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Introduction
Donald Schwartz
California State University, Long Beach
| OVER THE PAST FORTY YEARS, Gary Nash has been a major figure in the field of social history, with his writings on ethnicity, class, gender, and religion in American history. From his 1968 prize-winning Quakers and Politics: Pennsylvania, 1681–1726 to his most recent The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution, Gary's work has been widely recognized and praised by historians, by students of history, and by the general reading public. But there is another facet of Gary's work that is less well-known, but no less vital to the historical profession: his commitment to breaching the gulf between professional historians and history education at the K-12 levels. |
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While university-school partnerships have grown in recent years, such collaborations were rare or non-existent in the not too distant past. Long before the introduction of Teaching American History grants, Gary devoted much of his professional life to improving the teaching of history on the pre-collegiate level. Nearly twenty years ago, he helped launch the National Center for History in the Schools at UCLA, which he has directed since 1994. His effort on the 1994 National History Standards was accomplished in collaboration with classroom history teachers. Since then, Gary has worked closely with K-12 history teachers through venues such as the California/Social Science History projects and Teaching American History grants. Gary served as the lead historian on the ten K-8 books published by Houghton Mifflin to respond to the California History/Social Studies Framework, texts that were the only books approved by the state and became for a number of years the only books used in the schools with state money. Each summer, Gary leads teachers on a tour of his native Philadelphia, helping those educators to bring history alive to their students. |
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From such experiences, Gary has gained increased appreciation for those teaching history "in the trenches," regretting only that he did not try to connect the two communities of history teachers earlier in his career. Thus, it is as much for his pioneering work with public school history teachers as for his impressive record of scholarship that Gary Nash is honored in this edition of The History Teacher. |
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