Historical and Pedagogical Issues in History: Insights from the Great Lakes History Conference

The Great Lakes History Conference has been running for over 40 years, and during that time it has been fortunate to have some of the world’s finest historians and lecturers illuminating many of history’s most intriguing, and in some cases intractable, problems. Beginning with John Hope Franklin on race, Sherman Alexie on the American Indian Movement, and Eric Foner on “Civil Wars in a Global Context”, the Great Lakes History Conference has demonstrated the capacity to examine a broad range of intriguing thematic subjects. This series continues to address current issues facing both the profession and broader humanity. The hope is that further historical explorations will aid in removing such obdurate occlusions to social cohesion.

This series, as the title states, speaks to matters facing the educational community, including not only the urgency of keeping up with recent scholarship, but indeed how to then transmit that knowledge to the varied communities it informs. Those communities include professional historians, educators, and the larger public. This unique series provides readers with the first opportunity to read essays that thematically probe a significant historical issue by systematically unpacking the thorny questions, concerns, and disputes associated with historiography, evidence, and analysis, as well the most recent pedagogical approaches to teaching the history of each theme. That is to say, how do we communicate scholarship in a way that speaks to the research on historical thinking in the K-16 learning community?