The chapters in these books amount to something like case studies, in that they include testimony from people with different perspectives or conflicting views on a single subject. In addition, the chapters provide background information, explanatory notes, and a series of questions for the students. The questions are the heart of the matter, for when they are carefully selected they force students to think much as historians think: to define the point of view of the speaker, analyze the ideas presented, question the relationship between events, and so on. One text, for example, quotes Washington, Jefferson, and John Adams on the question of foreign alliances and then asks, "What did John Adams assume that the international situation would be after the American Revolution? What did Washington's attitude towards the French Alliance seem to be? How do you account for his attitude?" Finally, it asks, "Should a nation adopt a policy towards alliances and cling to it consistently, or should it vary its policies towards other countries as circumstances change?” In these books, history is clearly not a list of agreed-upon facts which must be ordered by the historians.
書中的這些章節幾乎成了案例研討，因為其中包括持有不同觀點的人們的說辭，甚至是持有對立觀點的人們對同一問題的看法。不僅如此，這些章節還提供背景信息、注釋，以及為學生設計的一系列問題。這些問題往往盤指事件核心，因為他們被精心挑選出來以促使學生從歷史學家的角度去看待問題：明確說話人的角度、分析提出的觀點、質疑事件之間的聯系等。比如，某本教科書就外國盟友問題引用了華盛頓、杰斐遜和約翰·亞當斯的觀點，并提問：“約翰·亞當斯認為美國獨立戰爭后的國際形勢將會如何？華盛頓對待法國盟軍的態度如何？如何解釋他的這一態度？”最后，還問道：“一個國家所采取的對待盟友的策略是否應當保持不變，還是應當隨著形勢的改變而變化？”在這些書中，歷史已不再是歷史學家們依序排列的公認史實了。
In matters of pedagogy, as in matters of politics, there are not two sharply differentiated categories of books; rather, there is a spectrum. Politically, the books run from moderate left to moderate right; pedagogically, they run from the traditional history sermon, through a middle ground of narrative texts with inquiry-style questions and of inquiry texts with long stretches of narrative, to the most rigorous of case-study books. What is common to the current texts—and makes all of them different from those of the fifties— is their engagement with the social sciences. In eighth-grade histories, the "concepts" are the very foundation stones of various elementary-school social-studies series. The 1970 Harcourt Brace Jovanovich series, for example, boasts in its preface of "a horizontal base or ordering of conceptual schemes" to match its "vertical arm of behavioral themes.”
如同政治觀點一樣，不同的教科書所采用的教學法并非分成陣營分明、相互對立的兩派，而是構成了一整個系列。政治上，從左傾到右傾；教學上，則從傳統的布道式的事實羅列，到中間地帶的敘述為主配合探索性提問以及探討性文章為主配以敘述長文加以擴充，再到最嚴密的案例分析類教材。目前教材的共同之處在于社會科學的介入，這也是它們迥異于50年代的教材之處。在八年級的歷史書中，“概念”一詞構成了各類小學階段社會學研究系列的基石。例如，哈考特·布茁斯·喬瓦諾維奇出版社在其1970年出版的教材系列的序言中自豪地說，該套歷史教材運用“以概念為橫向架構”，結合“以行為主題為縱向架構”的編寫體系。
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