Partners
The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, the History Education Group and Stanford University, the American Historical Association and the National History Center are recognized leaders in national efforts to improve history education.
Founded in 1994, the Center for History and New Media is the leading national digital history center, making active use of the Web for teaching and learning history through more than sixty digital history projects with more than $13 million in external funding. Its sites attract 10 million visitors and 300 million hits each year, including more than a million annual visitors to History Matters: The US Survey Course on the Web the most trafficked portal on the Web for high school and college U.S. history teachers. CHNM has been nationally recognized for its high-quality resources. Projects either produced or co-produced by CHNM have received the AHA’s James Harvey Robinson Prize three times for their “outstanding contribution to the teaching and learning of history.” Equally important, CHNM has substantively participated in six Teaching American History grants, serving as a managing partner in four grants.
The Stanford History Education Group was established in 2002 when Sam Wineburg, Professor of Cognitive Sciences in Education and Adjunct Professor of History at the University of Washington, moved to Stanford’s School of Education, the top rated education school in the nation. With Wineburg’s arrival, Stanford’s small doctoral concentration in Social Studies Education was reorganized, and reemerged with a focus on History Education, becoming the first program to prepare doctoral students as “history educators.” The program currently enrolls seven students at various stages toward their doctoral degree, and in 2007 its first graduate, Chauncey Monte-Sano, assumed the position of Assistant Professor of History/Social Studies Education at the University of Maryland. Since 2002, the History Education Group’s various projects have been supported by nearly $2 million in grants from the National Science Foundation, as well as various private foundations (Hewlett, Spencer, Carnegie Corporation,and Wallenberg, among others).
The American Historical Association (AHA) is the oldest and largest professional historical organization in the United States, bringing together nearly 5,000 institutions and more than 14,000 individual members, including college and university faculty, public historians, independent scholars, elementary and secondary school teachers, archivists, and librarians. The AHA maintains a network of 100 affiliated societies with a combined membership exceeding 80,000, and has served as the development source of numerous specialized organizations, including the National History Center. AHA’s participation grounds this project in the latest and best historical scholarship, and confers the prestige of that organization onto the entire initiative. The AHA has taken a leading role in shaping history education in the United States since 1898, when its Committee of Seven released an influential report called “The Study of History in Schools.”
The National History Center (NHC) promotes research, teaching, and learning in all fields of history. Created by the American Historical Association in 2002, the Center is a public trust dedicated to the study and teaching of history, as well as to the advancement of historical knowledge in government, business, and the public at large. The National History Center embraces all fields of history, encourages teaching and research, and fosters public understanding of national and international historical issues, and provides a place where historians from all over the world can meet and exchange ideas and to help historians reach broader audiences by providing the historical context necessary to understand today’s events. The Center sponsors public lectures, seminars workshops, conferences and publications; provides briefings to congress, and state and local policymakers; and provides journalists, diplomats, and members of the business and nonprofit communities with historical information essential to understanding the present in light of the past.