Teaching History: A Journal of Methods is an open-access journal serving historians and history teachers. Since 1976, our articles have emphasized the use of primary and secondary sources in classrooms and the impact of specific strategies and practices on student learning.
By submitting to Teaching History, the author(s) agree to the terms of the Author Agreement. All authors retain copyrights associated with their article or review contributions. Beginning in 2019, all authors agree to make such contributions available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license upon publication.
Teaching Byzantine history offers educators a fascinating opportunity to explore how the Roman Empire continued from antiquity into the late Middle Ages. As with any history course, standard lectures and discussion of primary sources are essential to teaching effectively about Byzantium. Via lectures, instructors can explain complicated subjects such as Chalcedonian Christology and the Byzantines’ relationship with the Kyivan Rus’. Through primary source discussion, instructors can guide students into analyzing historical evidence in texts like The Secret History by Procopius and The Alexiad by Anna Komnene. In addition to these traditional teaching methods, I have adopted another strategy for my university-level Byzantine Empire course: incorporating food and food history into the curriculum. During a class meeting dedicated to “Byzantine Cuisine,” I bring in six Byzantine foods for my students to sample: barley rusks, olives, feta cheese, pork sausages (loukaniko), bougatsa (a pastry), and the sweet Easter bread called tsoureki. I also pass around five of the Byzantines’ favorite spices – rosemary, cinnamon, anise, mastic, and mahlep – so that students can inhale their aromas. A significant learning outcome of this lesson is that students will be able to explain a fundamental aspect of daily life in Byzantium: what and how people ate and drank. More specifically, as students sample these foods and smell these spices, they are adding gustatory and olfactory experiences to the historical facts they have learned.
Copyright (c) 2025 Andrew Drenas https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
By collaborating with public history entities and applying Kolb's Experiential Learning Model in my public history classes, I developed meaningful hands-on learning experiences for my students. Field trips, reflective discussions, label writing, and exhibition development allowed my students to learn first-hand about the work of public historians while contributing to the needs of their community. These opportunities made public history come alive for my students while they gained a meaningful understanding of the field and their own potential.
Copyright (c) 2025 Sarah FitzGerald https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Teaching the Crusades with Role-Playing Simulations
This article explores the application of the pedagogical approach Reacting to the Past curriculum (RTTP) to teaching the History of the Crusades. The introductory section provides a brief overview of RTTP pedagogy, illustrating its main elements and discussing its pedagogical benefits, and describes the essential elements and game mechanics of Helen Gaudette’s "The Second Crusade: the War Council of Acre, 1148," an RTTP role-playing simulation that brings to life a dramatic turning point in the history of the twelfth-century crusades. Participants receive roles and "become" the great gathering of monarchs, barons, religious authorities, and others that met in Acre on the eve of the Second Crusade; they engage in debate and ultimately decide on the future course of the crusade, informed by a wide range of primary sources from both Christian (Western and Levantine) and Islamic perspectives. In the central part of the article, I draw from first-hand experience in teaching a class using RTTP and from the participating students' feedback to discuss the pedagogical benefits of the simulation applied to a typical History of the Crusades upper-level course. Different tasks and assignments for undergraduate and graduate students (in a mixed class of both undergraduates and graduates) are also presented. The article concludes with an assessment of the pedagogical value of these simulations, engaging at the same time a discussion of potential issues that may arise.
Copyright (c) 2025 Martina Saltamacchia https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Many public and private college and university teacher preparation programs across Michigan are facing dramatic declines in the numbers of students. Alternative certification programs have given history and social studies preparation programs stiff competition in recent years. Using Michigan Department of Education data and a survey conducted by the Michigan Council for History Education, this essay explains the history and current status of these developments and provides insights into how Michigan's college and university programs have responded to this market pressure. Competition from alternative certification requires Michigan's public and private teacher preparation programs to provide stronger evidence to potential teachers of their excellence and relevance in teacher preparation.
Copyright (c) 2025 Wilson Warren, David Zwart https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
An Interview with Kevin Gannon about "A History of Your Day"
Jessamyn Neuhaus conducts an interview with historian and scholar of teaching and learning Kevin Gannon about a first-day classroom activity he calls "A History of Your Day."
Copyright (c) 2025 Jessamyn Neuhaus https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Review - Holly Miowak Guise. Alaska Native Resilience- Voices from World War II.
Academic historians tend to silo their research and teaching. As a result, we read deeply, but not necessarily widely. Secondary teachers, whose curricula are much broader, rarely have time to delve deep into the latest scholarship. Holly Miowak Guise’s Alaska Native Resilience, therefore, is not a book I likely would have picked up on my own as either a teacher or a researcher – much to my detriment. This book’s approach, content, and even its pitfalls, are a wonderful reminder of the perils of drawing hard boundaries. Guise’s goal was to understand the Alaska Native experience of World War II – no easy task given the diversity of the region’s population. Guise points out that the United States currently recognizes 228 tribes in present-day Alaska. These Nations can more or less be categorized by geography and language into three umbrella groups – Iñuit, who historically inhabited the Arctic Circle and Alaska’s western coast; Aleut, from Alaska’s many western islands; and Alaskan Indians, whose ancestral homelands are further inland. Through significant archival research and over ninety(!) oral history interviews, Guise has constructed a personalized story that first and foremost acknowledges the diversity of her subjects. Different tribal groups experienced the war differently – but so did different individuals within the same Native Nation. This book’s first lesson for educators, then, is the importance of avoiding the overgeneralization that can result from overcategorization.
Copyright (c) 2025 Amy J. Rutenberg https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Review - Erika Bsumek, Matt O’Hair, Ian Diaz, Braeden Kennedy. ClioVis.
ClioVis is online software that provides a multi-visualization tool for creating digital mindmaps, timelines, and presentations in the classroom. University of Texas-Austin historian Erika Bsumek created ClioVis to be used across academic disciplines, but its use as a timeline tool lends itself well to engaging students in the history classroom. ClioVis is designed to be collaborative, allowing students to edit and contribute to a timeline simultaneously. There is a no-cost basic version, while other versions are available with flexible paid subscription options. Instructors can embed ClioVis in Canvas or other LMSs (typically in the paid version), but instructors can reach out to the Bsumek and her team and discuss different use cases that can be made available through freeto fee-based options.
Copyright (c) 2025 Lindsey Passenger Wieck https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Review - Donald Yacovone. Teaching White Supremacy- America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity
In 1866, a year after the end of the American Civil War, school children encountered a new textbook entitled, A Youth’s History of the Great Civil War in the United States. Attributing the war to an anti-slavery conspiracy that involved British efforts to undermine American democracy, A Youth’s History argued that Republicans forced the South to secede despite a harmonious slave society that included benevolent masters and loyal, contented slaves. The authors, John H. Van Evrie and Rushmore G. Horton, were northerners and their book was yet another example of an immense and sustained effort in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to shape a national white identity via a white supremacist historical narrative. In the recently published Teaching White Supremacy: America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of National Identity, historian Donald Yacovone examines school textbooks and other historical accounts to argue that “northern white supremacy,” rather than slavery, became “the more enduring cultural binding force” that dominated history classrooms until the 1960s (5).
Copyright (c) 2025 Richard Hughes https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Review - Tore C. Olsson. Red Dead’s History- A Video Game, and Obsession, and America’s Violent Past.
In the Preface of Red Dead’s History, Tore Olssen notes, “one thing a History PhD can do is ruin a great deal of historically themed pop culture” (x). As a historian who is often guilty of ruining pop culture but who is (at best) a hesitant gamer, I approached Olsson’s book with curiosity and a bit of uncertainty about how to engage a book about a wildly popular video game. Fortunately, one of the great strengths of Olsson’s work is in how he invites in all kinds of readers to the virtual historical world of Red Dead Redemption II, including “diehard gamers,” students who have not previously found history classes engaging, and history instructors who have not yet considered video games as pedagogical tools (6).
Copyright (c) 2025 Sarah Sears https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0