Should history teach information or skills?

In college I had a history teacher who didn’t teach us history. Instead he gave us two texts—A Patriot’s History by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen, and A People’s History by Howard Zinn—and assigned us to read excerpts on overlapping time periods from both. That was our education in the “content” side of American history, or the “who, what, where, when, and how” of the story.

