I n spring of 2006, the Florida state legislature, in a virtually unprecedented step, chose to make how U.S. history is taught a matter of public policy. The Florida omnibus bill contained the sentence, American history shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed, shall be viewed as knowable, teachable, and testable, and shall be defined as the creation of a new nation based largely on the universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence. (Florida House of Representatives, 2006, p. 44.) Apparently, protecting the hallowed ground of the nation-building story of American history from threatening forces prompted state policymakers to legislate its protection. Such a move provoked yet another in a decades-old raft of reactions, accusations, and criticisms from across the political spectrum. 1 Why all the fuss, a reasonable observer might ask, and to what end? This, of course, is itself a historical question. And of course, an answer would beg a response that includes a multitude of causes. In this review, I attempt to address the question in a series of broad but also specific strokes. I begin by suggesting that in the United States, for example, late 20th century immigration patterns have been perceived by some who consider themselves American natives because they were born in the country (even though their ancestors are of European stock) as threatening to soften the glue that preserves their vision of the right and true American culture. In 2006, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that there were approximately 34.3 million foreign-born persons (largely from Mexico) living in a country of 300 million people, or about 11.4% of the U.S. population. Contrast that with 1967, when there were 200 million people in the United States, of whom only 4.8% (9.7 million) were foreign born (largely from Italy). Recently, the idea about erecting a giant wall along the U.S.-Mexico border-ostensibly
The authors build on literature related to the development of epistemic cognition, research on historical thinking, and studies of individuals' epistemic beliefs. They designed this study to explore, develop, and test a measure of epistemic cognition in history. They administered the Beliefs about Learning and Teaching History Questionnaire to elementary teachers and college history professors, which represents an effort to construct a reliable and valid measure that could effectively monitor changes in epistemic cognition across large samples. Results from a confirmatory factor analysis suggested a good fit of a 2-factor model underlying the questionnaire. Responses from experts in the domain of history served as an initial attempt to validate the instrument.
This article reports on one facet of a researcher-practitioner project undertaken with class of 23 diverse fifth graders. The project was rooted in taking recent history education reforms seriously. It was premised principally on reforms dealing with teaching practices found in the history standards and the research literature. As the researcher-practitioner, the author engaged the students in historical investigations to help them learn to think historically and better understand the past. He operated from a theoretical framework based on how he believed historical thinking and understanding occur for such novice learners. During the first three lessons, on Jamestown's "Starving Time," the author and class encountered history's interpretive paradox. The article begins with an analogy drawn from the discipline of history. It then describes classroom events. The analysis focuses on a teaching dilemma that the encounter with the paradox provoked and conveys how the author's pedagogical thinking and decision making were influenced by that encounter. The discussion of the dilemma suggests how research and reform in history education and the theories that underpin them mingle, in promising but unpredictable ways. VanSledright 1090 cluded that Davis's efforts in Martin Guerre took her well beyond the interpretive boundaries long regarded as sacrosanct in the historical profession. Davis (1988) responded in the main by defending her treatment of the Martin Guerre case as an attempt to create an account that could be read as detective work, paralleling the way in which the story unfolded in 16thcentury France. She added that this entailed using a form of conjectural logic because the so-called facts of the case were and continued to be in dispute. She noted that there were differences between Finlay's and her own "mental habits, cognitive styles, and moral tone" (p. 574). She observed, "I see complexities and ambivalences everywhere. . . . Finlay sees things in clean, simple lines; he wants absolute truth, established with no ambiguity. . .; he makes moral judgments in terms of sharp rights and wrongs" (p. 574). In effect, Davis argued that their divergent readings of the case and their differing interpretive stances, which had produced those readings, accounted for the dispute about the evidence. She spent the better part of the rest of her essay describing those differences.This exchange is one of many that expose the epistemological turmoil in the historical profession during the last decade or two. The recent flap over Dutch, Edmund Morris's 1999 biography of Ronald Reagan, is only the most recent. This particular brand of contentiousness has to do with the relationship between the putative facts at historians' disposal from evidentiary documents, records, and artifacts, and the interpretations of the pastor histories-that result from the analysis of those facts. Although the issues raised by the Finlay-Davis exchange are not new to the historical profession, they have taken on a certain urgency, as recent criticism ...
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