The title of this blog is lifted from David Lowenthal’s book, The Past is a Foreign Country (1985). Lowenthal borrowed it from British novelist L. P. Hartley’s, The Go-Between (1953). “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there” is the novel’s opening sentence. As a former (now retired) history teacher, it was one of my favorite book titles. It reminded me to help students avoid reading the present back into the past, a mistake that historians call presentism.  It’s also a good book, although concerned with historic preservation rather than history teaching. For students to think historically, […]