Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Teaching history
Our classrooms are failing to pass down the essentials of what it means to be an American, a citizen of the United States.
We will never learn from the past if we've forgotten it. Now there's been a dramatic decline in the number of college students studying history.
My mother is 101 years old and in relatively good health, but has largely lost her memory. She doesn't recognize friends and family, nor understand where she is or what she's doing.
In order to have a well-informed citizenry, it's critical to focus on history and civics education in our schools.
It is painful to see a state such as Massachusetts — so central to our Nation's past — plan to cut back even more on the teaching of American history.
Learning about history is an antidote to the hubris of the present, the idea that everything in our lives is the ultimate.
Former President Harry S. Truman once remarked that the history we don’t know is the only new thing in the world.
DAVID McCULLOUGH tells why he thinks history is the most challenging, exhilarating, and immediate of subjects
If the historians themselves are no longer interested in defining the structure of the American past, how can the citizenry understand its heritage? The author examines the disrepair in which the professors have left their subject.
In the mid-sixteenth century, a blind and deaf old Spanish soldier named Bernai Díaz del Castillo set out to write an account of what he had seen and done as a follower of Hernando Cortés during the conquest of Mexico.
Historians have failed to help Americans understand what the war was all about. So charges this scholar, author, and Vietnam veteran.
Instead of fading away, as some thought it would, interest in the Vietnam War seems to be growing steadily. Last year all three networks devoted hour-long specials to the tenth anniversary of the end of the war, with weighty pronouncements on the meaning of it all.
NO, SAY THREE AMERICAN HISTORIANS. BUT THE PATIENT IS AILING AND THEY THINK THEY KNOW WHY AND WHAT TO PRESCRIBE.
That splendid flower of New England— the town meeting—wilts under the scrutiny of a native son
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