In her article “Adolescents’ Perspectives on Racial Diversity in U.S. History: Case Studies from an Urban Classroom,” Terrie Epstein looks at how different racial groups are incorporated into historical narratives about the American past. She describes interpretations that address the “great paradox” where both democratic ideals and gross inequalities coexist, and asks, how do students make sense of this story? How, she asked in this study, do student views about race shape the way they understand the historical experiences of racial groups?

Epstein, a professor in the School of Education at Hunter College in New York, analyzed the end-of-year historical narratives of ten 11th graders—five African Americans and five European Americans. She was interested specifically in students’ explanations of three components: racial groups’ experiences, the government role in shaping these experiences, and the existence of a common national history or identity.

She asked each of the students to select the 20 most important historical actors and events from a set of 51 captioned picture cards and explain their choices. What Epstein found was that adolescents’ own racialized identities significantly influenced how they understood history. White students and African American students generally understood the historical experiences of racial groups through distinct historical narratives—one of expanding freedoms, and the other of ongoing racial inequality.

Epstein found that white students generally told positive stories about a nation shaped by those of European descent—a nation that from its inception represented the principles of individual rights and democratic rule. When explaining events directly related to African Americans, Indians, and women, students recognized that these group’s members lacked fundamental rights. Nevertheless, each student constructed a national history and identity in which all Americans shared birthrights to democratic rights and protections and these rights had expanded over time.

African American students tended to create stories of American history characterized not by expanding freedoms, but by relations of racial domination and subordination. African Americans were at the center of their stories, fighting for freedom and equality; white historical figures, on the other hand, were significant as oppressors or as allies in that struggle. Overall, these students constructed a distinct historical narrative in which democratic principles and practices only applied to whites and racial oppression marked the experiences of African Americans, Indians, and Japanese Americans.

How might history teachers begin to think about synthesizing the seemingly contradictory historical themes of expanding democracy and ongoing racial inequality? Epstein suggests that history teachers help students understand that particular forms of democracy and racial inequality existed in every historical period. She concludes that discussions of the indivisible legacies of democracy and racial hierarchy might enable young people to construct narratives in which the racialized extensions and exclusions of democracy marked all Americans’ experiences and perspectives.

Keith Barton of Indiana University and Linda Levstik of the University of Kentucky wanted to understand the "official" story of American history so often presented in classrooms and textbooks. What happens to aspects of history that don’t fit the way we usually teach U.S. history? And how do students respond?

Barton and Levstik interviewed 48 children, grades 5–8, to see how middle-schoolers understand the significance of particular events. Students were asked to choose from a number of historical events in order to determine which eight to include on a timeline of the last 500 years.

Many students alighted on a central theme in U.S. history: steadily expanding rights and opportunities. While stories like this help structure students' thinking about American history, traditional themes (such as perpetual progress or expanding freedoms) left them ill-equipped to deal with issues like racial inequality or political dissent.

This study suggests that middle-grade students may need help grasping the complexities of the past or finding a place for stories that don’t fit common narratives. The authors proposed that teachers expose students to more complex and diverse perspectives by identifying what such narratives leave out. How has progress not been achieved? Where have freedoms not been expanded? What are the exceptions, the outliers, the cases that don’t fit? The researchers believe that students can learn traditional thematic narratives, while at the same time exploring the richness and complexity of history.

When Barton and Levstik interviewed the students, they found a core group of themes emerged from the events students chose as the most significant. Stories of national origin, American exceptionality, expanding freedoms, and technological progress consistently appeared among the students' choices. Such themes represented an "official version" of American history that all students seemed to recognize.

Some students viewed events as important despite the fact that their themes did not easily fit into the more popular narratives. Racism and sexism directly contradict themes of progress and expanding freedoms. Other events like the Great Depression and the Vietnam War fly in the face of American exceptionality. In both cases, however, students found it challenging to explain why they found these events significant. While students were convinced of the importance of such events, they struggled to reconcile them with common themes of U.S. history.

American history presents a wide variety of events and themes. Some, like our nation’s heritage regarding race, class, and gender, pose particular challenges. Accustomed to justifying the importance of events by referencing a few common themes, many students find themselves at a loss when confronted by events they know are important, but which don’t seem to fit the stories they are used to hearing. Lacking an overarching framework to help make sense of such events, they develop overly simplistic explanations to reconcile jarring events with the official story. As the sample application below shows, their explanations may put events together, but at the expense of historical accuracy.

In "A Sociocultural Perspective on Children’s Understanding of Historical Change: Comparative Findings From Northern Ireland and the United States," Keith Barton, a professor at Indiana University, looked at how children in different countries learn history, specifically the role played by narrative.

Barton observed that American students learn the "story" of American history, more often than not, as one of perpetual progress. In Northern Ireland, history is seen as relationships among social institutions over time, not a story about progress.

Barton wondered about the effects of such an approach. To that end he interviewed 121 students, ages 6–12, in four schools across Northern Ireland, asking how and why life had changed over time. Along with classroom observations and collecting data from history-related settings like museums, Barton’s interviews demonstrated how students in a non-American cultural context learn about history.

When he compared these to studies done in the United States, Barton found that American students portray historical change as straightforward, linear, and generally beneficial progress, while the Irish students saw history as either random and ambiguous, or cyclical. The American students studied tended to focus on accomplishments of historical figures, whereas students in Northern Ireland often discussed the role of societal and economic forces.

The "story" of history taught to American students frequently takes the form of a "quest-for-freedom" narrative in which life slowly but surely gets better for all Americans. This serves to unite a diverse society, such as is found in the U.S. By contrast, in Northern Ireland, where Protestants and Catholics remain divided, the narrative form creates the potential for opposing sides to take aim at each other. Consequently, in Northern Ireland, the primary emphasis in history is on societal relationships—relationships between different groups, as well as between people and institutions.

History classes in the United States also tend to focus more on the role of exceptional individuals in driving history forward. In this version of history prominent figures initiate a series of events which follow a causal chain to bring about significant change. For example, the American students learned that the civil rights movement was the product of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s genius rather than a broad range of social and institutional forces. In Northern Ireland, the students focused less on individuals and more on issues relating to social and economic structures. Barton suggests this may be because Americans are more comfortable dealing with individuals and their stories than with issues such as social class and prejudice. Conversely, there are few historical figures taught in Northern Ireland classrooms who don't represent a political position of one kind or another. Thus, while the Northern Irish are comfortable discussing social class, for instance, they have less experience examining the influence of particular individuals.

Barton's study showed that narratives about American history are frequently positive stories about the triumph of progress: as time passes, technology improves, freedoms expand, and life gets better. In Northern Ireland, stories about progress are much less common. Time goes on and life changes, but they do so in unpredictable ways. Barton argues that while a focus on progress may be positive, giving students a feeling of shared identity and inspiring their belief that Americans can learn from their mistakes, relying solely on such a narrative doesn't acquaint students with the effects of societal forces on individual actions or the diversity that exists at any given time in history.