Presenting U.S. history as contested interpretations of compelling problems, this text offers a clear set of principles and strategies, together with case studies and "Mystery Packets" of documentary materials from key periods in American history, that teachers can use with their students to promote and sustain problem-finding and problem-solving in history and social studies classrooms. Structured to encourage new attitudes toward history as hands-on inquiry, conflicting interpretation, a...

This volume reviews the background of mandated teacher performance assessment with an emphasis on policy, privatization, and professionalization. The authors discuss the potential impact of mandated teacher performance assessments on teacher education in the content areas of mathematics, English, and social studies. The perspectives and empirical research examined in this conceptual analysis illustrate the various ways in which the Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity (SCAL...

Offering a philosophy, methodology, and examples for history instruction that are active, imaginative, and provocative, this text presents a fully developed pedagogy based on problem-solving methods that promote reasoning and judgment and restore a sense of imagination and participation to classroom learning. It is designed to draw readers into the detective process that characterizes the work of professional historians and social scientists ─ sharing raw data, defining terms, building int...

**“If I could give each of you a graduation present, it would be this—the most inspiring book I've ever read."—Bill Gates (May, 2017)Selected by The New York Times Book Review as a Notable Book of the Year**The author of Rationality and Enlightenment Now offers a provocative and surprising history of violence.Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think we live in t...

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER Following Thomas Jefferson from the drafting of the Declaration of Independence to his retirement in Monticello, Joseph J. Ellis unravels the contradictions of the Jeffersonian character. He gives us the slaveholding libertarian who was capable of decrying mescegenation while maintaing an intimate relationship with his slave, Sally Hemmings; the enemy of government power who exercisdd it audaciously as president; the visionarty who remained curio...

Key Concepts for Understanding Curriculum is an invaluable guide for all involved in curriculum matters. Now fully updated, this revised and enlarged fourth edition provides not only a solid grounding in the subject but also covers the latest trends and issues affecting the field. Written in Marsh's clear and accessible style, the book details the strengths, weaknesses and controversies around major concepts in curriculum, includingcurriculum planning and d...

Born out of violence and the aspirations of its early settlers, the United States of America has become one of the world's most powerful nations. The book begins in colonial America as the first Europeans arrived, lured by the promise of financial profit, driven by religious piety and accompanied by diseases which would ravage the native populations. It explores the tensions inherent in a country built on slave labour in the name of liberty, one forced to assert its unity and reassess its ...

“A tour de force. . . . No one has ever written a book on the Declaration quite like this one.” —Gordon S. Wood, New York Review of BooksOur Declaration has already come to be regarded as a seminal work that reinterprets the promise of American democracy through our founding text. On the 250th anniversary of the Declaration and with over a decade of hindsight, renowned political philosopher Danielle Allen recontextualizes her revelatory book with ...

"Readers cannot but be provoked and stimulated by this splendidly iconoclastic and refreshing book."—Andrew Porter, New York Times Book ReviewThe Wealth and Poverty of Nations is David S. Landes's acclaimed, best-selling exploration of one of the most contentious and hotly debated questions of our time: Why do some nations achieve economic success while others remain mired in poverty? The answer, as Landes definitively illustrates, is a complex interplay of cultur...

How to Research is a clear and accessible guide to the business of doing a research project. It systematically takes the reader through from the planning to the writing up and finishing off.

In his bestselling The Moral Animal, Robert Wright applied the principles of evolutionary biology to the study of the human mind. Now Wright attempts something even more ambitious: explaining the direction of evolution and human history–and discerning where history will lead us next.In Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, Wright asserts that, ever since the primordial ooze, life has followed a basic pattern. Organisms and human societies alike have...

This second volume in "The Americans" trilogy deals with the crucial period of American history from the Revolution to the Civil War. Here we meet the people who shaped, and were shaped by, the American experience—the versatile New Englanders, the Transients and the Boosters. Winner of the Francis Parkman Prize.