Peter N. Stearns

The challenges to student mental health are real. They are also decades in the making.

We can’t expect people in countries with different cultural and political norms to act and think like Americans.

For the past several decades, key disciplines in or around the humanities, including my own field of history, have been strongly influenced by what has been termed “the cultural turn” -- the belief that culture influences, indeed powerfully shapes, the human condition. In this pervasive view, key…

In confining the humanities to the role of guardian of sacred truths, the canonical approach places the actual subjects of the humanities at a disadvantage in an educational culture that otherwise stresses innovative training and new knowledge. The popularity of appeals to the canon has not…

Increased student interest in history programs -- majors have risen 50 per cent or more at several universities over the past five years -- and growing debate about what the goals of history teaching should be have prompted suggestions for improving the training of history teachers and for…

The dilemma is obvious: In most history texts and in all but the most experimental curricula, the past is divided into two parts, the history of the United States and the history of the rest of the world. The characteristic split between American-history and world-history courses in high school and…