We're Teaching History Wrong

For decades now, Sam Wineburg, a professor of education and history at Stanford, has been studying the way history is taught. His new book, Why Learn History (When It's Already on Your Phone?), is about the way historical thinking--habits of mind that emphasize the careful assessment of evidence and the presumption of uncertainty, among other things--can help us navigate the information-rich environment of the web. The book, which zips along in a chatty, essayistic mode, details the work Wineburg and his colleagues have done to see how different groups of people--students, professional historians, scientists, and fact-checkers for magazines--process information in online and analog environments. In one entertaining chapter, which we've excerpted on Slate, Wineburg dissects Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, showing how the beloved book, so often taken as "the real truth" by people turned on to history when they read it, privileges a compelling narrative over the interrogation of evidence. Good historical thinking is by no means a magical solution to our information woes, as demonstrated by Wineburg's reports of what trained historians do while trying to navigate the web to find information about nonhistorical topics.