man football game.

Max Roser: A recent survey asked “All things considered, do you think the world is getting better or worse, or neither getting better nor worse?”. In Sweden 10% thought things are getting better, in the US they were only 6%, and in Germany only 4%. Very few people think that the world is getting better. … Continue reading The short history of global living conditions and why it matters that we know it →

Marshall Project In a breathtaking feat of rehabilitation, Jones, now 45, became a published scholar of American history while behind bars, and presented her work by videoconference to historians’ conclaves and the Indiana General Assembly. With no internet access and a prison library that skewed toward romance novels, she led a team of inmates that … Continue reading In prison for more than 20 years, was chosen for Harvard’s elite graduate history program — until the university decided her redemption was not enough. →

Lucas Reilly: Nobody aboard could see what had happened. It was midnight, and the HMS Saunders-Hill—a merchant vessel anchored along a sleepy bend of the River Thames—shuddered violently. Crewmen clambered from their beds and grasped at tilting walls. Cries filled the briny air. In the darkness, it was difficult to make sense of what had … Continue reading The Blind Traveler: How James Holman Felt His Way Around the World to Become History’s Most Prolific Explorer →

Josh Lauer The first consumer credit bureaus appeared in the 1870s and quickly amassed huge archives of deeply personal information. Today, the three leading credit bureaus are among the most powerful institutions in modern life—yet we know almost nothing about them. Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion are multi-billion-dollar corporations that track our movements, spending behavior, and … Continue reading A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America →

David Cutler: It’s tough for a historian to earn the adoration of both academia and popular culture, but Eric Foner has managed to do it. His books on American history are assigned reading at universities and colleges across the country. Reviewers have praised his work as “monumental in scope” and declared that it “approaches brilliance.” … Continue reading ‘You Have to Know History to Actually Teach It’ →

Conor Friedersdorf: When free-speech advocates point out that the First Amendment protects even hate speech, as the attorney Ken White recently observed, they are often met with extreme hypotheticals. For example: “So, the day that Nazis march in the streets, armed, carrying the swastika flag, Sieg-Heiling, calling out abuse of Jews and blacks, some of … Continue reading The Most Shortsighted Attack on Free Speech in Modern U.S. History →

Sarah Knapton: A 3,700-year-old clay tablet has proven that the Babylonians developed trigonometry 1,500 years before the Greeks and were using a sophisticated method of mathematics which could change how we calculate today. The tablet, known as Plimpton 332, was discovered in the early 1900s in Southern Iraq by the American archaeologist and diplomat Edgar … Continue reading 3,700-year-old Babylonian tablet rewrites the history of maths – and shows the Greeks did not develop trigonometry →

Jon Schwarz The combination of these two things is truly bizarre, because the Fed has more power than any institution over everything about work in America. Here’s how the Fed does it: The Fed largely sets short term interest rates. If it lowers interest rates it heats up the economy, because cheap money makes it … Continue reading THE INCREDIBLE LOST HISTORY OF HOW “CIVIL RIGHTS PLUS FULL EMPLOYMENT EQUALS FREEDOM” →

Teddy Fischer (Mercer Island High School): TEDDY: How can the US defeat an ideology? Ideologies can be countered by showing people a better education and hope for the future. MATTIS: I think the most important thing on that is probably education. An economic opportunity has to be there as well. On the education, I sometimes … Continue reading Secretary of Defense James Mattis interview (note the History Emphasis) →

Clive Thompson: Last spring, a 23-year-old woman was driving her car through the Ontario town of Tobermory. It was unfamiliar territory for her, so she was dutifully following her GPS. Indeed, she was so intent on following the device that she didn’t notice that her car was headed straight for Georgian Bay—so she drove down … Continue reading From Ptolemy to GPS, the Brief History of Maps We now have the whole world in our hands, but how did we get here? →

Robert Pondisco: When you’re done tut-tutting about Trump’s Civil War comments, remember that only 18% of U.S. 8th graders score proficient in History.

Amber Walker: For the last 23 years, the Madison chapter of 100 Black Men of America has hosted the African-American History Challenge Bowl. Middle school students from across Madison participate in the quiz show-style, single-elimination tournament. Each team receives copies of the core text, “Life Upon These Shores: Looking at African-American History” by Henry Louis … Continue reading Madison Middle school students explore complex themes in black history bowl →

Jonathan Rees: I recently wrote an essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education called “Confessions of an Ex-Lecturer.” Yet my appearance this class (well, the first part of this class anyway) is going to be a lecture. Yes, I’m going to lecture about why and how I stopped lecturing. To get past this enormous contradiction, … Continue reading My adventures in digital history. →

Christie Davies: John Onians is one of Europe’s most innovative and wide-ranging art historians. A classicist by training and an expert on the theory and practice of Renaissance architecture, he became the pioneer of the teaching of World Art in British universities. In European Art: A Neuroarthistory, his latest, expertly illustrated work, Onians has applied … Continue reading Art history & the brain →

Mark Sweney: Pearson has reported a pre-tax loss of £2.6bn for 2016, the biggest in its history, after a slump at its US education operation. The world’s largest education publisher, which in January saw almost £2bn wiped from its stock market value after issuing its fifth profit warning in two years, reported the record loss … Continue reading Education publisher Pearson reports biggest loss in its history →

National Asphalt Pavement Association Today, this dark, resilient material covers more than 94 percent of the paved roads in the United States; it’s the popular choice for driveways, parking lots, airport runways, racetracks, tennis courts, and other applications where a smooth, durable driving surface is required. Called at various times asphalt pavement, blacktop, tarmac, macadam, … Continue reading History Of Asphalt →

Charles Cole III:: I attended more than 10 schools before the fifth grade and I had an attitude problem in each and every classroom. I was born in Chicago to young, drug-addicted parents that had a penchant for moving and staying in and out of jail. I moved from Chicago to Paducah, Kentucky to stay … Continue reading #MyBlackHistory: My Parents Decided To Go Back To College 30 Years Later. Here’s How My Story Inspired Them. →

Po-Hung Liu: This study aimed to reveal the effects of teaching with concrete learning objects taken from the history of mathematics on student achievement. Being a quasi-experimental study, it was conducted with two grade 8 classes in a secondary school located in Trabzon. The experimental group consisted of 27 students and the control group consisted … Continue reading Do teachers need to incorporate the history of mathematics in their teaching? →

Lily Werlinich: Katrin Schultheiss, the chair of the history department, said faculty made the changes to the requirements largely due to enrollment pressures. She said by becoming more flexible and more responsive to students’ interests, the department hopes to recruit students who might not have decided to major in history otherwise. “I think the main … Continue reading History majors no longer have to take foreign language classes or classes on European, North American and U.S. history and can choose to specialize in a topic or region →

Jason Moon In the large, stately lobby of the New Hampshire Historical Society in Concord, a group of fourth graders is ushered up a set of marble stairs. Peggy Halacy, a museum teacher with the Historical Society, captures their attention and begins motioning toward the artifacts that adorn the walls. “Now I’d like you to … Continue reading Educators Grapple with ‘History Deficit’ in N.H. Elementary Students →

Kim Zetter APPLE EMERGED AS a guardian of user privacy this year after fighting FBI demands to help crack into San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook’s iPhone. The company has gone to great lengths to secure customer data in recent years, by implementing better encryption for all phones and refusing to undermine that encryption. But … Continue reading iPhones Secretly Send Call History to Apple, Security Firm Says →

Maev Kennedy The Association of Art Historians called the decision a significant loss of access to a range of cultures, artefacts and ideas for young people. It added: “Being able to signpost educational opportunities such as an A-level in art history to students who may never have considered this an opportunity, forms a significant part … Continue reading Last art history A-level axed after Michael Gove cull of ‘soft’ subjects →

Doyin Oyeniyi: Since the public outcry began, Momentum Instruction has reviewed the book again, but Dunbar stated that the publishers only found one factual error: a passage that suggests that the national language of the United States is English. Dunbar defended the textbook, saying that the company had no “agenda” when they published it, but … Continue reading Proposed Mexican-American Heritage Textbook Is A Continuation Of The Problem With U.S. History Classes →

The Renaissance Mathematicus: Scientific American has a guest blog post with the title: Mathematicians Are Overselling the Idea That “Math Is Everywhere, which argues in its subtitle: The mathematics that is most important to society is the province of the exceptional few—and that’s always been true. Now I’m not really interested in the substantial argument … Continue reading Some rather strange history of maths →

Ernie Smith A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail. When I recently wrote about airport stores, one of the most interesting (albeit minor) facets of the piece was the fact that airport travelers are generally considered a captive audience, making it … Continue reading A Brief History of the College Textbook Pricing Racket →

Frederick Logevall & Kenneth Osgood This matters. Knowledge of our political past is important because it can serve as an antidote to the misuse of history by our leaders and save us from being bamboozled by analogies, by the easy “lessons of the past.” It can make us less egocentric by showing us how other … Continue reading Why Did We Stop Teaching Political History? →

The Economist: The story of the Melungeons is at once a footnote to the history of race in America and a timely parable of it. They bear witness to the horrors and legacy of segregation, but also to the overlooked complexity of the early colonial era. They suggest a once-and-future alternative to the country’s brutally … Continue reading An Appalachian people offers a timely parable of the nuanced history of race in America →

Gabiriele Emanuel: century mathematician Robert Recorde, nestled the line just after his preface, table of contents and a biblical quote citing God’s command to measure and number all things. Recorde didn’t believe in math’s awfulness — quite the opposite. He was simply reflecting popular opinion on his way to a spirited defense of math. Why? … Continue reading A History Lesson: When Math Was Taboo →

Katrina Trinko: But this was no MSNBC event, and far from leaning forward, two of the three participants on a panel went on extended diatribes about the United States’ history to a room with enough empty chairs to satisfy an army of Clint Eastwoods. Sitting about half a mile from Independence Hall, where the Declaration … Continue reading Civics: Politics & History →

Tobias Stone: seems we’re entering another of those stupid seasons humans impose on themselves at fairly regular intervals. I am sketching out here opinions based on information, they may prove right, or may prove wrong, and they’re intended just to challenge and be part of a wider dialogue. My background is archaeology, so also history … Continue reading Civics: History tells us what may happen next with Brexit & Trump →

Zach Schwartz-Weinstein: In November, 1969, a 30-year old black dining hall waitress at Yale University named Colia Williams threw a glass of water at a white student dining hall manager who’d harassed her continuously over the few short weeks that she’d worked in the university’s dining halls. Williams was promptly fired for her insubordination. As … Continue reading Broken window theory: Corey Menafee and the history of university service labor →

uchicago: The first volume of the History of Cartography was published in 1987 and the three books that constitute Volume Two appeared over the following eleven years. In 1987 the worldwide web did not exist, and since 1998 book publishing has gone through a revolution in the production and dissemination of work. Although the large … Continue reading History of Cartography: Volumes One, Two, and Three →

Nick Anderson: University does not require history majors to take a course in U.S. history. Nor do Georgetown University, the University of Maryland and many other highly regarded schools. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni says that’s a problem. The council, based in Washington, recently surveyed the requirements for history majors at top colleges … Continue reading History degrees at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, others don’t require US history course →

James Grossman: A historian, however, would know that it is essential to look beyond such simplistic logic. Yes, in the first few years after graduation, STEM and business majors have more obvious job prospects — especially in engineering and computer science. And in our recession-scarred economic context, of course students are concerned with landing that … Continue reading History isn’t a ‘useless’ major. It teaches critical thinking, something America needs plenty more of →

Brian Hloe ONE DAY AFTER Tsai Ing-Wen’s inauguration, we may perhaps look back in further detail upon one of the events which prompted controversy during the inauguration ceremony—the musical performance which preceded Tsai’s inauguration speech. The performance, entitled “Taiwan’s Light” (台灣之光), was a depiction of Taiwan’s history meant to represent Tsai’s incoming presidency as the … Continue reading The ‘Taiwan’s Light’ Performance and Questions of the Representation of Taiwanese History →

Eric Banks: I can’t remember the last time I used an electric typewriter. It most likely would have been in the course of typing out an address on an envelope—but then again, I can’t readily call to mind the last time I did that with anything other than that old-fashioned technology, the ballpoint pen, which … Continue reading The Program Era: A cultural history looks at how word processing changed the way we write →

Jill LePore: ed Cruz’s campaign autobiography is called “A Time for Truth.” “This guy’s a liar,” Donald Trump said at a recent G.O.P. debate, pointing at Cruz. Trump thinks a lot of people are liars, especially politicians (Jeb Bush: “Lying on campaign trail!”) and reporters (“Too bad dopey @megynkelly lies!”). Not for nothing has he … Continue reading In the history of truth, a new chapter begins. →

Sam Sweet: In a 1975 interview with the New York Times, MAD Magazine founder Harvey Kurtzman recalled an illustration of a grinning boy he’d spotted on a postcard in the early fifties: a “bumpkin portrait,” “part leering wiseacre, part happy-go-lucky kid.” It was captioned “What, Me Worry?”  That bumpkin became Alfred E. Neuman, MAD’s mascot, who … Continue reading The Long, Tangled History of Alfred E. Neuman →

Bennett Carpenter: This week, contingent faculty at Duke took the historic step of filing for a union election. The decision comes in response to the administration’s ongoing attempts to replace stable, full-time, tenure track jobs with part-time, precarious, low-wage positions. Predictably, the burden of these policies is distributed unevenly across race and gender lines; while … Continue reading Union-busting at Duke: a brief history →

Robert B. Townsend and Julia Brookins The academic job market in history remains quite challenging for recent PhDs, and evidence from the AHA’s Directory of History Departments, Historical Organizations, and Historians (the Directory) indicates that these challenges are likely to persist. Among the signs of difficulty for academic-job candidates today and into the near future: … Continue reading The Troubled Academic Job Market for History →

Peter Attia: Within the past few years board games have gone through an explosion of growth. In 2012 The Guardian went as far as dubbing it “A Golden Age for Board Games”, stating board games have seen a growth rate as high as 40% year over year. It’s also quickly becoming one of Kickstarter’s most … Continue reading The Full History of Board Games →

Andy Kiersz: The Pythagorean Theorem: This theorem is foundational to our understanding of geometry. It describes the relationship between the sides of a right triangle on a flat plane: square the lengths of the short sides, a and b, add those together, and you get the square of the length of the long side, c. … Continue reading The 17 Equations That Changed The Course Of History →

Tim Urban: Most of us have a pretty terrible understanding of history. Our knowledge is spotty, with large gaps all over the place, and the parts of history we do end up knowing a lot about usually depend on the particular teachers, parents, books, articles, and movies we happen to come across in our lives. … Continue reading Horizontal History – Wait But Why →

Robert Englebert: Well before digital humanities was a hot commodity and seemingly a must for every grant application, I was cutting my teeth as a grad student and inadvertently became involved in digital history. Working for my PhD supervisor, Nicole St-Onge, at the University of Ottawa, I helped manage a team that digitized over 35,000 … Continue reading Colonial History in the Age of Digital Humanities →

Chrotopher Phillips: An era of sweeping cultural change in America, the postwar years saw the rise of beatniks and hippies, the birth of feminism, and the release of the first video game. It was also the era of new math. Introduced to US schools in the late 1950s and 1960s, the new math was a … Continue reading The New Math: A Political History →

Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond.: American Panorama is an historical atlas of the United States for the twenty-first century. It combines cutting-edge research with innovative interactive mapping techniques, designed to appeal to anyone with an interest in American history or a love of maps.

Will Fitzhugh, via a kind email: (was a literature major in college, and only came to read history seriously afterwards. No one emphasized the benefits of history when I was in school. And I realize that the appreciation of history is a bit cumulative. That is, when a student first reads history she doesn’t know … Continue reading Why Students Should Read a Work of History in High School →

The tables below show a three-year history of kindergarten attendance and chronic absenteeism (attendance less than 90%) across the seven HERE! Schools together (Allis, Falk, Lapham, Leopold, Mendota, Midvale, and Orchard Ridge). PDF Version. Background links. NPR (November 12, 2015), Getting kids to show up. Molly Beck on MMSD Attendance Report for 2013-14 (WSJ) (August, … Continue reading Madison Schools’ three-year history of kindergarten attendance and chronic absenteeism →

Human Google FIRST, THE GOOD NEWS. On the first page of Wayne A. Wiegand’s Part of Our Lives: A People’s History of the American Public Library, a stunning statistic from the Pew Research Center’s 2013 Internet and American Life Project: 91 percent of respondents over the age of 16 said that public libraries were “very” … Continue reading Eric Lundgren on Part of Our Lives : A People’s History of the American Public Library →

Malcolm Harris: But what is a “safe space” and why shouldn’t a university be one? This tweet from Dawkins would have been a psychotic response to a school shooting or campus rape, but that’s not the kind of safety he’s talking about. The safe spaces that Dawkins doesn’t like are encroachments onto his turf by … Continue reading What’s a ‘safe space’? A look at the phrase’s 50-year history →

sas confidential: The music business was killed by Napster; movie theaters were derailed by digital streaming; traditional magazines are in crisis mode–yet in this digital information wild west: academic journals and the publishers who own them are posting higher profits than nearly any sector of commerce. Academic publisher Elsevier, which owns a majority of the … Continue reading Academic Journals: The Most Profitable Obsolete Technology in History →

Seth Schoen & Amy Williams: Over the last year, law enforcement officials around the world have been pressing hard on the notion that without a magical “backdoor” to access the content of any and all encrypted communications by ordinary people, they’ll be totally incapable of fulfilling their duties to investigate crime and protect the public. … Continue reading Civics: is For Everyone—and American History Proves It →

Simon Mundy: The system was introduced in 2010 to replace a state monopoly on history textbooks that was introduced by the authoritarian leader Park Chung-hee in 1974, two years after he revised the constitution to suspend democratic elections. Park’s daughter, Park Geun-hye, is the sitting president and some of her political opponents have claimed that … Continue reading South Korea set to rewrite history books →

Merve Emre This year alone, there have been close to 100 certification sessions in cities ranging from New York to Pasadena, Minneapolis, Portland, Houston, and the Foundation’s hometown of Gainesville, where participants get a $200 discount for making their way south to the belly of the beast. It is not unusual for sessions to sell … Continue reading Uncovering The Secret History Of Myers-Briggs →

Joel Kotkin: In contrast to the physical sciences, and even other social sciences, the study of history is, by nature, subjective. There is no real mathematical formula to assess the past. It is more an art, or artifice, than a science. Yet how we present and think of the past can shape our future as … Continue reading On American History →

Fast Company: Driving through the Dutch countryside near the town of Hilversum, I have an overwhelming feeling that the surrounding water will wash out the road, given that my car is almost level with it. So it’s surprising that the Netherlands’ main audiovisual archives at the Sound and Vision Institute reside in a multilevel underground … Continue reading The Trouble With Digitizing History →

Open Culture: Worth a quick mention: The University of Chicago Press has made available online — at no cost — the first three volumes of The History of Cartography. Or what Edward Rothstein, of The New York Times, called “the most ambitious overview of map making ever undertaken.” He continues: People come to know the … Continue reading The History of Cartography, the “Most Ambitious Overview of Map Making Ever,” Now Free Online →

Andrew Ross Sorkin: In 2008, shortly after Bill Gates stepped down from his executive role at Microsoft, he often awoke in his 66,000-square-foot home on the eastern bank of Lake Washington and walked downstairs to his private gym in a baggy T-shirt, shorts, sneakers and black socks yanked up to the midcalf. Then, during an … Continue reading So Bill Gates Has This Idea for a History Class … →

Eric Fonor: No living historian has done more to shape our understanding of the American Civil War era than Eric Foner. A rare scholar who is both prominent outside the historical community and esteemed within it, over the course of a fifty-year career Foner has acquired virtually every award, tribute, and professional honor available to … Continue reading “People know next to nothing about Reconstruction”: The pernicious Civil War revisionism poisoning American history students →

Daniel Henninger: In this summer of agitated discontent for American conservatives, we can report a victory for them, assuming that is still permitted. Last year, the College Board, the nonprofit corporation that controls all the high-school Advanced Placement courses and exams, published new guidelines for the AP U.S. history test. They read like a left-wing … Continue reading College Board AP History Changes →

Audrey Waters: In 1913, Thomas Edison predicted that “Books will soon be obsolete in schools.” He wasn’t the only person at the time imagining how emergent technologies might change education. Columbia University educational psychology professor Edward Thorndike – behaviorist and creator of the multiple choice test – also imagined “what if” printed books would be … Continue reading Teaching Machines and Turing Machines: The History of the Future of Labor and Learning; Stuck In The Past →

Russell Sage Foundation: During her time in residence at the Foundation, Elizabeth Shermer (Loyola) has worked on a book that examines the origins of the contemporary crisis in public higher education. She argues that contrary to popular belief, state universities have always been subject to market forces. Shermer finds that there was never enough government … Continue reading The Complex History of Public Education in the U.S. →

Matthew Reisz: William Cronon, who is Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas research professor of history, geography and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was delivering the first in a new series of British Academy lectures in geography at London’s Royal Geographical Society on 7 July. He was interested, he told the audience, in “the … Continue reading Can history and geography survive the digital age? →

Predictive Pop: We cleaned and analyzed this data and combined it with YouTube to create a visual interface for exploring the past 25 years of music history and their respective music videos. The data canvas because wanted to find a more interesting way to display our data than the ways music charts are usually displayed. … Continue reading Introducing the Music Data Canvas: 25 Years of Music History →

Daniel Menninger: The memory hole, a creation of George Orwell’s novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” was a mechanism for separating a society’s disapproved ideas from its dominant ideas. The unfavored ideas disappeared, Orwell wrote, “on a current of warm air” into furnaces.

The Electric Typewriter.

Jeremiah: The idea of Manchu Sinicization is a hobgoblin unlikely to die anytime soon in China. Historians affiliated with what has become known as the “New Qing History” have been attempting to complicate this narrative for nearly three decades, and while scholars overseas — and even a few within China — are starting to come … Continue reading Chinese Academy of Social Sciences throwing shade at The New Qing History →

Sam Blumenfeld: Most Americans assume that we’ve always had public schools, that they came with the Constitution and are an indispensable part of our democratic system. But nothing could be farther from the truth as I discovered when I wrote my book, Is Public Education Necessary?, published in 1981. In writing that book I wanted … Continue reading The History of US Public Education →

Nations Report Card: Nationally, eighth graders’ average scores on the NAEP U.S. history, geography, and civics assessments showed no significant change in 2014, compared to 2010—the last assessment year. However, several student groups have made gains. In 2014, eighteen percent of eighth-graders performed at or above the Proficient level in U.S. history, 27 percent performed … Continue reading 18% of US 8th Graders Proficient in US history…. →

Marianne Lombardo: Baltimore burned because black people’s lives are devalued by systematic, institutionalized unfairness in the justice, economic, and education systems. Anger is the manifestation of despair. The Telegraph writes “While black men of all economic backgrounds face many pressures, those without hope for economic opportunity are the most likely to explode.” Earlier today, I … Continue reading John Oliver – This Moment in History Requires a Bigger Vision Than That Of Privileged Anti-Testers →

Audrey Watters: One of the most common ways to criticize our current system of education is to suggest that it’s based on a “factory model.” An alternative condemnation: “industrial era.” The implication is the same: schools are woefully outmoded. As edX CEO Anant Agarwal puts it, “It is pathetic that the education system has not … Continue reading The Invented History of ‘The Factory Model of Education’ →

Diane Ravitch writing in Educational Excellence Network, 1989: Futuristic novels with a bleak vision of the prospects for the free individual characteristically portray a society in which the dictatorship has eliminated or strictly controls knowledge of the past. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the regime successfully wages a “campaign against the Past” by banning … Continue reading “The Plight of History in American Schools” →

Lynne Cheney: No one worried much about the College Board having this de facto power over curriculum until that organization released a detailed framework—for courses beginning last year—on which the Advanced Placement tests on U.S. history will be based from 2015 onward. When educators, academics and other concerned citizens realized how many notable figures were … Continue reading The End of History, Part II →

Gorman Lee, via Will Fitzhugh: The Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education’s decision to indefinitely suspend the History and Social Science MCAS in 2009 has placed social studies education in a high risk of marginalization in K-12 public school districts across the Commonwealth. The problem has only exacerbated with increased emphases of English language … Continue reading Social Studies [and history] Education in Crisis →

Alexandra Petri, via Will Fitzhugh: Stepping back from State Legislatures And Their Strange Hobbies, if you wanted to object to AP U.S. History—which is run by the College Board, a private company, not, as many legislators seem to suspect, a Vast Conspiracy To Take Over State Control Of Learning — a better case might be … Continue reading The real case against AP U.S. History →

Drew Magory: I never took an AP course in high school. I’m pretty sure it was because I never qualified for it (I went straight B-minuses throughout my high school career), but it was also because I went to school back when taking AP courses wasn’t the dire necessity that it is for today’s students. … Continue reading What Happens When A 38-Year-Old Man Takes An AP History Test? →

Michael Conway: Before the release of Selma, I wonder how many people ever reflected on President Lyndon B. Johnson’s attitude toward the 1965 marches in Selma. I wonder if anybody thought that conventional wisdom afforded him either too much or too little credit for the Voting Rights Act. I imagine that Johnson’s legacy was not … Continue reading The Problem With History Classes →

Kabir Chibber: Finland already has one of the best school education systems. It always ranks near the top in mathematics, reading, and science in the prestigious PISA rankings (the 2012 list, pdf) by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Teachers in other countries flock to its schools to learn from a country that is … Continue reading Goodbye, math and history: Finland wants to abandon teaching subjects at school →

Doug Holton: It’s a refrain throughout my work: we are suffering from an amnesia of sorts, whereby we seem to have forgotten much of the history of technology. As such, we now tell these stories about the past, present, and future whereby all innovations emerge from Silicon Valley, all innovations are recent innovations, and there … Continue reading The History of the Future of Education →

David Perry: nyone who writes articles on the web knows the maxim: “Don’t read the comments.” Fortunately for Yoni Appelbaum, a recent Ph.D. in history from Brandeis University, the well-known writer Ta-Nehisi Coates routinely ignores that rule. A few years ago, while Appelbaum was supposed to be writing his dissertation, he spent far too much … Continue reading From Grad School to ‘The Atlantic’ How a history Ph.D. who was on the tenure-track market ended up in journalism – See more at: http://m.chronicle.com/article/From-Grad-School-to-The/189907/#sthash.O5G07Ve1.dpuf →

Samantha Wesner, via Will Fitzhugh: s a junior in high school taking American history, my class had two options for the final project: a PowerPoint presentation or an extended research essay. To many it was a no-brainer; the PowerPoint was definitely going to involve more pictures, fewer hours of work, and less solitude. But some … Continue reading Want to Build Knowledge, Skills, and Grit? Assign History Research Papers →

George Dvorsky: Triangulations blogger Sabio Lantz recently put together this rather clever diagram showing how the English language has evolved over the past 3,000 years. And yes, though it first emerged as a West Germanic language spoken in early medieval England, its roots go as far back as the Celts. It was carried by Germanic … Continue reading The History Of The English Language In One Chart →

Jessica Luther: In this month’s issue of the Texas Observer, I have a feature on the history of race and football in Austin. It was months in the making and I’m proud of the work. You can now read it online at their site. The feature goes from the segregated Jim Crow days of the … Continue reading The History of Race & Football in Austin →

Here are some of the essays which won Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes after being published in Volume 24 of The Concord Review. Kathleen Wenyun Guan of Singapore, a Senior at the United World College of Southeast Asia, had published a 6,103-word history research paper on the One Child Policy in China. (Georgetown School of Foreign … Continue reading Bright Diligent High School Students of History →

[I asked her about some of her experiences with math and history. Will Fitzhugh] Jessica Li (Class of 2015) High School Junior, Summit, New Jersey 24 May 2014 [6,592-word Sophomore paper on Kang Youwei… Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize 2014] My interest and involvement in mathematics was inspired by my family and my own exploration. My … Continue reading Math & History →

Bruce Deitrick Price: People use these snarky expressions when they want to suggest that something is so totally obvious that ten out of ten people will see it instantly. In a sane world, a good example would be Whole Word (or Look-say, as it was called when introduced in 1931). This is the famously bad … Continue reading The Most Obvious Conspiracy in the History of the World →