Integrating Childhood, Children’s, and Youth History into High School History Courses For three years after graduation from college, I taught social studies – all of them – in a small high school in rural Texas. I remember feeling alternately overwhelmed by (“how can I cover all of this?”) and constrained by (“why can’t I teach […]
Integrating Children, Childhood, and Youth into the Undergraduate Russian Survey Since Jackie so ably made the case for the importance of introducing childhood and youth to history students, I’ll move on to discuss how this can be done in the undergraduate classroom. Like many of you, I teach a two-semester introductory survey, broken into “Russia to […]
For much of the twentieth century, the United States and the Soviet Union were superpowers engaged in a struggle against one another in which children were held up as symbols of each state’s successes and failures. Aspects of my comparative approach could be applied to a Cold War course or unit, a World Since 1945 […]
Welcome back to the Teaching History blog. After a research trip to Moscow and workshop in Paris, I finally got back to work organizing new guest bloggers. In the coming months we will be discussing children, communism, World War I, the Cold War and more. First up: children. As I began to work on my […]
Everyone has a childhood. Therefore, the history of childhood is accessible to students of history and intrinsically compelling. It creates spaces for students to question implicit assumptions about both history and childhood. More history courses, I argue, should include a reading or project relating its contents to the burgeoning field of childhood studies. While the history […]