Americans love history. One had only to look at the best-seller book list in the summer of 2001 to realize this. There, outselling the self-help guides, the Harry Potter volumes, and the endless versions of Chicken Soup for the Soul, was David McCullough's lengthy biography of John Adams, which hundreds of thousands of Americans had chosen for their summer reading. Which recent movies seem to win the hearts of the public? Often it is the ones set at great historic moments, such as "Saving Private Ryan," "Schindler's List," "Gladiator," and "Titanic." Public television has had tremendous success airing historical documentaries, especially those, such as Ken Burns' series on the Civil War, that feature voice-over readings of letters, diaries, and speeches from the time. Likewise, any number of cable TV stations have found that there is a huge audience for documentary biographies of prominent people, past and present.

We gravitate to works about history for many reasons. First, the past is a fascinating place to visit. It was fundamentally different from today. People behaved differently, had radically different ways of doing things. They lacked our technology and yet they shared our humanity. We wonder how we would have behaved under similar circumstances. The experiences of those whose stories have survived, whether they were nurses on the battlefields of the Civil War or statesmen creating the Constitution, expand our knowledge of the human experience.

Second, we love history because it tells the tale of events that really happened. It includes wonderful stories of heroism and of dumb luck, stories of evil villains and of trying times. This is perhaps why so many people hope for the words "based on a true story" on any historical novel or movie.

Third, it is not only the stories that have withstood the test of time. Often it is the very words of the people, recorded in their own handwriting. One can, for example, touch the page of a diary in which one's great-grandmother wrote as a young girl and read her excited descriptions of a dance held long ago. There is nothing intervening between her mind and that of her reader. The page on which the young girl wrote may be yellowed but the words are unchanged. She may long since have grown old and died, but the girl's voice lives on. The diary becomes a time machine that draws one back into a distant time. Millions of such primary sources, written by the famous and the not-so-famous, are readily available and readers often find them irresistible.

Children share this same interest in the past for many of the same reasons. In catalogs of Halloween costumes one finds innumerable knights in shining armor and medieval princesses. Children enjoy stories about kids long ago in such books as the American Girls and My Name is America series. The Little House books have touched a nerve among children ever since they were written. "Tell me about when you were a little girl, Mommy" is a common refrain. Children seem to take great pleasure in recognizing that the world existed long before they arrived and that it is far older and far bigger than they can imagine.

Ironically, though, Americans don't seem to love history classes. I was recently sitting on an airplane next to a young man who had just finished high school. He was telling me about his desire to travel to Europe and to see the world. He had a book of historical fiction open in his lap. But when I told him that I was a history professor, he groaned. "Let me guess, it was your least favorite subject?" I offered. "Well, it wasn't the worst . . . " he said, but he couldn't hide his dislike of the courses he had taken. Why is this so often true? Think about your own experience of history in high school. Unfortunately, I think that mine is not uncommon. Most of my teachers taught directly from the textbook and tested us using worksheets that asked such questions as "Which of the following individuals was not present at the Seneca Falls Convention?" and "Who urged Americans to eat whole wheat bread and his hard crackers to promote good digestion?"

I could not get an "A" on those tests even now unless I had recently read the relevant chapter. They hide the glories and thrills of history in an avalanche of facts, many of which (truth be told) you don't really need to know. There are many historical facts that bear remembering, of course, but if the only reason for studying them is to memorize them for a multiple choice test, they won't sink in very deeply. No wonder that we sometimes remember history classes with a vague sense of dread and a forbidding knowledge of our own ignorance of many details. If the study of history only existed as one long exercise in memorization there would be little if any point in inflicting it on our children.

The truth is, though, that there are many very important reasons for children to study history at all grade levels. First, it builds in them an understanding of their shared cultural heritage, both as Americans and as citizens of the world. It is a cliche, but nonetheless one worth noting, to observe that a country that does not remember its history is like a person with amnesia who does not remember his or her own past decisions and all the events that happened as he or she grew up. Imagine if we all woke up one morning with no clue how we got here. "Now - remind me, why is democracy a worthwhile form of government? Wouldn't it be easier just to have a king or dictator? And even if men have the right to vote, why shouldn't they exclude from the franchise people who don't think the same way, or the poor, or the women? And if I'm tired, and it's raining, and I have to catch a bus, why should I bother getting to the polling booth anyway? Tell me, then, why shouldn't I just believe what my neighbors say about people across the border or over the sea? Why should I care about them?"

You can imagine the outcomes of such ignorance. Students need to know about the struggles, the defeats, and the triumphs that brought us to the present. They need to value their future right to vote, to take responsibility for learning the facts about issues they will vote on and for making wise decisions. These do not come from learning about civics and government alone, they grow out of the study of the history of the country and of the world.

Such study also breaks down the stereotypes about others that spread through gossip, malicious rumor, and a fundamental mistrust of the unfamiliar. We all have a tendency (first noted 2,500 years ago by the Greek historian Herodotus) to assume that our own culture is the best and that our own values are (or should be) shared by all humanity. This is true not only in America, but across the world. People everywhere believe that they speak without an accent, but that everyone else has the language wrong (no matter what that language might be). They believe that their religion, or their style of housing, or their cuisine, or their child-rearing practices, are far superior to those of the other cultures with which they come in contact. They tend to dismiss those other people as hopelessly misguided, or worse. Through learning about the other cultures and their histories some of this ethnocentrism can be replaced with understanding and tolerance.

The study of history also helps students to avoid being "present-minded." Just as people tend to think of their own culture as superior, students tend to assume that the present is the most important time in all of human history and that people in the past were barbarous because they did not live up to our standards. But we cannot judge in this way. Historical events need to be seen within the context of the beliefs and values of their own time. On the other hand, some traits do seem to be innately human and are shared across time and space. These give us a sense of a common spirit with people who have come before.

If history can make students better citizens in these ways, it also can capture their imaginations with tales of heroes and heroines, people who have done great things and whose stories can enlarge the horizons of the children who learn about them. Heroes don't have to be sports figures or rock stars. For example they can be everyday figures who braved difficult times, leaders who upheld principles even though it was tempting to ignore, or even benefit from, corruption, explorers who brought the world together, and scientists who helped us understand it better. Students will not dream of becoming such people unless they have encountered examples in the books that they read and the stories they hear.

So now, with lively narratives and arresting heroes and villains, we've captured the students' interest. They want to learn more. This is where history becomes more than "a story well-told" as it is sometimes described. It becomes an investigation in which the students play the role of detective. This is an added benefit of the study of history: it helps to develop students' skills in critical thinking and analysis. Even young children can take on the role of historical investigator as they analyze visual materials such as photographs, posters, and cartoons from the past. Older students can begin to look at different eyewitness accounts of an event and to try to decide what really happened. They quickly find that this is an impossible task; the eyewitnesses disagree! Why might this be? Could it have something to do with their contrasting political points-of-view? Or were they just looking in different directions, distracted by different scenes? Or had memory clouded the recollections of one or more of them by the time they recorded their testimony? Do other accounts exist that might help clarify the situation?

Perhaps, the students wonder, some of these documents were written for a specific audience. Perhaps the writer was trying to persuade people to support a particular cause. Maybe he was making a point and selected his words and anecdotes accordingly. They learn something about the writer in the process and they learn to read critically. This skill will serve them well throughout life; they will remember to find out more about an author before they read a book, article, editorial, election stump speech, or Web page and they may be less likely to trust that every word is true.

Continuing on their investigation into the past, the students begin to look for causes of the events that they have studied. Rather than just memorizing the years in which states joined the Union, perhaps they explore the controversies behind the granting of statehood. Who was in favor? Who was opposed? Why? What could have motivated each side and what were their worries? What were some of the deciding factors? Having debated such questions students are far more likely to remember the date of statehood (and the reasons behind it) than if they had simply highlighted it in their textbooks along with a host of other dates, none of them in any sort of meaningful context.

Some of these skills develop only gradually and do not become fully realized until high school or beyond. But the groundwork for such thinking can be put in place in elementary school. For example even the youngest students can begin to comprehend the passage of time and the chronological unfolding of events. The classic way of beginning such a realization is with the creation of a timeline of the students' own life, then adding their parents' lives, and their grandparents' lives, and beginning to add world events to that context. So World War I was not just a "very long time ago" but it ended "when Grandpa was one year old" (in the case of my kindergarten son). They learn that when Mom and Dad were born there were no home computers and that there was a time long ago (before even Grandma and Grandpa were born) when there weren't even any cars or buses. In this way the students see themselves as being part of history, that history did not end at some vague moment only to be replaced by the present, but that the present is the continuation of things that began in the past.

In addition to the critical thinking skills that are developed in the study of history, students also strengthen their skills at reading and expressing themselves orally and in writing. It goes without saying that this type of literacy has utility far beyond the history classroom. What type of reading do you do, every day? Of course, everyone reads road signs and billboards, but more important are your skills in reading the newspaper, following the instructions in a manual that accompanies a new appliance, deciphering the fine print in a rental agreement, understanding the options that are listed in the booklet you received about school transportation. No amount of training in reading fiction will prepare a student for such grown-up tasks. They need to learn to read non-fiction texts using strategies that will assist their comprehension. History provides the ideal subject matter for developing such literacy skills. And for school administrators who balk at allowing too much time for the teaching of history when they see literacy as much more important, it is worth noting that standardized assessments in language arts regularly test students on exactly these types of non-fiction reading abilities. Teaching history is, by definition, teaching literacy because most of the evidence and all of the narrative prose in history is written.

Students can be the authors, as well as the readers, of historical narratives. Using evidence from primary sources, a student can formulate arguments, develop a thesis, and create a compelling narrative. Student papers and essays written exclusively from secondary sources tend to be dull for both the student and the teacher (who, after all, has to grade them). The risk of plagiarism looms large, especially with students' growing use of the Internet. But primary sources offer an alternative to this. Students could be asked, for example, to analyze diary entries written by several women who were traveling on the Oregon Trail and to draw conclusions about the obstacles they faced and the ways in which they handled those obstacles. Such an assignment would challenge the students to read carefully, organize the data, look for evidence, and present a coherent argument. It would also almost preclude plagiarism (and make any attempts at plagiarism patently obvious to the reader).

Good history teaching is a far cry from the experience that I, and many others, had in high school. But as a teacher I know that I, too, have a long way to go. I have had students write on their evaluations of my classes "Thank you for making a boring subject interesting." I must have failed these students - they still think that history is innately boring and that I did some magic to make it seem interesting. We need to help students to see that history simply is not dull. We want them to have the same experience as the hundreds of thousands of readers of McCullough's John Adams and the viewers of public television's "Civil War" series, to find that they love history and want to learn more. That experience can and should begin for them in elementary school.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. All rights reserved.
I would like to add that the magazines published by Cobblestone Publishing provide rich resources for the investigation of history by children. They provide primary sources (both images and texts) and engaging narratives that speak to students' imaginations and ignite their interest in the past.