The History of The History Teacher

Editor’s note. At the invitation of the Society for History Education (SHE), publisher of The History Teacher, the AHA’s Council in 1985 voted to place two AHA representa­tives on the journal’s editorial board. In recognition of this “special relationship” with an affiliate of the Association, the Teaching Division of the AHA, in turn, invited a nonvoting observer from the Society to attend the Division’s semiannual meetings. The ar­rangement is intended to strengthen the ties between the two associations and improve history teaching by boosting the profession’s major teaching journal, The History Teacher. Professor Asher, the first president of SHE, was asked to write the following article for Perspectives on the history of the Society and its journal.

The History Teacher was born in 1967 at University of Notre Dame. It was the child of Professor Leon Bernard, who had been working for some time with high school teachers in the old US Office of Education NDEA Summer In­stitute programs. These programs brought together selected teachers from secondary schools with specialists in his­tory from college/university level for the purpose of improving classroom teach­ing and the training of better history teachers. The History Teacher was orig­inally designed to provide continued communication among participants of the summer institutes.

The journal’s clientele was made up mostly of teachers from the service area surrounding Notre Dame. The quarter­ly journal never attracted membership much beyond the original clientele. It survived through the very personal ef­forts of Professor Bernard until his health began to fail. In 1970, when I was serving as Director of the AHA History Education Project, headquartered at In­diana University, Bernard contacted me for the first time. I conveyed his propos­al to my board, but for reasons that are not here relevant, the HEP and the AHA were not then inclined to pursue the possibility of acquisition.

In 1972, after the HEP project office had moved to California State Universi­ty, Long Beach, where it was to remain until the end of its funding, Professor Bernard again contacted me about the possibility of moving the journal. By that time, he was The History Teacher, and the strain and financial burden of publishing it had become too great for him to continue to bear.

I had always felt that the profession needed a serious teaching journal; but by this time the History Education Proj­ect was funded principally to help com­plete several regional HEP team pro­grams begun before 1972. It could not underwrite a journal. So I consulted with historians who shared the desire to see THT become the profession’s teach­ing journal; we decided to gamble that we could use Leon Bernard’s founda­tion of hard work and build it into something more universal.

The principal supporters of this idea were Alan Brownsword, my former col­league at this university, then at the Office of Education; Tom Pressly, who had served with me on the old AHA Committee on History in the Schools; and Reggie Pearman, a former Olympic gold medal winner, also at United States Olympic Committee in those years. Oth­er colleagues lent money to pay off the journal’s loans and debts and to honor the inherited multi-year subscriptions. Reggie and Alan had sufficient faith in the enterprise to pull the necessary strings; they also invested their own money to make it work. Later, the Presi­dent of CSULB, Dr. Stephen Horn, an ardent student of history, offered sup­port to build a strong editorial corps for THT. This university support has never waned, and the journal long ago repaid its outside debts and became a stable enterprise.

Since The History Teacher had come to CSULB seriously in debt, and because the state was unable to assume the fi­nancial responsibility for this indebted­ness,  the three of us who brought the non-profit educational society—the So­ciety for History Education. I was the first president; the co-founders were my colleagues, Irving Ahlquist, who had trained many of the finest teachers and public school principals to come out of CSULB, and Fred Youngs, who became the first editor of the journal at CSULB. Even though the University has since provided a home and editorial under­ writing to the journal, the Society for History Education has continued as an independent corporation to this day.

As an organization, the Society for History Education was a horse after the cart: we had a journal, and now we began to ask what we should do with the organization from which that journal would, under normal circumstances, have been born. The journal required the Society, and we later began to ask what other raison d’etre existed for SHE. In many respects, the answer to this search is still evolving.

While we have spawned local work­ shops, Society meetings at the annual meetings of larger organizations, and sent out feelers to other organizations seeking professional/intellectual inter­ course, THT has remained our vehicle through which we pursue our major goal: the improvement of the teaching of history. The clientele for this service is different in many ways than that of some of our sister historical associations. Yet we feel that this need is as great within the membership of our sister societies as it is within our own.

Consequently, closer affiliation with the AHA allows us to bring this journal and this goal to the attention of a greater number of historians who may dis­cover that they can benefit from the journal’s existence and, at the same time, make it a better product. We also feel that formal sessions dealing with teaching history are as appropriate at the AHA as anywhere else. Indeed, when the AHA was in the early years of experimenting with teaching sessions and workshops at its annual  meetings, in 1974 at Chicago, we were called in by the then chair of the Council Committee on Teaching. William H. McNeill, to “wire the house” for the computerized history lab. We have had an off-and-on involvement with these programs ever since. We not only expect this to contin­ue, but we hope it will grow more con­sistent and more meaningful over time. Meanwhile, The History Teacher contin­ues as the Society’s most important product.

While The History Teacher was at Notre Dame, it contained mostly brief pieces along with a few of more traditional length. The brief pieces were what our editors used to call “how to survive in the classroom tomorrow tips.” While these were useful, we did not believe they should be in the journal. So, in 1975, we founded the Network News Ex­change, a newsletter to handle the kind of brief piece, teaching tip, announce­ment, et cetera, that had earlier been included in the journal. The History Teacher thus became a more formal journal, a true quarterly, carrying long­er articles on classroom methods, his­toriography curriculum, historical inter­pretation, and other classroom-related issues; also carrying critical reviews and review articles on media, texts, collec­tions of readings, historical gaming, and the materials of history teaching gener­ally.

THT’s editors have also sought to bring new authors to the public, and in that respect, they have done much more “editing” than one comes to expect from a journal staff. They have encouraged authors who have the grains of an idea to develop these into articles, rather than to turn articles down out-of-hand. In doing so, THT tries to encourage new authors, especially from the high schools and community colleges, to sub­mit materials for publication. The History Teacher has, therefore, undergone a de­liberate evolution into a formal quarter­ly dealing more and more with  ideas and materials that relate to the teaching of the discipline.

Until recently, The History Teacher at­tempted also to review relevant mono­graphs; it did not confine its reviews to texts, readers, and media. In the cur­rent agreement with the AHA, it is now the declared intention of the editors to group monograph reviews thematically in the journal and to examine materials from the perspective of how they can be used to improve teaching; also to con­centrate more on texts, classroom read­ers, media, and materials that affect how history is taught and learned, both in the form of formal reviews and in re­view articles, where THT hopes to achieve a high degree of excellence in comparative text analysis.

All deliberate planning for the jour­nal notwithstanding, The History Teacher had also undergone a gradual un­planned evolution in the nature of its content. Some of these lines of change developed very early, with the solicita­tion by the editors of significant articles from scholars active in the AHA, the OAH, and other older professional his­torical societies, including acquisition of the right to print or reprint some of their presidential addresses. This proc­ess led to carrying articles of greater substance and to an even more serious commitment to deal regularly with good historiography.

Within the past year, the journal has also made a serious commitment to treat world history in all its dimensions and to involve a much wider variety of scholars in providing the journal with editorial advice through its planning boards which began to evolve in the late 1970s.

Not all the changes, however, in the operation of the Society have been with­ in the journal or the NNE. From its inception, SHE attempted to organize the profession as a forum to carry out an examination of the issues affecting teaching and to improve what happens in the classroom, both in the process of training teachers and teaching young students. In pursuit of these goals, sev­eral attempts to form links with other professional organizations (and more than a few rebuffs) have been made. However, in the past two years we have been able to associate at various levels with other professional groups involved in the same endeavors. The recent ar­rangement with the American Histori­cal Association represents only the firm­est and most promising of these. We have also established less formal con­tacts and carried out some joint endeavors with the OAH and several regional organizations, including some interna­tional groups. Through the  formation of the National Editorial Advisory Board in the late 1970s, we were able to establish working arrangements with historians in Europe, Canada, Australia, and with regional associations in the United States.

Beginning with the early sponsorship of local workshops for teachers, SHE later decided to plan annual meetings to take place at those of the AHA—where we hope to run a few formal sessions in 1986. So if it serves the needs of both organizations, SHE would like to contin­ue to assume a greater responsibility in helping those who seek to improve teaching through similar meetings sponsored by either SHE or the host organization, whether the Organization of American Historians, or at other es­tablished professional meetings.

SHE recognizes, above all, that pro­fessional historical associations have an obligation to serve the secondary and community college teachers. The Socie­ty intends to aggressively seek input and suggestions from these teachers-as au­thors, in the form of suggestions for organizational activities, or for the pos­sible creation of other nonserial publica­tions, reviews, and studies. We feel that the current organizational affiliation will allow SHE and AHA to communi­cate more fully and more productively with those members of our profession who have until now not felt entirely well-served by one or both of us. We invite those who are either interested in or perhaps still skeptical about this to approach us directly or through the AHA and test this resolve. Write The Society For History Education; The His­tory Teacher; California State University, Long Beach; Long Beach, CA 90840.