ABSTRACT
Many teachers do not have the choice of studying the topics they or their students consider important; they don’t have the option of exploring the Holocaust, Japanese American relocation, or the Salem witch trials. Particularly at fifth and eighth grades, when most states require U.S. history to be taught, teachers are expected to cover the events that textbooks and curriculum guides have traditionally identified as the major events in the nation’s past-early explorers, Colonial life, the American Revolution, the Westward Movement, and so on. Of course, these expectations are not unreasonable: We certainly hope that by the end of the middle grades, students will know about topics such as Europeans’ encounter with Native Americans, the enslavement of African Americans, and the constitutional basis of U.S. government. No one could understand “how we got here” without having a thorough acquaintance with these historical issues.
