History Institute for Teachers

The Wachman Center’s History Institute for Teachers, co-chaired by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Walter A. McDougall and FPRI Senior Fellow David Eisenhower, aims to contribute to the more effective teaching of history and to the public discourse over America’s identity and its role in the world. Each year the History Institute for Teachers sponsors two or three weekend-long history institutes for high school teachers and junior college faculty. Teachers from all over the country have attended the weekends, including many leaders of statewide history and social studies councils.

Teaching the Teachers

As Prof. McDougall remarked in October 2006, opening the “Understanding China” program that marked the institutes’ tenth anniversary:

In the mid 1990s, many Americans perceived foreign affairs with a certain complacency, if they paid any attention at all. The end of the Cold War, victory in the first Gulf War, and globalization seemed to suggest that liberal democracy and the market economy were spreading across the world in a dialectical march toward what Francis Fukuyama called the end of history.

We at FPRI were skeptical that world crises were ending, so we never ceased to bring the best scholarship to bear on the challenges we thought likely to confront U.S. foreign policy in the 21st century. Even then, we also pursued its second, educational mission, to help American youth better understand the other cultures and nations with whom we all must coexist. The goal of these history institutes is to assemble the best scholars and secondary school teachers for an intensive, non-partisan discussion of important and controversial subjects. The institutes have over the years grown bigger and better, to the point where now we’re able to stage them not just in Philadelphia but around the country.

Resources from History Institutes

The October 2006 Institute was also the first to be webcast; participants logged on from around the world for the first webcast institute. The proceedings are reported to an even broader audience through Footnotes, an FPRI bulletin for educators that is faxed, e-mailed, and posted on this website; audio and video of presentations and classroom lessons/sample curricula are also webposted.

Upcoming

Past History Institutes

History Institutes have covered a variety of themes:

Participants


For more information, please e-mail fpri@fpri.org.