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Why Learn History
Let’s start with two truths about our era that are so inescapable as to have become clichés: We are surrounded by more readily available information than ever before. And a huge percentage of it is inaccurate. Some of the bad info is well-meaning but ignorant. Some of it is deliberately deceptive. All of it is pernicious.
With the internet always at our fingertips, what’s a teacher of history to do? Sam Wineburg has answers, beginning with this: We definitely can’t stick to the same old read-the-chapter-answer-the-questions-at-the-back snoozefest we’ve subjected students to for decades. If we want to educate citizens who can sift through the mass of information around them and separate fact from fake, we have to explicitly work to give them the necessary critical thinking tools. Historical thinking, Wineburg shows us in Why Learn History (When it’s Already on Your Phone), has nothing to do with test prep–style ability to memorize facts. Instead, it’s an orientation to the world that we can cultivate, one that encourages reasoned skepticism, discourages haste, and counters our tendency to confirm our biases. Wineburg draws on surprising discoveries from an array of research and experiments—including surveys of students, recent attempts to update history curricula, and analyses of how historians, students, and even fact checkers approach online sources—to paint a picture of a dangerously mine-filled landscape, but one that, with care, attention, and awareness, we can all learn to navigate.
It’s easy to look around at the public consequences of historical ignorance and despair. Wineburg is here to tell us it doesn’t have to be that way. The future of the past may rest on our screens. But its fate rests in our hands.
With the internet always at our fingertips, what’s a teacher of history to do? Sam Wineburg has answers, beginning with this: We definitely can’t stick to the same old read-the-chapter-answer-the-questions-at-the-back snoozefest we’ve subjected students to for decades. If we want to educate citizens who can sift through the mass of information around them and separate fact from fake, we have to explicitly work to give them the necessary critical thinking tools. Historical thinking, Wineburg shows us in Why Learn History (When it’s Already on Your Phone), has nothing to do with test prep–style ability to memorize facts. Instead, it’s an orientation to the world that we can cultivate, one that encourages reasoned skepticism, discourages haste, and counters our tendency to confirm our biases. Wineburg draws on surprising discoveries from an array of research and experiments—including surveys of students, recent attempts to update history curricula, and analyses of how historians, students, and even fact checkers approach online sources—to paint a picture of a dangerously mine-filled landscape, but one that, with care, attention, and awareness, we can all learn to navigate.
It’s easy to look around at the public consequences of historical ignorance and despair. Wineburg is here to tell us it doesn’t have to be that way. The future of the past may rest on our screens. But its fate rests in our hands.
250 pages, Paperback
First published September 17, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 107 reviews
December 23, 2018
This is a book of essays and short papers by a Professor at Stanford who focuses on education and history. The general concern is about the teaching of history, especially in the age of the Internet, when nobody seems to read books anymore and research can be done on nearly any topic on the Internet in a matter of minutes.
This is not a book about technology. Rather, the focus is on how to be a critical reader and a critical thinker when all the information anyone needs is handed to them instantly and for free on the web. Seen this way, the issue is how to make sense of the world around you based on the rush of information that continually inundates everyone. I cannot recall the last time I heard somebody complain about a shortage of information.
One would think that the problem of history in the internet age is a new special problem, but that does not turn out to be the case. Professor Wineburg starts by considering long-standing surveys of American students showing a deficit of historical knowledge and shows how this problem has persisted since these studies began around WW1 and result from the way that the history tests are designed not from any shortcomings in how students learn history. Later in the book, Wineburg presents evidence that there is room for hope in the historical knowledge of American students.
The focus of many of the essays is on what learning about history is actually about. Is it a matter of learning lots of specific little facts? Or is it more a matter of learning the historical context in which life occurs, such that one can begin to make sense of what is happening in an historical situation. These are exceptional essays and not what I expected in a book on the current teaching of history in secondary schools and colleges. Of particular interest her are two essays that track what happened when major approaches at promoting more effective teaching failed and also what happened when such efforts were more successful. The idea is that the content of history classes is important at some level but the pedagogy also needs to be well thought through. Readers can easily go to Wineburg’s website “Historical Thinking Matters” to see the details of his approach.
There is also an interesting chapter on how to do careful and responsible searching on the Internet and how to avoid getting fooled by phony websites. It turns out that getting snookered on the web is a broader problem than with historians - who are not immune. This is a chapter that everyone should read, whether they are historically inclined or not. I liked the orientation of these papers to the idea that new technology does not present special and difficult problems for users but that it requires the same careful and critical thinking - and a bit of common sense - that was needed in the good old days before the Netscape IPO.
These are separate essays but they fit together well and guidance for thinking critically on the web is always needed and useful.
The book is very readable and not dependent on academic jargon or issues of “inside baseball” among small groups of competing academics.
This is not a book about technology. Rather, the focus is on how to be a critical reader and a critical thinker when all the information anyone needs is handed to them instantly and for free on the web. Seen this way, the issue is how to make sense of the world around you based on the rush of information that continually inundates everyone. I cannot recall the last time I heard somebody complain about a shortage of information.
One would think that the problem of history in the internet age is a new special problem, but that does not turn out to be the case. Professor Wineburg starts by considering long-standing surveys of American students showing a deficit of historical knowledge and shows how this problem has persisted since these studies began around WW1 and result from the way that the history tests are designed not from any shortcomings in how students learn history. Later in the book, Wineburg presents evidence that there is room for hope in the historical knowledge of American students.
The focus of many of the essays is on what learning about history is actually about. Is it a matter of learning lots of specific little facts? Or is it more a matter of learning the historical context in which life occurs, such that one can begin to make sense of what is happening in an historical situation. These are exceptional essays and not what I expected in a book on the current teaching of history in secondary schools and colleges. Of particular interest her are two essays that track what happened when major approaches at promoting more effective teaching failed and also what happened when such efforts were more successful. The idea is that the content of history classes is important at some level but the pedagogy also needs to be well thought through. Readers can easily go to Wineburg’s website “Historical Thinking Matters” to see the details of his approach.
There is also an interesting chapter on how to do careful and responsible searching on the Internet and how to avoid getting fooled by phony websites. It turns out that getting snookered on the web is a broader problem than with historians - who are not immune. This is a chapter that everyone should read, whether they are historically inclined or not. I liked the orientation of these papers to the idea that new technology does not present special and difficult problems for users but that it requires the same careful and critical thinking - and a bit of common sense - that was needed in the good old days before the Netscape IPO.
These are separate essays but they fit together well and guidance for thinking critically on the web is always needed and useful.
The book is very readable and not dependent on academic jargon or issues of “inside baseball” among small groups of competing academics.
June 8, 2019
Perhaps the most crucial book about my profession I’ve read in recent years. It’s given me the vocabulary to express my concerns and the information necessary to improve my classroom. Wine burg highlighted areas I’ve been doing right and pointed out areas threat need work.
Don’t confuse facts with knowledge. History is more like sudoku than a crossword puzzle.
Don’t confuse facts with knowledge. History is more like sudoku than a crossword puzzle.
January 15, 2021
This is a provocative and thought provoking book. I am looking forward to discussing it with young people getting ready to start teaching history and social science. I did not agree with every aspect presented but the overall approach and goals were excellent.
April 15, 2019
Because no one looks it up
One can easily extend the title of this book to nearly any subject. I still don't understand why algebra is required in school. I never use it. I can easily ask my device to figure out any math problem i want without any understanding of the processes involved. Doing that will hardly have an effect on my or anyone else's life. But how stupid can we be to say we don't need to truly know history when we are expected to be full participants in our political and economic lives here in the US? The only reason students "don't learn" history when it has been taught chronologically is that it has been taught without imagination and badly. Guess what...students aren't learning history thematically, either.
There's a way to fix this problem. Let history be taught hands on by imaginative teachers who can make chronological sense out of it. Kids need context for what they learn. They need to know why things happened and what the impacts were. Let the teachers teach.
One can easily extend the title of this book to nearly any subject. I still don't understand why algebra is required in school. I never use it. I can easily ask my device to figure out any math problem i want without any understanding of the processes involved. Doing that will hardly have an effect on my or anyone else's life. But how stupid can we be to say we don't need to truly know history when we are expected to be full participants in our political and economic lives here in the US? The only reason students "don't learn" history when it has been taught chronologically is that it has been taught without imagination and badly. Guess what...students aren't learning history thematically, either.
There's a way to fix this problem. Let history be taught hands on by imaginative teachers who can make chronological sense out of it. Kids need context for what they learn. They need to know why things happened and what the impacts were. Let the teachers teach.
Read
January 3, 2021Sam Wineburg, one of the nation's foremost history teaching pundits - admittedly a sparse field if we exclude people whose prescription is "make it more social justicey" or "make it more patriotic" - has a positive and a negative agenda here. Neither is especially novel if you're familiar with his other work, and the positive agenda is essentially a (paid) advertisement of for the (free) resources and his team provide at SHEG, so for me, this ended up not being so much enlightening as Chicken Soup for the History Teacher's Soul with a side of red meat.
That said, SHEG really is great, and looking at my bathroom scale, it's clear that Why Learn History? wasn't the only comfort food I consumed over this winter break. And much like my repeated attempts to become a vegetarian, my repeated attempts to pull myself away from the Forever Culture War have thus far ended in failure, so I am certainly not averse to generous helpings of red meat, either. If you haven't already overloaded your intellectual arteries with this particular flavoring, you might even derive some nutritional value from it.
This negative agenda takes up the first half of the book, and trains its fire on everyone: test-fetishizing ed reformers, Howard Zinn, congressmen thundering against Howard Zinn, kids today (who are as clueless as everyone says), kids and adults of every era (who, he demonstrates pretty conclusively, have always been just as clueless, putting the lie to most narratives about why kids today are so much so), their teachers, particular textbooks, the idea of textbooks in general, "critical" reading techniques that are anything but, you, and your dog.
At the heart of Wineburg's complaint, and what allows him to be so profligate in his salvos, is a particular dialectical relationship or ganying between background knowledge and the reading of primary texts. Existing "critical reading" and constructivist methodologies, such as they are - and they have not penetrated very far, in Wineburg's telling - present primary texts without the means, methodological or substantive, to meaningfully evaluate their authenticity, purpose, or meaning. Faced with these texts, actually existing A students respond with exactly two tools: 1) SAT reading section tips and tricks, whereby correct answers are gleaned by process of elimination and a grab-bag of well-honed but historically irrelevant heuristics, or 2) noticing that the text has a particular political slant and dismissing it as biased if it isn't their own. Questions like "who wrote this?," "when?," and "for whom?" are basically not asked: the text is taken at face value and seen as if it were written today. These, the brightest and most motivated of adolescents, are victims of this system (at least in this respect - they'll turn out fine in terms of income health etc); real shame must be heaped upon their teachers, who applaud the students for their skillful use of these clumsy tools, and a sample of no doubt high-IQ adults, scientists and seminarians, who fare no better. (In defense of the scientists, we can take this as just one more strike against truly general intelligence - no shame in being dumb outside your field - but aren't they supposed to teach hermeneutics in seminary?) By contrast, trained historians presented with the same texts (deliberately outside their specialization) always take a colophon-first approach, contextualizing the text and only then diving into content, asking questions to mark their ignorance along the way.
Perhaps taking less time to demolish, because it is built on even shakier foundations, is the traditional approach of loading students with facts, testing them on those facts, and forgetting it all. Forget it they do: students' ability to recall basic historical facts after the test is empirically terrible, has always been empirically terrible, and no wonder: the fill-em-with facts approach is drearily boring - regularly ranking among students' least-favorite subject - and, particularly in an era of the internet, would be useless even if it were successful. (But oh: neither "digital natives" nor their parents know how to sort true from false information online. Neither, in one of the most depressing experiments in the book, do those trained historians, who have developed a sort of hothouse epistemology from peer-reviewed journals that "anything with footnotes probably wasn't completely made up.") Half of this stems from textbooks themselves, which present themselves as POV-less (and citationless) fact repositories, and which anyway make gross historical errors.
So the positive part of the program, broadly speaking, is about developing reading skills, especially understanding texts in context, both historical and contemporary, so you can think of them as artifacts with a purpose, and whose reliability has to be judged by means of referring to an ecology of other texts. This sounds complicated, but Wineburg proffers (or cherry-picks?) evidence that students love it - or at least damn with with the faint praise that it beats being treated as foie gras for trivia.
Moreover, he and the rest of SHEG proffer lesson plans at the site above. It's said that most of the lobbying power of corporations isn't in campaign finance so much as the research units, which hand over to underfunded and overworked congressional staffs freely written legislation. No doubt much the same applies to the curriculum as well. After all, as I currently look out over my own unplanned semester, I'll no doubt be including them too.
That said, SHEG really is great, and looking at my bathroom scale, it's clear that Why Learn History? wasn't the only comfort food I consumed over this winter break. And much like my repeated attempts to become a vegetarian, my repeated attempts to pull myself away from the Forever Culture War have thus far ended in failure, so I am certainly not averse to generous helpings of red meat, either. If you haven't already overloaded your intellectual arteries with this particular flavoring, you might even derive some nutritional value from it.
This negative agenda takes up the first half of the book, and trains its fire on everyone: test-fetishizing ed reformers, Howard Zinn, congressmen thundering against Howard Zinn, kids today (who are as clueless as everyone says), kids and adults of every era (who, he demonstrates pretty conclusively, have always been just as clueless, putting the lie to most narratives about why kids today are so much so), their teachers, particular textbooks, the idea of textbooks in general, "critical" reading techniques that are anything but, you, and your dog.
At the heart of Wineburg's complaint, and what allows him to be so profligate in his salvos, is a particular dialectical relationship or ganying between background knowledge and the reading of primary texts. Existing "critical reading" and constructivist methodologies, such as they are - and they have not penetrated very far, in Wineburg's telling - present primary texts without the means, methodological or substantive, to meaningfully evaluate their authenticity, purpose, or meaning. Faced with these texts, actually existing A students respond with exactly two tools: 1) SAT reading section tips and tricks, whereby correct answers are gleaned by process of elimination and a grab-bag of well-honed but historically irrelevant heuristics, or 2) noticing that the text has a particular political slant and dismissing it as biased if it isn't their own. Questions like "who wrote this?," "when?," and "for whom?" are basically not asked: the text is taken at face value and seen as if it were written today. These, the brightest and most motivated of adolescents, are victims of this system (at least in this respect - they'll turn out fine in terms of income health etc); real shame must be heaped upon their teachers, who applaud the students for their skillful use of these clumsy tools, and a sample of no doubt high-IQ adults, scientists and seminarians, who fare no better. (In defense of the scientists, we can take this as just one more strike against truly general intelligence - no shame in being dumb outside your field - but aren't they supposed to teach hermeneutics in seminary?) By contrast, trained historians presented with the same texts (deliberately outside their specialization) always take a colophon-first approach, contextualizing the text and only then diving into content, asking questions to mark their ignorance along the way.
Perhaps taking less time to demolish, because it is built on even shakier foundations, is the traditional approach of loading students with facts, testing them on those facts, and forgetting it all. Forget it they do: students' ability to recall basic historical facts after the test is empirically terrible, has always been empirically terrible, and no wonder: the fill-em-with facts approach is drearily boring - regularly ranking among students' least-favorite subject - and, particularly in an era of the internet, would be useless even if it were successful. (But oh: neither "digital natives" nor their parents know how to sort true from false information online. Neither, in one of the most depressing experiments in the book, do those trained historians, who have developed a sort of hothouse epistemology from peer-reviewed journals that "anything with footnotes probably wasn't completely made up.") Half of this stems from textbooks themselves, which present themselves as POV-less (and citationless) fact repositories, and which anyway make gross historical errors.
So the positive part of the program, broadly speaking, is about developing reading skills, especially understanding texts in context, both historical and contemporary, so you can think of them as artifacts with a purpose, and whose reliability has to be judged by means of referring to an ecology of other texts. This sounds complicated, but Wineburg proffers (or cherry-picks?) evidence that students love it - or at least damn with with the faint praise that it beats being treated as foie gras for trivia.
Moreover, he and the rest of SHEG proffer lesson plans at the site above. It's said that most of the lobbying power of corporations isn't in campaign finance so much as the research units, which hand over to underfunded and overworked congressional staffs freely written legislation. No doubt much the same applies to the curriculum as well. After all, as I currently look out over my own unplanned semester, I'll no doubt be including them too.
November 24, 2018
كتاب مفيد جدا حول واقع تعليم التاريخ في المدارس الأمريكية، والمأمول اتباعه من أساليب التطوير ليصبح مواكبا لوسائل العصر. هذا الكتاب يهم كل مدرس تاريخ في التعليم العام والجامعي، والمهتم بالشأن التعليمي عموما.
December 11, 2019
"The Latin root of inspiration is inspiritu, the act of emptying the ego to create a space for the spirit to enter." (176)
And my experience of reading this book has precisely been a humbling one. This has challenged my standards of pedagogical practices and assessment, and I believe every single history teacher in the world stands to benefit similarly from reading this.
But this book is not just for the history teachers. Everyone living in the 21st century needs to challenge their own ideas of what history and learning is history is about. Wineburg is erudite yet accessible, critical and encouraging at the same time, and is so sincere in pursuing the greatest standards in teaching history that the untrained reader will feel compelled to consider his/her history education all over again, and maybe even start anew.
Few books provoke an emotional response to my professional inadequacies, and this is one of them. Consider myself a new fan of Wineburg.
And my experience of reading this book has precisely been a humbling one. This has challenged my standards of pedagogical practices and assessment, and I believe every single history teacher in the world stands to benefit similarly from reading this.
But this book is not just for the history teachers. Everyone living in the 21st century needs to challenge their own ideas of what history and learning is history is about. Wineburg is erudite yet accessible, critical and encouraging at the same time, and is so sincere in pursuing the greatest standards in teaching history that the untrained reader will feel compelled to consider his/her history education all over again, and maybe even start anew.
Few books provoke an emotional response to my professional inadequacies, and this is one of them. Consider myself a new fan of Wineburg.
April 29, 2021
As a teacher, I wanted to like this book. Unfortunately, I thought it was pretentious drivel. It said absolutely nothing. It didn't offer solutions. It had some case studies, if you want to call it that? It really was a list of anecdotes from the author's experiments teaching history to grade school students, some worked, some didn't? I hated the cheeky tone. He kept trying to "own" the reader with "logic" but had no actual examples. White academia is really out of touch. If you're not going to offer real solutions to people in the classroom, then you're just pandering. Bye.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 25, 2020
This is an uneven collection of chapters that can be read alone, but they all contained elements that blew me away. From the ways testing of historical knowledge in the US school system works (kids know just as much as their parents did about history) to ideas for how to learn to evaluate evidence to turning Bloom’s taxonomy on its head, these chapters make for important and provocative reading for history teachers.
June 19, 2019
Great discussion of why we need to teach history differently than we have in the past.
May 24, 2022
This is a good book, although not particularly novel in its conclusions. But if you're looking for a set of activities or even methods you can deploy in the classroom to combat our inability to suss out what is "fake news," this is not the book. It's a think piece backed by some interesting studies. I would also argue that while the subject is primarily k-12 History education, that is not his audience. His audience is professional historians (note that it's published by U of Chicago press). Middle School and High School teachers know what he's saying, which is that they need to focus on teaching primary source analysis and contextual clues for digital sources (like looking up who owns a domain using WHOIS). As he notes the problem isn't that they don't know that. It's that we don't have the time or the will to create that kind of support. Thus, this book is more useful for those of us who are picking up these students in first- and second-year colleges and have the time and freedom (outside of state and local school board curricular constraints) to demonstrate that History is a frame for thinking, not a domain of knowledge. I'm not mad I read it. I think it offers some interesting historiography into the question of assessment, but I wouldn't say it's ground-breaking. Rather, it confirms what I know anecdotally and experientially from my own classroom, as well as the primary source analysis focus that was emphasized in pedagogy when I was in graduate school.
December 31, 2024
So much to think about with this one. My son recommended this one to me. And yes, some parts are total nerd reading, (but then that’s who we are), so maybe not everyone is going to get into as much. But the author really demonstrates how we need to flip how we teach history from “knowing” a specified amount of data, to how we think historically/critically and give up “right vs wrong” to a more “why/how did you come to that conclusion. Then not only do students have a grasp of history, but also have thinking skills that will help them critically navigate the internet news stories/ads/agendas as adults.
August 22, 2022
Totally paradigm shifting and one of the most inspiring books about teaching and thinking that I’ve read in a long time.
February 6, 2023
This was a disappointing read. I got nothing from it.
July 13, 2024
Phenomenol, cutting edge insights and approaches, relevant, intellectual, wickedly useful strategies here.
July 28, 2022
This will have me looking at my lessons quite differently…Yet, with states continuing to shove the main goal of education to be to pass the standardized state tests, education will remain stagnant as it has for far longer than it ever should have.
June 23, 2019
This is a very important book for history teachers, but is also insightful for anyone who teaches anything--or anyone who reads anything on the internet, for that matter.
July 18, 2024
This book really got me thinking about my instructional practices as a history teacher. While some practices I use were validated, I also got ideas for new ways to approach my instruction.
December 11, 2024
I enjoyed this book. I will definitely carry the inspiration of it into my future classroom!
January 18, 2019
For starters, I thought that Wineburg's work was going to be more focused on the issues that schools are facing with students using technology in classes and how it's leading to a lack of student engagement with understanding the history of a nation. The first chapter opened up with a startling issue/controversy and was certainly on the right trek for what issues I presumed would be the ongoing topics of the book. In the middle of the book, I found myself slightly less engaged than the previous chapters (Chapter 4 and 5 are what come to mind). Chapter 6 was probably the most important chapter from this book for me and the one that I learned the most from considering its topic (Changing History...One Classroom At A Time). If the book were just about the information presented in the opening and the end, I would have gotten through it a little faster than I did, I think.
One aspect of Wineburg's writing style that caught me up at times was his conclusions and the way that they were worded. The end of Chapter 2 (or was it Chapter 3?) I remember spending quite some time breaking down and making sure I understood clearly what he was saying, and this was because of the multiple complex words that he was using. As I continue to reflect off of Wineburg's work, I recall thinking about a cloud of astuteness and privilege that Wineburg has throughout his experiences with working to create a curriculum that will be useful for teachers and influential for students to help them understand how historians do their work. The experiences that Wineburg shares are certainly useful in confirming that history teachers are not alone in their struggles with how to keep students engaged in the material of the past that has some impact on their lives. That being said, I found myself being belittled by Wineburg in various places (Ch. 7, for example). As a fairly new member of the education community (4 years of experience teaching US History), I know that my approaches and methods are not perfect, but if I were starting my teaching career now, I'm not sure that I would find Wineburg's advice helpful.
In all, I did enjoy Wineburg's work and would recommend it to others to read, educator or not.
One aspect of Wineburg's writing style that caught me up at times was his conclusions and the way that they were worded. The end of Chapter 2 (or was it Chapter 3?) I remember spending quite some time breaking down and making sure I understood clearly what he was saying, and this was because of the multiple complex words that he was using. As I continue to reflect off of Wineburg's work, I recall thinking about a cloud of astuteness and privilege that Wineburg has throughout his experiences with working to create a curriculum that will be useful for teachers and influential for students to help them understand how historians do their work. The experiences that Wineburg shares are certainly useful in confirming that history teachers are not alone in their struggles with how to keep students engaged in the material of the past that has some impact on their lives. That being said, I found myself being belittled by Wineburg in various places (Ch. 7, for example). As a fairly new member of the education community (4 years of experience teaching US History), I know that my approaches and methods are not perfect, but if I were starting my teaching career now, I'm not sure that I would find Wineburg's advice helpful.
In all, I did enjoy Wineburg's work and would recommend it to others to read, educator or not.
September 2, 2019
This was one of the most thought-provoking books on teaching history I have read. The premise is that students. through their phones, now have near-instant access to more information than the Library of Congress and the British Library combined. So why teach history?
His answer is that historical thinking is essential to success in the modern world, so memorization isn't necessary, but the ability to evaluate information is. My main criticism of this book is that it is a little disjointed. Each chapter has its own point and they don't always flow together as well as I'd like, but most of them are very good.
He starts by debunking the idea that American students today know less of history than earlier generations. He traces test scores over the last century and shows that they are consistently bad. Probably my favorite quote from the book is :"A sober look at a century of history testing provides no evidence for the 'gradual disintegration of cultural memory' or a 'growing historical ignorance.' The only thing growing is our amnesia of past ignorance.
Later in the book her delves into the changing priorities of American history, where civil rights leaders have become the most famous non-presidents, while earlier radicals who also had a large, or perhaps larger, impact are being phased out. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Harriet Beecher Stowe are examples.
The most important issue for me, and the one that got me most exciting, is the idea of 'lateral reading", which means to move from page to page to check the sources of information. Wineberg uses professional fact-checkers as examples and finds that they are MUCH better than historians at checking the accuracy of information. As someone with a history PhD, this was insulting, yet as far as I can tell, he made valid points. (Maybe if I were a fact-checker, I could find some holes in his argument.) I immediately starting thinking of how I could use this in my classes.
This is a great book. It was an easy read and it gave me a lot to think about and work on. What more can you ask?
His answer is that historical thinking is essential to success in the modern world, so memorization isn't necessary, but the ability to evaluate information is. My main criticism of this book is that it is a little disjointed. Each chapter has its own point and they don't always flow together as well as I'd like, but most of them are very good.
He starts by debunking the idea that American students today know less of history than earlier generations. He traces test scores over the last century and shows that they are consistently bad. Probably my favorite quote from the book is :"A sober look at a century of history testing provides no evidence for the 'gradual disintegration of cultural memory' or a 'growing historical ignorance.' The only thing growing is our amnesia of past ignorance.
Later in the book her delves into the changing priorities of American history, where civil rights leaders have become the most famous non-presidents, while earlier radicals who also had a large, or perhaps larger, impact are being phased out. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Harriet Beecher Stowe are examples.
The most important issue for me, and the one that got me most exciting, is the idea of 'lateral reading", which means to move from page to page to check the sources of information. Wineberg uses professional fact-checkers as examples and finds that they are MUCH better than historians at checking the accuracy of information. As someone with a history PhD, this was insulting, yet as far as I can tell, he made valid points. (Maybe if I were a fact-checker, I could find some holes in his argument.) I immediately starting thinking of how I could use this in my classes.
This is a great book. It was an easy read and it gave me a lot to think about and work on. What more can you ask?
November 6, 2019
Sam Wineburg’s thoughtful book tackles the topic of how easy access to “information” through the internet has not increased appreciation of and knowledge about history, but has often cheapened and diminished it.
He then explains the ways in which textbooks and especially websites of slanted content can fool even educated people into accepting their facts, and how a discriminating reader/researcher should navigate all this.
Knowledge is layered. Since the mind demands form and pattern which builds up slowly, repeated exposure to ideas is essential. Students of history must understand that learning history requires returning to a subject and probing deeper each time, asking questions as you do so.
It is also important to get the context for historical writings and thoughts of the past. Language used centuries ago may employ the same words of today, but may have meant something entirely different at the time.
New technology always creates a certain amount of intellectual chaos. Gutenberg’s printing press made publishing available to far more than the educated elite, but also led to variations in quality – something the educated elites despaired of. The rise of newspapers, radio and television gave more people access to information, but also meant an increase in incorrect information.
The rise of the internet has made history more accessible to people than ever before, but its democratic nature means that we, as readers must do what editors, publishers and subject experts did for us in the past: separate the reasoned from the shrilly partisan; the deeper story from the superficial.
Wineburg recommends that those seeking on-line historical information type “site:edu” into their browsers to limit searches to education sites.
Freedom of speech is critical. But the expansion of such freedom with regard to history comes with a cost: use discretion about what you read, research from and accept as fact.
He then explains the ways in which textbooks and especially websites of slanted content can fool even educated people into accepting their facts, and how a discriminating reader/researcher should navigate all this.
Knowledge is layered. Since the mind demands form and pattern which builds up slowly, repeated exposure to ideas is essential. Students of history must understand that learning history requires returning to a subject and probing deeper each time, asking questions as you do so.
It is also important to get the context for historical writings and thoughts of the past. Language used centuries ago may employ the same words of today, but may have meant something entirely different at the time.
New technology always creates a certain amount of intellectual chaos. Gutenberg’s printing press made publishing available to far more than the educated elite, but also led to variations in quality – something the educated elites despaired of. The rise of newspapers, radio and television gave more people access to information, but also meant an increase in incorrect information.
The rise of the internet has made history more accessible to people than ever before, but its democratic nature means that we, as readers must do what editors, publishers and subject experts did for us in the past: separate the reasoned from the shrilly partisan; the deeper story from the superficial.
Wineburg recommends that those seeking on-line historical information type “site:edu” into their browsers to limit searches to education sites.
Freedom of speech is critical. But the expansion of such freedom with regard to history comes with a cost: use discretion about what you read, research from and accept as fact.
November 28, 2019
Though I appreciate Wineburg's critique of how history is taught and suggestions for cultivating historical thinking, I'm disappointed that in multiple chapters on evaluating information there is not one mention of the DECADES of teaching & research by librarians on this topic. In one particularly excruciating passage, Wineburg has an exchange with Dan a "search anthropologists" at Google:
"Well, then, who's studying what goes right when we search?" [Wineburg]
Dan paused over his mocha and looked me squarely in the eye:
"Sam, I'm afraid it might be up to you."
I hate to break it to you Sam and Dan but you did not discover this nor are you the first to study how people search for information. There is an entire discipline dedicated to that called Library & Information Science
#LibrariansTheOriginalFactCheckers #InformationLiteracyLookItUp
"Well, then, who's studying what goes right when we search?" [Wineburg]
Dan paused over his mocha and looked me squarely in the eye:
"Sam, I'm afraid it might be up to you."
I hate to break it to you Sam and Dan but you did not discover this nor are you the first to study how people search for information. There is an entire discipline dedicated to that called Library & Information Science
#LibrariansTheOriginalFactCheckers #InformationLiteracyLookItUp
May 17, 2019
I was hoping for one thing but got another: a rant against Howard Zinn.
He argues against strawmen with such ahistorical ideas as "[Zinn] places Jim Crow and the Holocaust on the same footing, without explaining that as color barriers were being dismantled in the United States, bricks were being laid for the crematoria at Auschwitz." I'm sorry, but who exactly was dismantling Jim Crow? The whole US? That's nationalist myth. Obviously the point that history is not black/white or good/evil went over Wineburg's head. Many of this other take-downs are similarly misconstrued or cherry-picking.
Zinn's not above criticism, but 1. do it in a book about that, and 2. do a better job of it.
He argues against strawmen with such ahistorical ideas as "[Zinn] places Jim Crow and the Holocaust on the same footing, without explaining that as color barriers were being dismantled in the United States, bricks were being laid for the crematoria at Auschwitz." I'm sorry, but who exactly was dismantling Jim Crow? The whole US? That's nationalist myth. Obviously the point that history is not black/white or good/evil went over Wineburg's head. Many of this other take-downs are similarly misconstrued or cherry-picking.
Zinn's not above criticism, but 1. do it in a book about that, and 2. do a better job of it.
December 16, 2018
The author is famous for his much-needed takedown of the over-used Howard Zinn People’s History of the United States, which describes a simplistic Holden Caulfield-like “our-elders-are-all-hypocrites” attitude toward history and this book is worth reading for that section alone, which points out the many serious errors (especially of omission) in Zinn’s accounts of McCarthyism (Soviet archives later revealed that many of Zinn’s heroes really were spies), Allied bombings in World War II (Zinn distorts the timeframe to suggest both sides were wrong), but mostly Zinn is guilty of uncritically treating history like it’s an open-and-shut case. Yup, such-and-such happened and no need to dig any further.
But real historical inquiry requires us to ask why to everything. As he shows in an example of people examining an 1892 New York Times article declaring a holiday in honor of Columbus, good historians should start with “Okay, it’s 1892”. Instead of launching into a tirade against Columbus, ask about the circumstances that would have led people in 1892 to think Columbus was worthy of honor. That will bring more insights than simply regurgitating facts you learned outside the source material itself.
I think you can skip parts 3 and 4, unless you’re interested in the history behind how the author set up his current research project to improve education. The section “Why Google Can’t Save Us”, is a depressing account of how hard it is — even for experts — to tell truth from falsehood on the Internet.
The author dissects a George Washington speech to show how easy it is to read today’s values (about religion, for example) into a past that was much more complicated and nuanced than our lazy minds might hope. But similarly I wonder if the author himself realizes how much he is a product of his own time and whether some of his observations will seem quaint and outdated in the future. As he says:
Good words that apply to the present as well. Understanding history is hard because it teaches us understanding the present is hard too.
But real historical inquiry requires us to ask why to everything. As he shows in an example of people examining an 1892 New York Times article declaring a holiday in honor of Columbus, good historians should start with “Okay, it’s 1892”. Instead of launching into a tirade against Columbus, ask about the circumstances that would have led people in 1892 to think Columbus was worthy of honor. That will bring more insights than simply regurgitating facts you learned outside the source material itself.
I think you can skip parts 3 and 4, unless you’re interested in the history behind how the author set up his current research project to improve education. The section “Why Google Can’t Save Us”, is a depressing account of how hard it is — even for experts — to tell truth from falsehood on the Internet.
The author dissects a George Washington speech to show how easy it is to read today’s values (about religion, for example) into a past that was much more complicated and nuanced than our lazy minds might hope. But similarly I wonder if the author himself realizes how much he is a product of his own time and whether some of his observations will seem quaint and outdated in the future. As he says:
History humbles us when it acquaints us with our ignorance. Even the most esteemed historian cannot possess the knowledge needed to reconstitute the past in every era and region. Yet the awareness that we cannot take at face value words from other times and places inspires a sobering caution. At its best, this caution cultivates respect for others, who may have spoken the same language as we do but meant something entirely different in doing so. Words, too, are steeped in history. Shorn of knowledge, we become caged by the present and turn the past into a faded and inferior copy of the world we already know. Our ignorance gladly issues invitations to stereotypes to fill in the gaps. These impostors are more than happy to oblige.
Good words that apply to the present as well. Understanding history is hard because it teaches us understanding the present is hard too.
October 10, 2021
This book was on my list to read for a while and finally got a chance to read as homework in one of my classes. Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone) is an interesting book, which I didn’t expect it to be focusing more on the history education side of thing.
Now and then, a book comes along that makes you stop and fundamentally question some core assumptions about how a discipline is taught and learned. Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone) by Sam Wineburg is one of them. This book is not only for students but especially for history teachers out there and the policy-making power over history curricula to read. Everyone I know of doesn’t like history mostly because they are afraid of remembering dates and events. Well, the author, Wineburg shows a different way/method for teachers to effectively teach their students. If you think your students should read Zinn so they can understand what happened in the past? Wineburg will make you think twice. If you think that teaching students how to source historical texts will make them savvier internet consumers? Wineburg will force you to get more creative. Wineburg spent a portion of his book challenging history teachers. Wineburg’s inventive research and pioneering experiments help us understand that teaching history shouldn’t be a botu memorizing facts or raiding historic passages for multiple choice bit, but rather is an invaluable opportunity to practice critical thinking skills, curious inquiry, pattern marking and sense making, and the ability to “make knowledge” – urgent interdisciplinary skills that will help our students become better leadrs and shapers of future events.
Together with his industrious research team at the Stanford History Education Group, Wineburg has made his curriculum freely available, and has been downloaded more than 9 million times around the globe. Wineburg also gives a preview of his equally urgent effort to teach Civic Online Reasoning skills that help our students understand how to be digitally literate in an increasingly complex and misleading digital universe.
This book provides plenty of information to help teachers get their students to think and navigate the world around them. Not just the historical world either. By teaching history as a way of thinking and promoting the idea that an educated person is always seeking out better information to make informed decisions, we are giving our students actual life skills that they can use for the rest of their lives. I appreciate Mr. Wineburg's willingness to put his work out there and provide an organized framework for those in the trenches trying to support their students in the best way possible.
Now and then, a book comes along that makes you stop and fundamentally question some core assumptions about how a discipline is taught and learned. Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone) by Sam Wineburg is one of them. This book is not only for students but especially for history teachers out there and the policy-making power over history curricula to read. Everyone I know of doesn’t like history mostly because they are afraid of remembering dates and events. Well, the author, Wineburg shows a different way/method for teachers to effectively teach their students. If you think your students should read Zinn so they can understand what happened in the past? Wineburg will make you think twice. If you think that teaching students how to source historical texts will make them savvier internet consumers? Wineburg will force you to get more creative. Wineburg spent a portion of his book challenging history teachers. Wineburg’s inventive research and pioneering experiments help us understand that teaching history shouldn’t be a botu memorizing facts or raiding historic passages for multiple choice bit, but rather is an invaluable opportunity to practice critical thinking skills, curious inquiry, pattern marking and sense making, and the ability to “make knowledge” – urgent interdisciplinary skills that will help our students become better leadrs and shapers of future events.
Together with his industrious research team at the Stanford History Education Group, Wineburg has made his curriculum freely available, and has been downloaded more than 9 million times around the globe. Wineburg also gives a preview of his equally urgent effort to teach Civic Online Reasoning skills that help our students understand how to be digitally literate in an increasingly complex and misleading digital universe.
This book provides plenty of information to help teachers get their students to think and navigate the world around them. Not just the historical world either. By teaching history as a way of thinking and promoting the idea that an educated person is always seeking out better information to make informed decisions, we are giving our students actual life skills that they can use for the rest of their lives. I appreciate Mr. Wineburg's willingness to put his work out there and provide an organized framework for those in the trenches trying to support their students in the best way possible.
October 23, 2019
Wineburg starts out with "our current plight," about how a massive government grant designed to improve the teaching of US history was a complete flop, and how over-reliance on a particular textbook (Zinns) shaded kids' view not just of US history, but of the concept of history overall. Then he moves into why studying history doesn't fit into Bloom's Taxonomy as is, but works better if you invert it--"true historical inquiry begins--and ends--with a question mark." He explores how various people have interpreted, for example, a declaration from George Washington. Then he shows how context--what was going on when the document was written, what the writer was trying to do or influence at the time--is just as important as what the document actually says; perhaps even more so. Part three covers attempts to introduce better ways of teaching history into the classroom, which were successful but either labor-intensive or expensive or both. Then he explores "Why Google Can't Save Us" which all librarians know anyway--the proliferation of fake news, etc. In part four Wineberg looks at how people identify important figures in history, and how that has or hasn't changed over the years. The basic messages of the book are that teaching history is complex and people aren't learning how to piece together scraps of information and draw conclusions colored by context, textbooks shouldn't be used on their own, and, perhaps most importantly from the librarians' POV, when trying to assess information online, work laterally. Don't stay on the site you're trying to evaluate, but check it out on Wikipedia, find out who owns the site through WHOIS.com, check people out on social media, etc. Traditional historians' methods for assessing reliability fail on the internet. An interesting read, overall.
June 14, 2019
I plan to become an educator in the future, either a history teacher or professor of history or sociology. This book changed a lot of perspectives I had on education. I was a big believer to have history being fact recall, however, Wineburg changed my perspective on this with his examples and methods. One method, I like is the bin method. Where students will have one topic (let's say Rosa Parks) and spend time with primary sources and secondary sources to support an idea (let's say Rosa parks had personal issues with the bus driver causing her to not give up her seat or was it standing up for her rights). While, in this method, students will learn how to determine the credibility of one source. Interesting point Wineburg makes is that students don't know how to determine the credibility of sources at the undergrad and graduate level. One experiment, he did was seeing if professors and graduate students could in one click find the organization of the website. No one knew how to. Especially in the digital age, there is so much access to news and information, some that are fake. People need to learn how to historical think and determine the truth of a source. Things that should be taught in social studies instead of memorizing facts that are outdated, when today we can find this information in a couple clicks on our cell phone.
This book has changed the way I will teach history and utilize less lecture. This book is a must read and very interesting. This book is a page-turner. A book I will definitely re-read.
This book has changed the way I will teach history and utilize less lecture. This book is a must read and very interesting. This book is a page-turner. A book I will definitely re-read.
January 28, 2020
This book is about teaching more than technology, and is specifically about teaching history as opposed to teaching in general. I can't review the book from the point of view of a history teacher, but I am an engineering teacher passionate about pedagogy and I found the book thought-provoking and helpful at times. When it comes to discussing technology, it is narrowly about how students process online information, not about how technology is shaping education in general. In other words, this book is primarily about history education, not about your phone.
I find it ironic that the author describes in detail how every generation of history teachers wrongly sees a unique crisis in their generation's history teaching, and then he explores in detail his own generation's crisis. This helps me not to over react to his alarm, while recognizing that some alarm is probably appropriate.
I know from experience that digital natives are not particularly good at searching for and analyzing information from the Web. Teachers in all disciplines can take from this book a motivation to help their students in this area, along with some hints about how to do that.
As someone outside of the history field, I enjoyed an introduction to the controversy over Howard Zinn's famous history textbook and Wineburg's criticisms of it. However, there are probably better books than this one to dive into that subject, starting with Wineburg's other writings as well as those of his critics.
I find it ironic that the author describes in detail how every generation of history teachers wrongly sees a unique crisis in their generation's history teaching, and then he explores in detail his own generation's crisis. This helps me not to over react to his alarm, while recognizing that some alarm is probably appropriate.
I know from experience that digital natives are not particularly good at searching for and analyzing information from the Web. Teachers in all disciplines can take from this book a motivation to help their students in this area, along with some hints about how to do that.
As someone outside of the history field, I enjoyed an introduction to the controversy over Howard Zinn's famous history textbook and Wineburg's criticisms of it. However, there are probably better books than this one to dive into that subject, starting with Wineburg's other writings as well as those of his critics.
June 2, 2025
This book had some good ideas, but it didn't deliver what I expected. I came in wanting to understand "why learn history," and I have no further clarification after finishing the book. It felt more like a media literacy guide than a history book. The author spends most of his time discussing how to think critically about information online. That's fine, but it's not what the title promised.
The writer comes off as smug and self-congratulatory. He also has a weird obsession with trashing Howard Zinn throughout the book. The first half consists of him complaining about everyone—teachers, students, textbooks, and politicians. He does make a valid point that people have always been clueless about history (not just "kids today"), but it gets overshadowed by all the negativity.
As an educator, I was hoping for practical advice. Instead, I got a collection of stories about the author's classroom experiments. Some worked, some didn't. The chapters feel disconnected—you could read them in any order, making the whole book seem haphazard. The cheeky tone quickly wore thin. The best part was his argument for why we need to teach history differently. That discussion was genuinely useful and raised valid points about reforming history education. This book makes lofty promises but fails to deliver. If you're seeking practical teaching advice or a compelling case for why history matters, I'm not sure this is the book for you.
The writer comes off as smug and self-congratulatory. He also has a weird obsession with trashing Howard Zinn throughout the book. The first half consists of him complaining about everyone—teachers, students, textbooks, and politicians. He does make a valid point that people have always been clueless about history (not just "kids today"), but it gets overshadowed by all the negativity.
As an educator, I was hoping for practical advice. Instead, I got a collection of stories about the author's classroom experiments. Some worked, some didn't. The chapters feel disconnected—you could read them in any order, making the whole book seem haphazard. The cheeky tone quickly wore thin. The best part was his argument for why we need to teach history differently. That discussion was genuinely useful and raised valid points about reforming history education. This book makes lofty promises but fails to deliver. If you're seeking practical teaching advice or a compelling case for why history matters, I'm not sure this is the book for you.
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