One example of outstanding history teaching comes form the classroom
of Bob Bain, a public school teacher in Beechwood, Ohio. Historians, he
notes, are cursed with an abundance of data—the traces of the past threaten
to overwhelm them unless they find some way of separating what is important
from what is peripheral. The assumptions that historians hold about
significance shape how they write their histories, the data they select, and
the narrative they compose, as well as the larger schemes they bring to
organize and periodize the past. Often these assumptions about historical
significance remain unarticulated in the classroom. This contributes to students’
beliefs that their textbooks are the history rather than a history