ABSTRACT
If learning history is to move beyond the accumulation of certified facts, students and educators must recognize historians’ work as society’s best contemporary efforts to make sense of past times. Such efforts must themselves be placed in historical contexts. To historicize history is to understand that today’s methods for establishing trustworthy narratives are no more than today’s methods. And yet, that is not to say that we have no way of establishing a complex, multi-perspectival historical interpretation accepted for our time. In a time of rapid knowledge production, to deny youngsters an education in those methods entails not only impeding their access to understanding the past but also excluding them from full participation in the cultural landscape of the future.7
