National History Education Clearinghouse

Executive Producer and Senior Scholar, Sam Wineburg

Wineburg is a Professor at Stanford’s School of Education and Professor of History (by courtesy). He directs the Ph.D. program in History Education, the only program of its kind in North America. Wineburg’s interdisciplinary scholarship stands at the crossroads of three fields: history, cognitive science, and education, and has appeared in such diverse outlets as Cognitive Science, Journal of American History, Education Week, and the Los Angeles Times. Educated at Brown University and the University of California at Berkeley, he taught middle school and high school before completing a doctorate in Psychological Studies in Education at Stanford in 1990. He spent the next twelve years at the University of Washington, where he was professor, cognitive studies in education and adjunct professor of history. In 2002 he returned to Stanford, the same year his book, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past won the Frederic W. Ness Award from the Association of American Colleges and Universities. He has consulted with Teaching American History (TAH) programs across the nation, and in 2007 was voted a trustee of the National Council for History Education (NCHE).

Project Co-Director, Sharon M. Leon

Leon is Director of Public Projects at CHNM and Research Assistant Professor of History at George Mason University. Her research interests include the history of religion in the U.S., especially Roman Catholicism, gender history, and twentieth-century cultural history. She received her bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University and her doctorate in American Studies at the University of Minnesota in 2004. Her book on the U.S. Catholics opposition to the eugenics movement is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. Her research has appeared in Church History and the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, as well as book reviews in numerous journals. Leon regularly presents at the American Historical Association and American Studies Association meetings. At CHNM, she has worked on World History Matters, ECHO, and five TAH grants. She is associate director of World History Matters and currently directs Historical Thinking Matters, The Object of History: Behind the Scenes with the Curators of the National Museum of American History, The Bracero History Archive, and CHNM’s new exhibition software, Omeka.

Project Co-Director, Daisy Martin

Martin is a former high school history and civics teacher and currently a post-doctoral scholar working in History Education at Stanford University’s School of Education. She earned her Ph.D. in Curriculum and Teacher Education in History and Social Science Education in 2005 with a dissertation entitled “Teaching for Historical Thinking: Teacher Conceptions, Practices, and Constraints.” Currently she co-directs Historical Thinking Matters, serves as teaching consultant with professional development efforts organized by the Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project, and teaches history teacher-candidates. She has worked with elementary, middle, and high school teachers in TAH grants in California, Nebraska, Ohio, and Tennessee, and led professional development workshops funded by NEH, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and the Teachers for a New Era project at Stanford. Current projects include creating classroom ready resources for teaching historical problems and researching teacher practices and conceptions relevant to this kind of teaching. Her publications include articles in The History Teacher (forthcoming) and Educational Leadership.

Project Co-Director, Kelly Schrum

Schrum is the Director of Educational Projects at CHNM and an Associate Research Professor in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University. Schrum is co-director of the websites World History Sources and Women in World History, Making the History of 1989, and Children and Youth in World History and is associate director of History Matters. She is the Academic Program Director on four TAH grants in northern Virginia and Maryland. Schrum received her B.A. from UC Berkeley and her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Some Wore Bobby Sox: The Emergence of Teenage Girls’ Culture, 1920-1950. Other publications include U.S. History Matters: A Student Guide to U.S. History Online (2nd edition, forthcoming), and World History Matters: A Student Guide to World History Online (forthcoming) as well as articles on teenage girls and on teaching and new media. Schrum presents regularly at local, state, and national conferences including the AHA, OAH, Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, NCSS, and the annual TAH Project Directors’ meeting. She has worked extensively in the areas of twentieth-century American culture, new media, and teacher training.

Project Manager, Lee Ann Ghajar

Ghajar is a doctoral student in American history at George Mason University with research interests in nineteenth century southern industrial history and in the intersection of new media and historical presentation. At CHNM she has worked on Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution and managed web adaptation of a local oral history project. Formerly a public historian at the Women’s Memorial, Arlington National Cemetery, her conference presentations include “Women in a Man’s War: Who Writes History?” presented at Third National Conference, Teach Vietnam Teachers Network and “The Juxtaposition of Ambivalence and Need: Women Army Physicians, Post-World War II, ” before the Conference of Army Historians.

Project Manager, Teresa DeFlitch

DeFlitch has worked as Associate Director of Education at Bush-Holley Historic Site in Cos Cob, Connecticut. She joined Bush-Holley after completing her MA in American History at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, where she was awarded the Dobie-Kampel Fellowship and specialized in African-American history and race. She completed the Historic Deerfield Summer Fellowship in Early American History and Material Culture and, recently, was a Public Humanities fellow at the John Nicholas Brown Center for the Study of American Civilization at Brown University (JNBC). She has presented at several conferences, including Making History Public, a conference sponsored by the American Association of History and Computing, and Sharing Stories: Interpreting African American History for New England and the Nation, co-sponsored by the JNBC and the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Project Associate, Jane Heckley Kon

Kon received her doctorate in Curriculum and Teacher Education from Stanford University. She has worked as a social studies teacher, a teacher educator and a curriculum designer. Trained as a geographer, she has strong interests in the relationships between history and geography. She has co-authored numerous papers and articles on geography education and assessment, including “The Thud at the Classroom Door: Teachers’ Curriculum Decision-Making in Response to a New Textbook,” presented at the American Educational Research Association in 1994 and “Assessing Geographic Knowledge with Sketch Maps,” published in the Journal of Geography and selected in 1992 as the best article related to teaching in a college or university.

Historian, Alan Gevinson

Lead Web Designer, Laura Veprek

Veprek earned her MA in International Studies from the University of Washington. She is responsible for the design, organization, and standards-compliant coding of multiple websites focusing on the dissemination of historical content.

Webmaster, Ammon Shepherd

Shepherd is Webmaster and Technical Coordinator at CHNM. He holds a an M.A. in history from George Mason University, where he is currently enrolled in the doctoral program. His research interests focus on the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Germany.

Lead Programmer, Jon Lesser

Jon Lesser is a creative technologist with experience designing and building web applications. He maintains a web presence at JonLesser.net.