Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts & Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone) - Sam Wineburg Audiobook

Written by Sam Wineburg
Read by Kevin Pierce, Mike Chamberlain
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps

Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past Critical Perspectives On The Past

Since ancient times, the pundits have lamented young people’s lack of historical knowledge and warned that ignorance of the past surely condemns humanity to repeating its mistakes. In the contemporary United States, this dire outlook drives a contentious debate about what key events, nations, and people are essential for history students. Sam Wineburg says that we are asking the wrong questions.

This audiobook demolishes the conventional notion that there is one true history and one best way to teach it. Although most of us think of history - and learn it - as a conglomeration of facts, dates, and key figures, for professional historians it is a way of knowing, a method for developing an understanding about the relationships of people and events in the past. A cognitive psychologist, Wineburg has been engaged in studying what is intrinsic to historical thinking, how it might be taught, and why most students still adhere to the ‘one damned thing after another’ concept of history.

Whether he is comparing how students and historians interpret documentary evidence or analyzing children’s drawings, Wineburg’s essays offer ‘rough maps of how ordinary people think about the past and use it to understand the present.’ Arguing that we all absorb lessons about history in many settings - in kitchen table conversations, at the movies, or on the world-wide web, for instance - these essays acknowledge the role of collective memory in filtering what we learn in school and shaping our historical thinking.

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Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone)

Let’s start with two truths about our era: 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: 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.