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Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Critical Perspectives On The Past) Paperback – May 11, 2001
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Since ancient times, the pundits have lamented young people's lack of historical knowledge and warned that ignorance of the past surely condemns humanity to repeating its mistakes. In the contemporary United States, this dire outlook drives a contentious debate about what key events, nations, and people are essential for history students. Sam Wineburg says that we are asking the wrong questions. This book demolishes the conventional notion that there is one true history and one best way to teach it.
Although most of us think of history -- and learn it -- as a conglomeration of facts, dates, and key figures, for professional historians it is a way of knowing, a method for developing and understanding about the relationships of peoples and events in the past. A cognitive psychologist, Wineburg has been engaged in studying what is intrinsic to historical thinking, how it might be taught, and why most students still adhere to the "one damned thing after another" concept of history.
Whether he is comparing how students and historians interpret documentary evidence or analyzing children's drawings, Wineburg's essays offer "rough maps of how ordinary people think about the past and use it to understand the present." Arguing that we all absorb lessons about history in many settings -- in kitchen table conversations, at the movies, or on the world-wide web, for instance -- these essays acknowledge the role of collective memory in filtering what we learn in school and shaping our historical thinking.
- Print length280 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherTemple University Press
- Publication dateMay 11, 2001
- Dimensions6 x 0.8 x 9 inches
- ISBN-109781566398565
- ISBN-13978-1566398565
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Winner of the Frederic W. Ness Award, The Association of American Colleges and Universities
About the Author
Product details
- ASIN : 1566398568
- Publisher : Temple University Press; unknown edition (May 11, 2001)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 280 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9781566398565
- ISBN-13 : 978-1566398565
- Item Weight : 14.1 ounces
- Dimensions : 6 x 0.8 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #547,861 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #235 in Social Studies Teaching Materials
- #319 in Historiography (Books)
- #633 in Curricula (Books)
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About the authors

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Sam Wineburg (samwineburg.com) is the Margaret Jacks Professor of Education, Emeritus, at Stanford University. In the words of Lee Shulman, past president of the Carnegie Foundation, Wineburg “has not merely contributed to our understanding of how history is created, taught and learned; he has nearly single-handedly forged a distinctive field of research and a new educational literature.” Wineburg's interdisciplinary scholarship sits at the crossroads of three fields: history, cognitive science, and education, and his writing has appeared in such diverse outlets as Cognitive Science, the Journal of American History, the New York Times, TIME Magazine, and the Smithsonian. His work has been featured on C-SPAN, NPR, ABC News, the BBC, and stories about his work have appeared in newspapers throughout the world. Educated at Brown and Berkeley, he earned his PhD at Stanford in Psychological Studies in Education. In 2002, his book, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past, won the Frederic W. Ness Award from the Association of American Colleges and Universities for scholarship that makes the most important contribution to the “improvement of Liberal Education and understanding the Liberal Arts.” He is the founder of the Stanford History Education Group (sheg.stanford.edu), whose free curriculum has been downloaded more than 14 million times. In 2007, he was awarded the American Historical Association’s “William Gilbert Prize” and in 2008 the “James Harvey Robinson Prize,” for the most important scholarship on the teaching of history and the most important teaching innovation, respectively. In 2013, he was inducted into the National Academy of Education and also named the Obama-Nehru Distinguished Chair by the US-India Fulbright Commission and spent four months crisscrossing India lecturing about his work. In 2018, his research group created a state-of-the-art curriculum on digital literacy (cor.stanford.edu) that has been recognized by UNESCO with its "Global Media and Information Literacy" award and been downloaded by thousands of schools all over the globe.
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The book is practically a must read for anyone who wants to teach history at any level. He explains why the study of history is important. It really is. Just watch the current presidential election and the mangling of history going on by all candidates, some more so than others. It is evident that history education has not seen many gains in a century and that has a lot to do with the way it is taught. Wineburg addresses the challenges students and teachers face in learning about history and how to confront the challenges and overcome them. The final chapter cover history as national memory which is an entire field in its own right.
I really enjoyed reading the book and use pieces as quotes for my own teaching. Students in my classes find out on the first day that this is not about the memorization of facts, but rather learning why things happened and what their effect on us today is. Thanks to Wineburg, I get their attention and then plant the seeds of inquiry which leads to some interesting discussions later in the semester. This book is all part of the development of training history teachers to think outside the box and get past the lecture so that students are actually learning. Wineburg also addresses the pathetic methods of assessment which have been handicapping teachers for decades. It is time to get rid of the multiple choice questions and move to the essay based exams. That is the only real way to see if students are learning.
Thinking about history is unnatural according to Wineburg. He is correct. Most people do not even consider the past at all. Yet, their lives are heavily intertwined with history on a daily basis. It is interesting how many people do not know much of anything about history, yet make decisions that rely upon their bad knowledge all the time. Thanks to people like Wineburg and his authoring of this book, we can begin to bring that to their attention and work on making them appreciate history.
Whatever its limitations, I'd highly recommend the book to all history teachers. While we may not find "The Solution" we will find productive new approaches to creating our own solutions.













