But the good news—at least for the teachers and parents in charge :)—is that when students are old enough to recognize this, they’re old enough to learn how to deal with it. That is, we don’t always have to be worried about which history books they’re reading, because eventually they’ll be old enough, mature enough, and sophisticated enough to learn how to make judgments by themselves. We can teach them all the tools we use to discern between the types of competing narratives on display in the list above—we can teach them how to identify detrimental biases, how to uncover unstated context, how to check fact claims for accuracy, how to make judgments about convincing and unconvincing evidence, how to comprehend and spot partisanship, how to evaluate chains of reasoning, how to strip claims down to their parts, how to spot and make sense of value judgments, how to think about point of view and story selection, how to get behind the surface of tone and emphasis, where to go for discussion and feedback, what tools and sources to rely on, and so on.

This is finally when students are really studying history: when they’re going back and forth between the facts and their interpretation, the facts and their interpretation, on and on ad infinitum. This is how professionals do history; these are the two parts of the best history courses: (1) They help students develop a broad knowledge base, and (2) they help students develop sound judgment.

In this way a good history class (quite apart from all of its other values, like personal enjoyment, the humanization of past peoples and groups, our own confrontation with alien contexts, etc.) can empower students to read with the same caution, skepticism, and discernment of the adults who care about them. In the best history classes students learn to appreciate the past in all of its complexity, learn to understand the contexts that inform the present, and learn to use the methods of the historian to resist and even see right through the people who try to use a particular spin on the past to get something in the present.

Perhaps one problem with some of the titles listed above is that they go too far toward simplifying a narrative that can’t easily be simplified, or they go too far toward making a cohesive narrative out of a disparate set of facts and contexts that don’t easily cohere. Further, this strong-arm approach does little to help young students understand or appreciate how history is done, and what to think when interpretations diverge.

So what kind of history does The Nomadic Professor do? We hope we do the kind of history described above, but we’ll leave you and yours to make that judgment.