13 Quotes by Sam Wineburg

As historical texts become rich and conceptually dense, readers may slow down not because they fail to comprehend, but because the very act of comprehension demands that they stop to TALK with their texts. In plain English, they pretend to deliberate with others by talking to themselves.

Texts on a lifeless strings of facts, but the keys to unlocking the character of human beings, people with likes and dislikes, diocese and foibles, errors and convictions. Words have texture and shape, and it is their almost tactile quality that leads readers to sculpt images of the writers who use them. These images are then interrogated, mocked, congratulated, or dismissed, depending on the context of the reading and the disposition of the reader.

Texts are not "processed" as much as they are resurrected, and the image of reader and information processor or computer device, which often dominates current discussions of reading, seems less apt than another metaphor: the reader as necromancer.

The problem is not the content of textbooks, but the very idea of them.

The study of history should be a mind-altering encounter that leaves one forever unable to consider the social world without asking questions about where a claim comes from, who’s making it, and how time and place shape human behavior.

If history is to have relevance in the digital age, it must make us allergic to the point of nausea to claims attached to spurious evidence--even if issued from the highest offices in the land

(The historian) "was able to disapprove without being astonished. She could reject and still understand.

History teacher Bob Alston's "expertise late not in his sweeping knowledge of the topic but in his ability to pick after a tumble, to get a fix on what he does not know, and to generate a roadmap to guide his new learning. He was an expert at cultivating puzzlement it was Alston's ability to stand back from first impressions, to question his quick leaps of mind, to keep track of his questions that together pointed him in the direction of new learning.

The hardest work begins in dry dock.