Organization description
Parallel Histories is an educational non-profit that looks to resource teachers with quality material that encourages critical thinking contested histories. By developing their critical thinking, oracy skills and self-confidence students are equipped with the skills to navigate conflicting narratives. Our resources cut through the rising tide of populism, helping young people to participate in healthy, civic and democratic society.
Project description
At Parallel Histories, students navigate sensitive topics by going back to
historical sources when investigating the causes of conflict. Our dual
narrative approach provides the starting point for investigation into the
historical controversy as each side tells it, first from one position and
then from the other. In the process, stereotypes are disrupted, and
preconceptions challenged. Students learn how to question historical
claims and identify the difference between proportionate and
disproportionate claims. The proven impact of this process is that young
people learn how to think without being told what to think. Their views
are informed by precise knowledge and greater sensitivity and tolerance
to views different from their own. Not only does our approach develop
the skills of the historian, but it also empowers engagement as active
citizens in a pluralistic democracy.
The issue of the international role of the US vs isolationism is literally on
the front page of media today with debates over wars in the Middle
East, and the role of tariffs and international trade. The mid-Atlantic
region of the US, both historically and in today’s modern globalized
world has been, and still is, often on the front-line of US international
relations diplomatically with Washington DC, militarily with bases such
as NATO HQ in Norfolk, and economically through major Atlantic ports.
Teachers across the mid-Atlantic form the core of Parallel Histories
team, and also form the core of our outreach networks, and teachers in
our region, and across the US are asking for resources to help their
students understand the conflicted modern history of the US as an
isolationist/protectionist power and as a global actor.
Parallel Histories US will produce an ebook “Isolationism or
Internationalism? America and the World 1898-1949” using the Library
of Congress collections identified, and distribute this widely across the
Mid-Atlantic region’s teachers, and beyond across the US, that will allow
students to grapple with primary source documents and analyze for
themselves the historical context of very current issues. This ebook’s
target audience is AP US History teachers and their students, for whom
these themes, and this time period, forms a center part of the AP US
History national curriculum.
