Critical Thinking & Writing in History is a guide through the historical method. This work explores the very definition of history and offers explanatory text in locating sources, source analysis, argumentation and reasoning, looking for subtext, causation, contextualization, generalization, historical empathy, and writing history. Critical Thinking & Writing in History is ideal for college freshmen seeking to improve their historical thinking. Readers will learn the answers to such questions as: What is the nature of history? What sources do historians use and where do they find them? How do historians analyze sources? How do historians interpret subtext? How do historians structure arguments? What are common mistakes in reasoning? What is causation and how do historians prove it? How do historians contextualize arguments and events? What circumstances are necessary to create a generalization? What is the role of moral judgement in studying the past? How do historians write? Written with student needs in mind, this text offers clear short arguments and explanations, bolded key terms, original images, and endnotes for further reading. Critical Thinking & Writing in History is an ideal primer for historical thinking.

A guide for history and school library media specialists for creating technologically advanced, resource-based instructional units in American and World History in grades 7-12.

What do the humanities have to offer in the twenty-first century? Are there compelling reasons to go on teaching the literate arts when the schools themselves have become battlefields? Does it make sense to go on writing when the world itself is overrun with books that no one reads? In these simultaneously personal and erudite reflections on the future of higher education, Richard E. Miller moves from the headlines to the classroom, focusing in on how teachers and students alike confront the existential challenge of making life meaningful. In meditating on the violent events that now dominate our daily lives—school shootings, suicide bombings, terrorist attacks, contemporary warfare—Miller prompts a reconsideration of the role that institutions of higher education play in shaping our daily experiences, and asks us to reimagine the humanities as centrally important to the maintenance of a compassionate, secular society. By concentrating on those moments when individuals and institutions meet and violence results, Writing at the End of the World provides the framework that students and teachers require to engage in the work of building a better future.

Develops critical-thinking and writing skills Prepares students for document-based assessment Includes options for mock trials and debates

This book offers an alternative, realistic and practical approach to help those in health and social care critically appraise what they read and what they see in the workplace.

Learning history as only a collection of dates and names prevents us from seeing the true value of the past. The Student Guide to Historical Thinkingreveals the study of history as a mode of thinking with real current-day implications. It begins with a focus on important historical understandings and then presents strategies for fostering fair-minded historical thinking. Students learn to engage with the past in a way that promotes critical thinking about the present and future. As part of the Thinker’s Guide Library, this book advances the mission of the Foundation for Critical Thinking to promote fair-minded critical societies through cultivating essential intellectual abilities and virtues across every field of study across world.

A look at how to teach history in the age of easily accessible—but not always reliable—information. Let’s start with two truths about our era that are so inescapable as to have become clichés: We are surrounded by more readily available information than ever before. And a huge percent of it is inaccurate. Some of the bad info is well-meaning but ignorant. Some of it is deliberately deceptive. All of it is pernicious. With the Internet at our fingertips, what’s a teacher of history to do? In Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone), professor Sam Wineburg has the answers, beginning with this: We can’t stick to the same old read-the-chapter-answer-the-question snoozefest. If we want to educate citizens who can separate fact from fake, we have to equip them with new tools. Historical thinking, Wineburg shows, has nothing to do with the ability to memorize facts. Instead, it’s an orientation to the world that cultivates reasoned skepticism and counters our tendency to confirm our biases. Wineburg lays out a mine-filled landscape, but one that with care, attention, and awareness, we can learn to navigate. The future of the past may rest on our screens. But its fate rests in our hands. Praise for Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone) “If every K-12 teacher of history and social studies read just three chapters of this book—”Crazy for History,” “Changing History . . . One Classroom at a Time,” and “Why Google Can’t Save Us” —the ensuing transformation of our populace would save our democracy.” —James W. Lowen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me and Teaching What Really Happened “A sobering and urgent report from the leading expert on how American history is taught in the nation’s schools. . . . A bracing, edifying, and vital book.” —Jill Lepore, New Yorker staff writer and author of These Truths “Wineburg is a true innovator who has thought more deeply about the relevance of history to the Internet—and vice versa—than any other scholar I know. Anyone interested in the uses and abuses of history today has a duty to read this book.” —Niall Ferguson, senior fellow, Hoover Institution, and author of The Ascent of Money and Civilization