The Consumer Approach to Economic Studies

This article examines how recent history textbooks from the United States, Japan, China, and South Korea present the Korean War. The comparative analysis focuses on four areas: the causes of the Korean War, American involvement in the war, Chinese involvement in the war, and the results of the war. Analysis of the central story lines reveals that some consistent statements exist about certain events in the Korean War, but inconsistencies and conflicting views seem to dominate the history textbooks in these countries. The authors believe that comparing international history textbooks creates a good opportunity for students to see the complexity and controversy of history interpretation. Such a critical comparative approach helps students better understand how people in different countries perceive and interpret historical events. The authors argue that reviewing the similar and conflicting interpretations of the war gives students a unique opportunity to develop their critical-thinking ability and reasoning skills.     

Practice in Formulating Public Opinion

The social studies classroom can and should be a place where students learn critical thinking skills, but too often, especially in the middle grades, students are asked to focus on discrete facts on which they can be tested. The purpose of this article is to suggest that sixth graders can learn the critical thinking skills of “historical thinking” by discussing big ideas and essential questions and to provide a framework for a middle school unit of study on Ancient Egypt.     

The Nature of Freedom

A narrative of racial progress abounds in U.S. history, making it difficult for teachers to present complex interpretations of racial/ethnic discrimination. Historical complexity challenges such simplistic notions of race/ethnicity and encourages critical thinking. Adding anti-essentialist historical content about Latinx communities is one way to complicate perceptions of race relations in the United States. When combined with historical inquiry, or the act of “doing” history, anti-essentialist historical content can help students articulate a more complex understanding of history. Studying Mendez v. Westminster, a 1940s California case about Mexican American desegregation, offers an opportunity for educators to leverage these historical and racial/ethnic complexities. Specifically, we highlight how to (1) provide background on the historical and racial/ethnic context of the 1940s, (2) highlight Mexican Americans’ racial/ethnic and language complexity, and (3) use historical inquiry to expose the multidimensionality of Mexican American discrimination.     

‘We Have Certainly Saved Ourselves’: Popular Views of Masculinity during the Korean War, 1950–53

This article addresses the ways in which the American popular media, particularly middle-brow magazines, novels, and films, created a gendered interpretation of the Korean War. On the US home front, cultural commentators linked the purported 1950s crisis of masculinity to concerns that “coddled” and “overmothered” American military personnel would lack the manly vigor necessary to prevent South Korea from falling to communist forces. Ultimately, though, most of these observers insisted that in the crucible of war lay an antidote for America’s flagging masculine spirit. The so-called “police action” served as a critical terrain — both real and imagined — for debating masculinity during the Cold War. Although such optimism proved short-lived, this martial vision for boosting manliness resonated in post-war US policy and culture well beyond the three short years of the conflict.     

Speaking out in Times of Crisis: Differentiability in Romanian Jewish Leadership, 1938–1944

ABSTRACT

The Jewish leadership in Romanian territories during World War II sought to change antisemitic legislation, stop deportations, and ensure the survival of the deportees in the camps and ghettos. Unfortunately, they found their communities attacked from various sides and their petitions largely unheeded by the Antonescu wartime government. When the Federation of Jewish Communities was replaced by the government-controlled Jewish Center, Bucharest lawyer Wilhelm Filderman and former Federation members found other avenues by which to continue their work. I analyze their major successes as well as their failures in regard to legislation, deportations, and survival of deportees through the different phases of the war to reveal the dominating influence of regionalism among Romanian Jewish leadership.     

Twelve Years After: The Berlin Wall as Will and Idea

The Berlin Wall at different times in its ignominious history has been demonized by Western opinion less because of its real paltry role in the Cold War tension in Europe than because of the fears and frustrations it generated within Europe. This is the central theme and claim of this paper. We attempt to show through an excursion of personal and institutional events how the perceptions of Soviet communist realities were refracted through the icon of the Wall as a Cold War symbol.     

Twelve Years After: The Berlin Wall as Will and Idea

The Berlin Wall at different times in its ignominious history has been demonized by Western opinion less because of its real paltry role in the Cold War tension in Europe than because of the fears and frustrations it generated within Europe. This is the central theme and claim of this paper. We attempt to show through an excursion of personal and institutional events how the perceptions of Soviet communist realities were refracted through the icon of the Wall as a Cold War symbol.     

Unrolling the Map in American History

Cinematic feature films are a big part of youth popular culture. When blockbuster movies are about historical topics, it is reasonable for teachers to be drawn to using them in the classroom to motivate students interest. This article overviews research on film in the history classroom and describes three learning functions that history movies can have fact and ficion; constructing the past and the people in it; and reacting to the past.     

Blood Transfusion in Room 223

How educators handle conflicting views of Populism is important in engaging students in critical thinking.     

Rationale Argument Mapping Software

This software review focuses on using Rationale Argument Mapping Software to teach critical thinking skills in social work. Overall, the program is a great tool for helping students to think critically and precisely about their arguments.     

The Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow: Judaism for the masses

In 2012, a new Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center opened in Moscow – an event unthinkable during the Soviet regime. Financed at the level of $50 million, created by an international crew of academics and museum designers, and located in a landmark building, the museum immediately rose to a position of cultural prominence in the Russian museum scene. Using interactive technology and multimedia, the museum's core exhibition presents several centuries of complex local Jewish history, including the Second World War period. Naturally, the Holocaust is an important part of the story. Olga Gershenson's essay analyzes the museum's relationship to Holocaust history and memory in the post-Soviet context. She describes the museum's struggle to reconcile a Soviet understanding of the “Great Patriotic War” with a dominant Western narrative of the Holocaust, while also bringing the Holocaust in the Soviet Union to a broader audience via the museum. Through recorded testimonies, period documents, and film, the museum's display narrates the events of the Holocaust on Soviet soil. This is a significant revision of the Soviet-era discourse, which universalized and externalized the Holocaust. But this important revision is limited by the museum's choice to avoid the subject of local collaborators and bystanders. The museum shies away from the most pernicious aspect of the Holocaust history on Soviet soil, missing an opportunity to take historic responsibility and confront the difficult past.     

Recent Happenings in the Social Studies

Students often bring considerable prior information about the Holocaust to their study of the event, with much of that knowledge being inaccurate or incomplete. In addition, the Shoah's complexity necessitates that teachers establish a well-defined framework as they introduce the topic to their students. This article outlines an opening lesson for a Holocaust unit in which students develop a definition of the event by completing a multistep process that deconstructs the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's definition of the Shoah. Through this process, teachers gain valuable information about students’ prior knowledge while establishing a structured approach to the teaching of the event. In addition, students’ content knowledge of the Shoah is expanded as critical topics about the event are introduced at the start of their study of the topic.     

Your Money’s Worth

This article shares findings of how two third-grade children who have systematically studied history in grades K–3 analyzed historical sources on a topic about which they had no prior knowledge. In think-aloud interviews, the children analyzed written documents on the 1887 Dawes Severalty Act. One of the children, who tested on the third-grade level for reading, demonstrated extensive use of the sourcing heuristic and analogical thinking to contextualize and interpret the documents. Care and imagination seemed to facilitate the child's deployment of historical thinking. Both children informed their judgments about the Dawes Act by referencing the evidence. These findings suggest that curriculum, rather than age, is the strongest limit on U.S. elementary students’ engagement in historical thinking. The findings also provide evidence of gifted and talented ability in the specific domain of historical thinking and suggest that analogical thinking deserves greater attention in our efforts to understand and teach dimensions of historical interpretation.     

Debating,obfuscating and disciplining the Holocaust: post-Soviet historical discourses on the OUN–UPA and other nationalist movements

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union the archives of the former republics and satellite states of this multiethnic empire were opened. This allowed historians to investigate the history of nationalist and radical right organisations and armies that, during the Second World War, had been involved in the Holocaust and other atrocities. Among them was the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists. For a long time the history of these movements was unknown or distorted by Soviet propaganda and propagandist publications written during the Cold War by veterans of these movements living in the West and cooperating with Western intelligence services. The dissolution of the Soviet Union was simultaneously accompanied by the “rebirth” of nationalism that was not free from antisemitism and racism, and which triggered different types of nationalist distortions of history and obfuscations of the Holocaust. Post-Soviet historical discourses were shaped not only by journalists or political activists, but also by radical right historians. These discourses impacted as well on historians who in general were critical of the post-Soviet rehabilitation of nationalism, war criminality or East Central European fascism. Concentrating on Ukrainian and Polish history, this article explores how the radical right historical discourses appeared in the post-Soviet space, what types of historians were involved in them and what kinds of distortions and obfuscations have predominated.     

Introducing the Historical Thinking Practice of Contextualizing to Middle School Students

This article describes the design of a social studies unit about the Johnstown Flood of 1889 with a particular emphasis on how specific unit resources engaged middle school students in learning about the geographical and historical context of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. We also report on how the resources supported the teaching and learning of the historical thinking practice of contextualizing.     

“It Led to Great Advances in Science”: What Teacher Candidates Know About the Holocaust

A quarter of a century has passed since lawmakers enacted the New Jersey Holocaust education mandate, and it seems responsible and timely to ask if it, the original Holocaust education mandate, actually encouraged substantive learning about the Holocaust. Despite repeated fanfare about the mandate and its inclusion in educational curricula throughout the state, no existing studies have tested its impact. To fill the gap, this article examines the effectiveness of the New Jersey Holocaust education mandate. It does this by reviewing and analyzing a survey of teacher candidates at a large public university in New Jersey to develop data on the knowledge and attitudes about the Holocaust. The teacher candidates comprised a pool whose primary and secondary education took place under the mandate and who intend to teach within the state-mandated framework. After a review of the current state of Holocaust education, the article examines the New Jersey mandate and curriculum more carefully. It then moves on to explore the results of a mixed-methods survey given to teacher candidates at a public university in that state to offer a measure of the mandate’s success. Finally, it ends with implications for revisions of curriculum and instruction.     

The Attitude of High School Pupils Toward History

Music has been a source of inspiration, of protest, of wisdom, and of emotion for millennia. In the United States, music became woven into the fabric of the culture well before it became a nation and it remains so today. Songs have expressed a range of emotions and informed listeners of historical, social, and political issues at every level of sophistication. Yet our passion for music, coupled with its significance as an artifact of history, has not found its way into classrooms in any prominent way. This article explores four models of using music in the history classroom, each of which ventures to encourage history teachers to consider music, its analysis, and even its creation as integral to history curricula. Each model uses various instructional strategies grounded in tenets of historical thinking and range from a teacher-centered Close Reading Model to inquiry and discovery-based approaches, concluding with a student-centered model of Creative Development.     

Family Involvement and Holocaust Salience among Offspring and Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors

The present research focuses on family involvement reported by offspring and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors (OHS and GHS, respectively). Study 1 included a convenience sample of 75 participants, divided into 2 groups (36 OHS and 39 comparisons). Study 2 included a convenience sample of 92 dyads of OHS and GHS. Both samples completed the Family Involvement Questionnaire and the Holocaust Salience Scale. In line with the hypotheses, Study 1 found that, relative to comparisons, OHS presented greater familial involvement. Only OHS with strong family involvement showed higher Holocaust salience than comparisons. Study 2 showed higher familial involvement among OHS as compared to GHS, and significant parent-child correlations. The results show that family involvement is related to intergenerational transmission of the trauma, especially among OHS. Yet, among OHS and GHS, parents’ and children’s family involvement were associated. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.