In 1983 Stanislav Petrov’s decision to “corroborate” the information his computer was giving him may have averted nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. Petrov was the lieutenant colonel on duty at a Soviet command center responsible for monitoring Soviet early-warning satellites. When his computer told him the U.S. had just launched 5 intercontinental ballistic missiles that would make landfall in under 25 minutes, he had almost no time to react carefully….
The Nomadic Professor’s 2026 Media Literacy Challenge: Read Smarter Online! Twice a month throughout 2026, America’s 250th anniversary year, we’ll share one small skill to help you read better online—social media, YouTube, podcasts, newsletters, forums, magazines, journals, newspapers, and everything between. Challenge #1 is Lateral reading: learning about the source before read from the source.
If you’ve been to one of our in-person or online sessions on teaching history, you may have heard us talk about the value of knowing the past for understanding and making informed judgments about the present. While this prerequisite is not new, and our articulation of it is not original, it is a prerequisite that is worth emphasizing—and doing so often.
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.
