The History Teacher, Volume 43, No. 3 (May 2010)

Cover: Magna Carta, 1297 [close-up detail view]. A fragile parchment suffering multiple areas of decay and inscribed with the "dead language" of Latin, this 1297 copy of Magna Carta was auctioned at Sotheby's for $21.3 million in December 2007, transferring ownership from billionaire Ross Perot to billionaire David Rubenstein of The Carlyle Group. Winning bidder Rubenstein placed the document on permanent loan to be displayed at the U.S. National Archives. David W. Saxe and Scott Alan Metzger each examine Magna Carta's extensive historical legacy, with contributions beginning on page 329 and 345 of this issue. Read our featured article right now: "Teaching Magna Carta in American History: Land, Law, and Legacy", by David W. Saxe of Penn State University. [PDF 387KB]

May 2010: Contents | Contributors

GENERAL

329   Teaching Magna Carta in American History: Land, Law, and Legacy
  by David W. Saxe

345   Magna Carta: Teaching Medieval Topics for Historical Significance
  by Scott Alan Metzger

THE CRAFT OF TEACHING

357   Teaching the Bill of Rights in China
  by Kurt Mosser

375   Teaching as Counterinsurgency: Enhancing Pedagogical Effectiveness and Student Learning in a Culture of Distraction
  by Robert G. Kane

397   Quit Surfing and Start "Clicking": One Professor's Effort to Combat the Problems of Teaching the U.S. Survey in a Large Lecture Hall
  by Stephanie Cole with Greg Kosc

411   Creating a Caring Classroom in which to Teach Difficult Histories
  by Maia G. Sheppard

NOTES AND COMMENTS

427   Invisible Evidence: The Story is There, but the Sources are Scarce
  by Sarah Machiels Bennison

SPECIAL FEATURE

433   Teaching Teaching while Teaching History: How College Faculty Can Help Their Students Become Better Secondary Social Studies Educators
  by John A. Shedd

435   Preventing "Back-atcha": Improving Secondary School Instruction by Introducing Prospective Teachers to Historiography
  by Barbara J. Blaszak

441   Uncovering History for Future History Teachers
  by Fritz Fischer

449   Glimpsing at Pedagogy while Teaching History: A Mixture of Metacognition, Bird-Walking, and Quick Tips for Future Teachers
  by John A. Shedd

455   Thinking Historically, Teaching Historically: Perspectives on the Professional Development of Teachers from a Teaching American History Grant
  by Kevin B. Sheets

REVIEWS

463-475

Black, Jeremy. War in European History, 1660-1792
  by Robert A. Pierce

Hall, Richard C. Consumed by War: European Conflict in the 20th Century
  by Jeffrey C. Williams

Lentz-Smith, Adriane. Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I
  by Sharita Jacobs Thompson

Marcus, Alan S., Scott Alan Metzger, Richard J. Paxton, and Jeremy D. Stoddard. Teaching History with Film: Strategies for Secondary Social Studies
  by David Neumann

Meyers, Debra and Burke Miller, eds. Inequity in Education: A Historical Perspective
  by Jon E. Purmont

Moss, Hilary J. Schooling Citizens: The Struggle for African American Education in Antebellum America
  by Sandra Slater

Summers, Mark Wahlgren. A Dangerous Stir: Fear, Paranoia, and the Making of Reconstruction
  by Joel M. Sipress

Taddeo, Julie Anne and Ken Dvorak, eds. The Tube Has Spoken: Reality TV and History
  by Charles L. Ponce de Leon

Uglow, Jenny. A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game
  by Roy Schreiber

Young, Nigel, ed. International Encyclopedia of Peace
  by Charles F. Howlett

IN EVERY ISSUE

327   Contributors to this issue
477   Questionnaire for potential reviewers
478   Subscription information
480   Submission guidelines for The History Teacher

ADVERTISERS IN THIS ISSUE

Cover 2 Facts on File: Encyclopedia of American History
374   Bedford/St. Martin's: A History of Western Society
432   World History Association: WHA 19th Annual Conference
440   Society for History Education: The Extraordinary Teacher
462   Association for Asian Studies: Teach About Asia, Learn About Asia
476   Society for History Education: Advertise in The History Teacher
Cover 3   Organization of American Historians: Become a Member of the OAH Today!
Cover 4   Northern Illinois University Libraries: Mark Twain's Mississippi

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CONTRIBUTORS

Sarah Machiels Bennison received her Ph.D. in History of Education from New York University, where she is now a visiting Assistant Professor. A historian of education and a former New York City public school teacher, her work has focused on missionary education among Native Americans in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century West.

Barbara J. Blaszak (Le Moyne College), Fritz Fischer (University of Northern Colorado), John A. Shedd (State University of New York at Cortland), and Kevin B. Sheets (State University of New York at Cortland) collaborated to produce a panel presentation on secondary social science education at the 122nd Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association in Washington, D.C., "Teaching Teaching while Teaching History: How College Faculty Can Help Their Students Become Better Secondary Social Studies Educators."

Stephanie Cole received her Ph.D. from the University of Florida in 1994, and is currently an Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Arlington, where she has taught courses in the U.S. survey, women’s history, and the history of gender, race, and work since 1996. Her latest publication, "'Neither Matron nor Maid:' Race, Gender, Class, and Marriage in Jim Crow Texas" is forthcoming in a collection of essays honoring southern historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown to be published by University Press of Florida.

Robert G. Kane received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania, where he won a Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2001. He is currently an Assistant Professor of History at Niagara University in New York, and teaches courses on modern China, modern Japan, the Vietnam War, U.S. foreign relations, and a variety of other subjects.

Gregory Kosc is a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Arlington, where he is working on a dissertation entitled "Performing Masculinity and Reconciling Class in the American West: British Gentlemen Hunters and Their Travel Accounts, 1865-1914." In addition to serving as the pilot project manager and research assistant for UTA's investigation of classroom response systems (CRS) and the development of higher order thinking skills, he has taught the U.S. survey at UTA and other area institutions since 2006.

Scott Alan Metzger is an Assistant Professor in the College of Education at Pennsylvania State University. Before earning his doctorate from Michigan State University, he was a high school history teacher in Michigan public schools. At Penn State, he teaches undergraduate social studies teacher education and in the Language, Culture, and Society graduate program. His research interests include history teaching and learning, history in film and popular media, and the sociology, philosophy, and history of education.

Kurt Mosser earned his B.A. in History and Philosophy from Southern Methodist University and his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Chicago. His research interests focus on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and he has published papers addressing issues of grammar and logic in Kant's critical strategy, culminating in Necessity and Possibility: The Logical Strategy of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (Catholic University Press, 2008). Mosser also publishes on Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, feminism, popular music, various class and race issues, and other philosophical topics.

David W. Saxe (Ph.D., University of Illinois-Urbana) is an Associate Professor at Pennsylvania State University and teaches History-Heritage Education. He is also Director of the Arboretum at the Penn State Heritage Education Interpretation Project. He taught history in public schools for eleven years, taught history education at Penn State for twenty years, and is a former Member of the Pennsylvania State Board of Education. Considered a national expert on History Standards, Saxe is also author of traditional history textbooks Land and Liberty I: A Chronology of Traditional American History and Land and Liberty II: The Basics of Traditional American History.

Maia G. Sheppard is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She has taught in high schools and worked with community-based education programs in a variety of contexts, from rural Africa to New York City, and recently collaborated with a group of educators to start a small high school for immigrants and refugees in the Bronx. Her research interests are rooted in the role schools, and particularly teachers, play in shaping students’ civic identities as active and critical participants in a democracy.

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