Who are our students, and what and how do they think about history? Analyzing what we do as teachers and why we do it might usefully begin with understanding what our students bring to the history classroom. What do our students imagine when they consider the American past, or the study of history more broadly? And how might we answer those questions as historians, applying to teaching the same sorts of analysis that we bring to our historical scholarship? This section offers three attempts to address those challenges.

In this installment

• Introduction, by Scott E. Casper
• “Famous Americans”: The Changing Pantheon of American Heroes, by Sam Wineburg and Chauncey Monte-Sano
• The History Learning Project: A Department “Decodes” Its Students, by Arlene Díaz, Joan Middendorf, David Pace, and Leah Shopkow
• A Place for Regions in the Modern U.S. Survey?, by David Wroebel