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This empirical quantitative research study aimed to test whether historical texts could activate empathic concern and perspective taking in a US History classroom with adolescent students.

Eighth-grade participants (n = 227) were randomly assigned to read either a historical narrative text or a collection of primary documents, then participants self-reported a range of emotions and wrote a paragraph that was assessed for historical perspective taking.

Results indicated that for students randomly assigned to read the narrative text, empathic concern or compassion, was associated with higher historical perspective taking, even after controlling for literacy ability.

All participants attended a single predominantly. White upper middle class middle school, and read either one narrative text or one collection of primary documents. Findings cannot be generalized to all students or all texts. The study design did not assess for a causal relationship of empathic concern and historical perspective taking.

This study demonstrates that empathic concern, when activated through a certain narrative text, can be associated with greater achievement on cognitive academic tasks such as writing a paragraph assessed for historical perspective taking. Furthermore, this study provides evidence that empathic concern should be a target emotion for students rather than a similar emotional experience as the person they are empathizing with.

Adolescents today appear to have lower levels of empathy than in the past. Empathy may be crucial for moral behavior. Research indicates that historical texts could potentially provide effective empathic interventions for adolescents. However, there are no published empirical quantitative research studies related to activating empathy for adolescents through literacy in a history classroom.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how and why teachers use historical fiction in their classroom (e.g. selection and instruction) through the lenses of their pedagogical content knowledge (Shulman, 1986) and pedagogical tools (Grossman et al., 1999).

The authors explored the following questions: In what ways do elementary school teachers, more specifically fifth grade teachers responsible for early US history as part of their social studies curriculum, use historical fiction in their classrooms? and What factors do elementary school teachers consider when they select historical fiction to use in their classrooms? In order to explore these questions, the authors interviewed eight fifth grade teachers. The authors describe the ways in which these teachers use historical fiction as part of their social studies instruction by employing collective case study (Stake, 1994).

This study has reified this notion that historical fiction is widely used by fifth grade teachers. The authors identified that these teachers are choosing texts that allow them to integrate their language arts and social studies instruction in effective and engaging ways. Many participants described choosing the texts purposefully to address social studies standards during their language arts time. Despite many of these teachers using prescribed curricula for language arts instruction and following state standards for social studies, the teachers in this study felt free to make curricular decisions related to integration. Most importantly, when given this freedom, they chose to integrate purposefully with quality texts.

The primary limitation of this research study is the small sample size (n=8). However among the eight teacher participants, there are two states are represented, varied teaching contexts (e.g. departmentalized, self-contained classrooms), and many years of classroom social studies teaching experience.

The Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts (CCSS) (Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association, 2010) have prompted teachers to present both informational text and literature in equal balance in upper elementary grades. Little research has been done in the last decade about the ways in which historical fiction addresses these standards.

Defined as perceiving the past via the lens of former peoples, historical empathy engenders rich cognitive and affective understandings. Drawing on Ricoeur's hermeneutics (1981, 2004), this paper departs from previous work on historical empathy by conceiving empathy as dialogically mediated by sociocultural and narrative perceptions.

This hermeneutic phenomenology explores eight adolescents' engagements with primary sources from the Second World War.

This study reveals the power of empathy to draw the students into the past and to investigate sources. Alternately, the students struggled with fanciful elaborations and overidentifications with historical figures.

Cultivating wise judgments begins with accepting the inherent link between students' historicity and historical empathy and then teaching students to wisely interpret.

This study broadens historical empathy's framework to include Ricoeur's hermeneutic philosophies of narrative and history.

Elementary classroom teachers can infuse social studies into the curriculum by integrating history, civics and English/language arts. Elementary teachers can bundle close reading, critical thinking and text-based writing within historical inquiries using accessible primary sources with engaging secondary sources.

This article reports the successes and struggles of one fourth-grade teacher's theory-into-practice interdisciplinary unit. The month-long, history-based inquiry integrated close readings of primary and secondary sources to scaffold and refine students' text-based writing about the oft-ignored interconnections between two Civil Rights icons who never met.

Findings included the import of historical inquiries within the elementary grades, students' abilities to scrutinize and extract meaning from dozens of sources and the value of revision for text-based writing, particularly its impact on the clarity, criticality and complexity of students' writing.

The inquiry's length, use of repeated readings, bulk of curricular resources and integration of revision are each comparably unique within the elementary social studies research literature.

Historical newspaper collections provide a wealth of information about the past. Although the digitization of these collections significantly improves their accessibility, a large portion of digitized historical newspaper collections, such as those of KBR, the Royal Library of Belgium, are not yet searchable at article-level. However, recent developments in AI-based research methods, such as document layout analysis, have the potential for further enriching the metadata to improve the searchability of these historical newspaper collections. This paper aims to discuss the aforementioned issue.

In this paper, the authors explore how existing computer vision and machine learning approaches can be used to improve access to digitized historical newspapers. To do this, the authors propose a workflow, using computer vision and machine learning approaches to (1) provide article-level access to digitized historical newspaper collections using document layout analysis, (2) extract specific types of articles (e.g. feuilletons – literary supplements from Le Peuple from 1938), (3) conduct image similarity analysis using (un)supervised classification methods and (4) perform named entity recognition (NER) to link the extracted information to open data.

The results show that the proposed workflow improves the accessibility and searchability of digitized historical newspapers, and also contributes to the building of corpora for digital humanities research. The AI-based methods enable automatic extraction of feuilletons, clustering of similar images and dynamic linking of related articles.

The proposed workflow enables automatic extraction of articles, including detection of a specific type of article, such as a feuilleton or literary supplement. This is particularly valuable for humanities researchers as it improves the searchability of these collections and enables corpora to be built around specific themes. Article-level access to, and improved searchability of, KBR's digitized newspapers are demonstrated through the online tool (https://tw06v072.ugent.be/kbr/).

State and national initiatives place an increased emphasis on both students’ exposure to diverse texts and teachers’ integration of English/language arts and history/social studies. The intent is for students to critically examine diverse accounts and perspectives of the same historical event or era. Critical examination can be accomplished through teachers’ purposeful juxtaposition of age-appropriate, engaging trade books and relevant informational texts, such as primary source materials. To guide interested elementary and middle level teachers, researchers can evaluate trade books for historical representation and suggest divergent or competing narratives that compel students to scrutinize diverse perspectives. Researchers can locate germane primary sources and modify them in ways that maintain their historicity. As students read, they scrutinize, contextualize, and corroborate sources, which enables them to actively construct historical understandings. We examined children’s literature centered on child labor. We juxtaposed trade books targeting elementary students with those intended for middle level students. While our findings revealed various forms of historical misrepresentation, child labor trade books appear far more historically representative than those centered on slavery.

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) invite students to engage in close reading of primary source texts from American history, but an overly rigid definition of close reading that excludes providing background knowledge threatens to undermine these efforts. This approach flies in the face of decades of research on successful reading comprehension strategies. It also rejects the extensive literature on discipline-based learning in history, which has routinely affirmed the importance of context for understanding primary source texts. Primary sources are typically drawn from a world different from that of the students in time or place, or both. Teachers should provide historical context to their students by giving them information about the time, location, and purpose for the creation of the source. They should also situate the source in a specific location—whether local, national, or international—and examine the source in relation to other events of the time. Context is not the enemy of close reading of primary sources; context is the very thing that makes close reading possible and meaningful.

Contemporary education initiatives require English language arts educators spend half their time on non-fiction and history and social studies teachers to include diverse sources. Beginning in the early grades within the aforementioned curricula, students are to scrutinize multiple texts of the same historical event, era, or figure. Whereas trade books are a logical curricular resource for English language arts and history and social studies curricula, the education mandates do not provide suggestions. Research indicates trade books are rife with historical misrepresentations, yet few empirical studies have been completed so more research is needed. Our research examined the historical representation of Eleanor Roosevelt within trade books for early and middle-grades students. Identified historical misrepresentations included minimized or omitted accounts of the societal contexts and social relationships that shaped Mrs. Roosevelt’s social conscience and civic involvement. Effective content spiraling, in which complexity and nuance increase with grade level, between early and middle-grades trade books did not appear. Pedagogical suggestions included ways to position students to identify the varying degrees of historical representation within different trade books and integrate supplementary primary sources to balance the historical gaps.

Despite the benefits of historical thinking pedagogy, many teachers continue to require students to read textbooks. Contained within textbook narratives are particular types of implied causation, asyndetic constructions, which may limit students’ abilities to fully comprehend certain textbook passages. This study examines how asyndetic constructions influence students’ comprehension of causal events. Twelve middle school readers were asked to read a US History textbook passage and answer questions related to the asyndetic construction. They also were asked to reason about their answers. Findings suggest that good middle school readers do not identify asyndetic constructions as problematic to their comprehension even though they often incorrectly answer questions related to these constructions. Findings also indicate that, when middle school readers recognize the asyndetic sentences as causally related, they often disregard and/or overlook the mental processes in the text that provide clues for explaining that relationship. Based on these findings, teachers need to recognize the complexity of textbook language and structure when assigning such readings, taking special care with poor readers who have fewer linguistic resources for making meaning of asyndetic constructions than good readers.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the creation and exploitation of a historical corpus in an attempt to contribute to the preservation and availability of cultural heritage documents.

At first, the digitization process and attempts to the availability and awareness of the books and manuscripts in a historical library in Greece are presented. Then, processing and exploitation, taking into account natural language processing techniques of the digitized corpus, are discussed.

In the course of the project, methods that take into account the state of the documents and the particularities of the Greek language were developed.

In its present state, the use of the corpus facilitates the work of theologians, historians, philologists, paleographers, etc. and in the same time, prevents the original documents from further damage.

The results of this undertaking can give useful insights as for the creation of corpora of cultural heritage documents and as for the methods for the processing and exploitation of the digitized documents which take into account the language in which the documents are written.