Responding to the “History Wars” that waged a debate over the content that should be or should not be taught in history class, Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History: National and International Perspectives seeks to take the discussion of history education in a different direction by emphasizing the process of teaching and learning history in schools.  This discussion is a result of a convergent conversation among the findings of the “cognitive revolution,” the changes in the discipline of history, and the relationship between collective memory and national identity.  The articles in this collection strive to make explicit the implicit assumptions about what history is, how it should be organized, and why it is worth learning.

This anthology of twenty-two articles is organized in four sections: Current Issues in History Education; Changes Needed to Advance Good History Teaching; Research on Teaching and Learning in History; and Models for Teaching.  However, the introduction highlights an additional four themes that could arrange the collection: choices and beliefs in understanding history; a shared understanding of history; the tension between collective memory and critical history; and recommendations for reform.  With these additional organizers, the editors emphasize that the discussion they are engaging in is not simple or one dimensional, but rather a complex interaction between different disciplines, perspectives, issues, and findings.

Peter Seixas’ article “Schweigen! die Kinder! or, Does Post Modern History Have a Place in the Schools?,” begins the collection by outlining three approaches for teaching history: collective memory, disciplinary history, and postmodernist history.  Advocating for disciplinary history in favour of a heritage-based or “fragmented” history, Seixas sets the terms for understanding historical thinking in history education, which is at the core of this collection.  David Lowenthal’s 1998 book The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge University Press) is also foundational for the articles in this collection and his article, “Dilemmas and Delights of Learning History,” emphasizes why history is hard to learn, why it is important to study, and why it has immediate importance in our society.

Many of the arguments for a disciplinary-based history education are based in the understanding that knowing more history does not necessarily result in greater commitment to the nation. Rather, teaching young people to think historically will give them the tools to consider competing versions of events, which will lead to a deeper and more nuanced understanding of historical experiences.  Peter Lee and Rosalyn Ashby’s Chata project was foundational for setting out the disciplinary concepts of progression in historical thinking and they discuss a portion of their findings in “Progression in Historical Understanding among Students Ages 7-14.” As well, Desmond Morton grounds the argument for historical thinking in Canada’s History Wars in his article “Teaching and Learning History in Canada.”  
Although a concern for the whole collection, three articles focus on how students cognitively process historical information.  In “Lessons on Teaching and Learning in History from Paul's Pen,” Gaea Leinhardt looks intensively at the development of historical reasoning through one student’s writing.  James Voss and Jennifer Wiley, on the other hand, look at the factors going into multiple students’ processing and understanding of causation, argument construction, and multiple source literacy in “A Case Study of Developing Historical Understanding via Instruction: The Importance of Integrating Text Components and Constructing Arguments.”  “The Sourcer's Apprentice: A Tool  for Document-Supported Instruction” by M. Anne Britt, Charles A. Perfetti, Julie A. Van Dyke, and Gareth Gabrys focuses on a computer program pilot test that was developed to support primary source investigation for students.

While most of the “History Wars” discourse was based in what youth don’t know, Sam Wineburg emphasizes that no one has looked at what youth do know about history.  In “Making Historical Sense,” Wineburg discusses a portion of his 1996 study in which he looked at how teenagers “become historical in modern society.”  Similarly, in “How Americans Use and Think about the Past: Implications from a National Survey for the Teaching of History,” Roy Rosenzweig discusses some of the findings from his 1994 study with David Thelen which found that, contrary to popular belief, Americans feel strongly connected to history, although personal and familial histories are more important than national histories.  But can these connections, or beliefs, be taught in history education?  James V. Wertsch explores this question by introducing the concepts of mastery and appropriation of historical knowledge in his article, “Is It Possible to Teach Beliefs, as Well as Knowledge about History?”

Veronica Boix-Mansilla discusses the attempt to use history to understand present-day issues in “Historical Understanding: Beyond the Past and into the Present.”  Partially funded through the Facing History and Ourselves organization, this study looked at if learning about the Holocaust provided a more contextualized understanding of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.  Directed instruction toward using history and philosophy to create purposeful, peaceful, and informed action is also discussed in “Making Connections: The Interdisciplinary Community of Teaching and Learning History.” In this article, Christine Gutierrez explains an innovative teacher-driven reform that privileged interdisciplinary learning in a community of scholars at a high school in South Central Los Angeles. However, Gary B. Nash argues in “The 'Convergence' Paradigm in Studying Early American History in the Schools” that unless textbooks reflect contemporary interpretations of the past, especially of first contact and colonial past, students won’t be able to look to history to understand how the history of collaboration and intersection have been a factor throughout America’s history.

All the authors in this collection believe that history education should be structured around teaching students how to think like historians when assessing evidence and constructing interpretations of the past.  A key, yet challenging, factor for teaching with this model is collaboration between historians and history educators.  G. Williamson McDiarmid and Peter Vinten-Johansen discuss their attempt to bridge this challenge in “A Catwalk across the Great Divide: Redesigning the History Teaching Methods Course.”  Shelly Weintraub discusses the process of integrating the principles of historical thinking into the history standards for the Oakland Unified School District in California in “'What's This New Crap? What's Wrong with the Old Crap?' Changing History Teaching in Oakland, California.”  Diane Ravitch provides a statistical exploration of history teaching in “The Educational Backgrounds of History Teachers” and finds that there is a low percentage of history teachers who actually have a history background, which makes the concentrated teaching of history a challenge.

By looking at what teachers and teacher candidates believe about their American students and thus what they teach in class, “Articulating the Silences: Teachers' and Adolescents' Conceptions of Historical Significance”  by Linda Levstik looks at the disjuncture between what could be taught and what is being taught.  She found that teachers and teacher candidates often don’t teach the type of history that students feel is important to their national identities.  In “Methods and Aims of Teaching History in Europe: A Report on Youth and History,”  Bodo von Borries also found a difference between what European history teachers think they are teaching and what students are actually learning.

Teaching world history is another thread in this collection.  Ross E. Dunn’s “Constructing World History in the Classroom” discusses three models for teaching world history and advocates for the Patterns of Change Model, firmly rooted in the discipline of history and based around historical questions that seek to explore the “interaction of the pieces of human history.”  Denis Shemilt’s article “The Caliph's Coin: The Currency of Narrative Frameworks in History Teaching” supports this by saying that students should learn large processes of interrelation in history rather than fragmented and isolated pieces.  In “Getting Specific about Training in Historical Analysis: A Case Study in World History,” Peter N. Stearns discusses an attempt to teach an interrelated world history in an undergraduate program by focusing on a comparison-based model.  Finally, Robert B. Bain looks at how his high school students responded to thinking about historical inquiry in world history in his article “Into the Breach: Using Research and Theory to Shape History Instruction.”

In sum, this collection refocuses the discussion of what it means to think historically and “do” history, and provides many angles for “knowing, teaching, and learning” history in this disciplinary framework.