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Effective teaching, while supplemented by best practice methods and assessments, is rooted in accurate, age-appropriate, and engaging content. As a foundation for history content, elementary educators rely strongly on textbooks and children’s literature, both fiction and non-fiction. While many researchers have examined the historical accuracy of textbook content, few have rigorously scrutinized the historical accuracy of children’s literature. Those projects that carried out such examination were more descriptive than comprehensive due to significantly smaller data pools. I investigate how children’s non-fiction and fiction books depict and historicize a meaningful and frequently taught history topic: Christopher Columbus’s accomplishments and misdeeds. Results from a comprehensive content analysis indicate that children’s books are engaging curricular supplements with age-appropriate readability yet frequently misrepresent history in eight consequential ways. Demonstrating a substantive disconnect between experts’ understandings of Columbus, these discouraging findings are due to the ways in which authors of children’s books recurrently omit relevant and contentious historical content in order to construct interesting, personalized narratives.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the value of Goodreads reader ratings for measuring the wider impact of scholarly books published in the field of History.

Book titles were extracted from the reference lists of articles that appeared in 604 history journals indexed in Scopus (2007-2011). The titles were cleaned and matched with WorldCat.org (for publisher information) as well as Goodreads (for reader ratings) using an API. A set of 8,538 books was first filtered based on Dewey Decimal Classification class 900 “History and Geography”, then a subset of 997 books with the highest citations and reader ratings (i.e. top 25 per cent) was analysed separately based on additional characteristics.

A weak correlation (0.212) was found between citation counts and reader rating counts for the full data set (n=8,538). An additional correlation for the subset of 997 books indicated a similar weak correlation (0.190). Further correlations between citations, reader ratings, written reviews, and library holdings indicate that a reader rating on Goodreads was more likely to be given to a book held in an international library, including both public and academic libraries.

Research on altmetrics has focused almost exclusively on scientific journal articles appearing on social media services (e.g. Twitter, Facebook). In this paper we show the potential of Goodreads reader ratings to identify the impact of books beyond academia. As a unique altmetric data source, Goodreads can allow scholarly authors from the social sciences and humanities to measure the wider impact of their books.

In spite of required state curriculum objectives, American history textbooks often become the de facto curriculum defining history. Self-imposed censorship by textbook publishers defines how individuals, groups, and events are portrayed. A 2004 Thomas B. Fordham Institute report concluded that today’s history textbooks are bland with no voice or storyline and have been sanitized and filled with history rewritten to meet the demands of special interest groups. The report also concluded that while American history textbooks now contain more pages, they include less content. Paradoxically, when a well-crafted textbook is created, students may never have access to it. Efforts by special interest groups to censor such books are not uncommon. A case study of one author’s efforts to have her award-winning history textbook adopted for classroom use and the ensuing censorship efforts by special interest groups are described.

The following classified, annotated list of titles is intended to provide reference librarians with a current checklist of new reference books, and is designed to supplement the RSR review column, “Recent Reference Books,” by Frances Neel Cheney. “Reference Books in Print” includes all additional books received prior to the inclusion deadline established for this issue. Appearance in this column does not preclude a later review in RSR. Publishers are urged to send a copy of all new reference books directly to RSR as soon as published, for immediate listing in “Reference Books in Print.” Reference books with imprints older than two years will not be included (with the exception of current reprints or older books newly acquired for distribution by another publisher). The column shall also occasionally include library science or other library related publications of other than a reference character.

This study aims to determine the most similar set of recommendation books to the user selections in LibraryThing.

For this purpose, 30,000 tags related to History on the LibraryThing have been selected. Their tags and the tags of the related recommended books were extracted from three different recommendations sections on LibraryThing. Then, four similarity criteria of Jaccard coefficient, Cosine similarity, Dice coefficient and Pearson correlation coefficient were used to calculate the similarity between the tags. To determine the most similar recommended section, the best similarity criterion had to be determined first. So, a researcher-made questionnaire was provided to History experts.

The results showed that the Jaccard coefficient, with a frequency of 32.81, is the best similarity criterion from the point of view of History experts. Besides, the degree of similarity in LibraryThing recommendations section according to this criterion is equal to 0.256, in the section of books with similar library subjects and classifications is 0.163 and in the Member recommendations section is 0.152. Based on the findings of this study, the LibraryThing recommendations section has succeeded in introducing the most similar books to the selected book compared to the other two sections.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, itis for the first time, three sections of LibraryThing recommendations are compared by four different similarity criteria to show which sections would be more beneficial for the user browsing. The results showed that machine recommendations work better than humans.

WE note that Llandudno has appointed as librarian a lady whose principal qualifications appear to be that “during the war she served as a V.A.D. nurse at Llandudno and Bristol.” We have every admiration for the services rendered by the lady during the war. She may be a qualified nurse, but is she a qualified librarian? We make no further comment except to say that it is a pity that her nursing qualifications are given so much prominence and that her library abilities are secondary. Personally, we prefer a certificated librarian to a certificated nurse for a library, and vice versa for a hospital!

Middle level teachers, at times, link historical content with relevant English literature in interdisciplinary units. Elementary teachers periodically employ history-themed literature during reading time. Interconnections between language arts and history are formed with developmentally appropriate literature for students. Historical misrepresentations, however, proliferate in children’s literature and are concealed behind engaging narratives. Since literacy and historical thinking are essential skills, children’s literature should be balanced within, not banished from, the classroom. Using America’s peculiar institution of slavery as a reference point, this article examines children’s literature, identifies almost a dozen areas of historical misrepresentation, and proffers rich primary source material to balance the various misrepresentations. We provide teachers with reason for caution when including such literature; but also model how to locate, use, and, at times, abridge primary source material within an elementary or middle level classroom. Such curricular supplements provide balance to engaging but historically-blemished children’s literature and enable educators to attain the rigorous prescriptions of Common Core.

This study examines reviewing tendencies in CHOICE, Journal of American History, and American Historical Review in the early 1990s in order to compare their strengths and weaknesses. Among the factors assessed were the number of titles reviewed by each, the degree of overlap for 1,017 different titles that were reviewed in these journals, subject coverage in the field of American history, and timeliness. The study found that JAH reviewed 50 percent more titles than the other two journals in 1991 and had the best coverage for most subject categories in American history. AHR reviewed the fewest books in most categories and contained the least number of unique titles. Although numbers of titles reviewed in each category differed, percentage of coverage was similar within most categories in all three journals. However, several categories revealed some divergence in coverage. Reviews in CHOICE preceded reviews of the same titles in JAH and AHR by 9.3 months and 10.9 months, respectively.

The purpose of this paper is to review the recent book A New History of Management (NHM) and to discuss the strengths and limitations of the book versus traditional management history as practiced by Wren and Bedeian.

I analyze NHM by looking at the evidence presented in the book versus the historical record.

Although there are some strengths to NHM, the scholars often fail to address the larger historical evidence, which reduces the value of their work.

The value is to start a discussion of the nature of management history by discussing traditional versus postmodern history. Hopefully, the authors can commence with a dialogue to further historical research.

The British scholar S.C. Bradford first showed that the dispersion of periodical articles on a subject follows a predictable pattern. Based on his study of the literature of applied geology and lubrication, Bradford observed that: