Wineburg, Sam

Sam Wineburg's work engages questions of identity and history in modern society: how today's youth use the past to construct individual and collective identities. Increasingly his work focuses on how young people learn about world through digital media; specifically, in the digital Wild West what do they decide to believe or reject? Over the last fifteen years his interests have spanned a wide terrain, from how adolescents and professional historians interpret primary sources to issues of teacher assessment and teacher community in the workplace. His book, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts, won the 2002 Frederic W. Ness Award from the Association of American Colleges and Universities for the book "that best illuminates the goals and practices of a contemporary liberal education." From 2007-2009 he was the Executive Director of the Department of Education's National Clearinghouse for History Education, a collaboration between George Mason University, Stanford, and the American Historical Association. With the late Roy N. Rosenzweig, he created the award-winning website, historicalthinkingmatters.org. He directs the Stanford History Education Group, a research and development outfit dedicated to improving history instruction in the US and abroad, whose materials have been downloaded over 3 million times since 2009. In 2013 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Sweden's Umeå University.