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.     

The Composite Biography as a Methodological Tool for the Study of Childhood in History

This article presents a composite biography of an orphaned girl and her mother in Medieval London. Though the mother was sound in mind and body, she had no control over her daughters inheritance and place of residence. In addition, her underage daughter was married without her consent. The composite biography can bring to life the otherwise dry renditions of families experiences that are present in court records and other historical documents.     

Examining School Connectedness as a Mediator of School Climate Effects

Researchers have suggested that good‐quality school climates foster a sense of connection to the school and in this way contribute to fewer emotional and behavioral problems. However, few studies have directly assessed the role of school connectedness as a mediator of school climate effects. Using path analysis, this brief report examined whether four aspects of student perceived school climate (cohesion, friction, competition among students, and overall satisfaction with classes) were indirectly associated with subsequent early adolescent conduct problems and depressive symptoms through school connectedness. Participants were four hundred and eighty‐nine 10‐ to 14‐year old middle school students involved in two waves of a study. The results showed that school connectedness mediated the relations between perceived cohesion, perceived friction, and overall satisfaction with classes and subsequent student conduct problems 1 year later. School connectedness was not, however, predictive of subsequent depressive symptoms and thus did not mediate the school climate effects on early adolescent emotional problems.     

Making Junior High School History Real

This article addresses the subject of teaching about women in world history in K–12 schools and in programs of social studies teacher education. It includes a review of the place of gender in teaching about world history to current and future teachers at Teachers College, Columbia University. This informal research serves as the platform for a set of recommendations concerning necessary steps for “gender-balancing” the world history curriculum in social studies teacher education.     

Notebooks as Projects in a History Course

This article focuses on high school students' knowledge and notions of citizenship after taking the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Naturalization Test. The students' test results and responses show emerging support for the need to make changes to the test as well as the students' limited conceptions of citizenship. In addition, this study's methodological benefits and challenges are discussed with implications for future research and practice.     

The Local History of an International Type: The Structural Panel Building in Czechoslovakia

ABSTRACT

Focusing on the state-run system of architectural offices as a mediator between politics and practice, this article considers how the 1948 Communist Party takeover of Czechoslovakia affected architectural practice and the establishment of housing types in the early 1950s. The legacy of a strong local construction industry before 1948 was critical to these developments. At the new Institute of Prefabricated Buildings, created in 1952, architects and engineers continued earlier research on prefabricated construction technologies. Through this work, the Czechoslovak government and its architectural administration soon concluded that its best long-term option for solving the country's housing crisis was the use of structural panel construction. Fifty years later, one in three Czechs still lives in the more than one million apartments built with this technology between 1954 and 1990. Structural panel construction was not a Soviet import; instead it developed out of local wartime experimentation at the Bat'a Shoe Company in Zlín, independently of similar research undertaken in the Soviet Union and other parts of the Eastern Bloc in the same years. Although buildings that look similar were constructed in the region and similar housing types appeared across Europe after the Second World War, this article argues that structural panel technology in Czechoslovakia is an example of local continuities in the building industry, rather than evidence of the homogenization of the postwar European landscape.     

The City as a Sexual Laboratory: The Queer Heritage of the Chicago School

This article documents the pioneering—and largely overlooked—sociological studies of sexuality undertaken by scholars at the University of Chicago during the first decades of the twentieth century. Focusing primarily on their investigations of a wide range of non-normative sexualities, including prostitution, cross-racial sexuality and homosexuality, it argues that these studies provided the foundation for a radical new understanding of sexuality that emphasized the social context and meaning of sexual practices and types, rather than their biological or psychological determination. Finally, it demonstrates the forgotten centrality of these studies to the establishment of the field of urban sociology by explicating the sexual subtext of several key concepts from the so-called Chicago School, including natural areas, concentric zones of urban development, mobility, social personalities and the marginal man.     

Buildings as History: The Place of Collective Memory in the Study of Historic Preservation

Using data from ethnographic fieldwork in New Orleans, Louisiana, I examine the “buildings as history” ideology of the contemporary historic preservation movement to contribute to the sociological understanding of the logics of the movement, the relation of collective memory to historic preservation, and, more broadly, the processes of meaning construction in relation to the built environment. I conclude that the preservationist emphasis on the inherent value of the historic built environment irrespective of that environment's association with historically significant events and figures provides a means both to defuse critiques over preserving buildings with “difficult histories” and to justify preserving as much of the historic built environment as possible, which then allows for the continued expansion of the movement's purview and ensures its ongoing existence.     

“资治”和“通鉴”：城市史研究中的悖论

在城市史研究中,＂资治＂和＂通鉴＂本该是一对并重的关系,但是很多时候两者反而形成了悖论。在具体的城市史研究中,重视其＂资治＂作用,忽略其＂通鉴＂作用的情况时有发生。本文将对城市史的研究进行综合考察,并以失败和成功两方面的案例来说明,在城市史研究中,＂资治＂和＂通鉴＂是可以得到有机结合并且达到最佳状态的。     

Examining Secondary School Choice Processes as a Predictor of Adjustment After the School Transition

The secondary school transition is an important moment in adolescents' lives. Taking a prospective approach, the present study examined whether educational identity regarding a secondary school choice and own and parental expectations during the last year of primary school predicted post-transition school and psychological adjustment in Dutch adolescents (N = 314, M_age = 11.58). Additionally, the study qualitatively examined the reasons adolescents gave for their school choice, and linked these reasons to exploration behavior and post-transition adjustment. Identity processes and expectations predicted adjustment. Adolescents mostly reported multiple reasons for their school choice, with educational, practical, and social aspects of secondary schools appearing most important. The number of reasons mentioned was associated with pre-transition exploration behavior.     

The Use of Local Statistics in High School Courses in Sociology and Social Problems

Since the inception of mandated testing in reading and mathematics, social studies instruction has been marginalized in elementary and middle schools. After the genesis of several state-mandated testing programs and nearly a decade after the launch of the No Child Left Behind legislation, the effects of limited K–8 social studies instruction are being recognized at the high school level, specifically in high school test score data. This article reveals the obstacles generated by marginalizing social studies in the elementary and middle schools and offers a model for helping teachers understand their role in offsetting the problems associated with early social studies marginalization. The article also provides a way to help teachers collaboratively fill the social studies content gaps.     

The Social Construction of Local School Violence Threats by the News Media and Professional Organizations

The research presented here examines the social construction of local school violence threats in the context of national claims-making about school violence, particularly school shootings. In light of the news media glare surrounding other school shootings, school and police officials in Burlington, Wisconsin assessed the threat posed by five high-school youth who allegedly plotted to carry out a school attack in November 1998. Social constructionist scholarship has shown that claims made about a problem and the way it is framed in the news media and other informational contexts shape an audience's perception of a social problem's seriousness, prevalence, setting, and causes. But as William Gamson and others have pointed out, "readers" are not passive recipients of media messages; rather, they actively interact with those messages to construct meaning. This research project involved two components: (1) content analysis of the print media (in two periods 1992–1993 and 1997–1998) and law enforcement and school administrator publications and conference materials; and (2) in-depth, semistructured interviews with 13 respondents, including the 11 Burlington school and police officials who assessed and acted on this case. In this paper, I examine how the (Racine) Journal Times and professional organizations constructed (and reconstructed) school violence and how local decision-makers interpreted their own school violence threat in the context of the news media's and professional organizations' constructions.