Why Current Events Are the Secret to Making History Stick
I have yet to meet a student joins one of my classes excited about memorizing dates, battles, and the pronouncements of long-dead men. Some of my new students arrive skeptical. They are convinced that history class is going to be an exercise in exactly that. What they don’t expect is that within a few weeks, they’ll be connecting a medieval Islamic empire to headlines they scrolled past that morning. That’s the whole point.
Relevance Is Not a Compromise
After years of teaching history and geography, I’ve become convinced that current events are not a supplement to history education. Instead, they are the proof that it matters. Basic historical information is available to anyone with a smartphone. What isn’t so easy to find, and what takes real teaching to develop, is the ability to see the connections between what is happening right now and what happened decades or centuries ago. That’s where understanding lives. That’s where history stops being a subject and starts being a way of seeing the world.
So in my classes, we discuss current events almost every day. Not as a break from history, but as an extension of it.
What That Actually Looks Like
The connections are everywhere, once you know how to look for them. Here are a few that come up regularly in my courses:
The nationalism thread in European history never really ended. Students who study the forces that drove conflict and realignment across 19th century Europe quickly realize that those same forces, like the hunger for ethnic and cultural identity, the suspicion of outside influence, the tension between national sovereignty and larger political unions, didn’t disappear after two world wars. They went quiet for a while. Looking at where they’re resurfacing across Europe today makes the 19th century feel startlingly close.
The question of when America gets involved is one of the most durable in U.S. history. Students who study the reasoning behind American entry into World War I, and then World War II, start to notice a pattern. There is a recurring argument about when the rest of the world becomes America’s business, and what the cost of waiting looks like. That pattern didn’t stop in 1945. Recognizing it in more recent foreign policy decisions transforms it from a historical event into an ongoing national conversation students can actually participate in.
The story of Iran makes far more sense when students understand the long history of Persian identity, the reach of the Abbasid Caliphate, and the layers of outside interference that followed. The Iranian government’s worldview doesn’t emerge from nowhere. It emerges from a very specific and very long history. Students who know that history read today’s news differently.
The instability across the Sahel is one of the clearest examples of history’s long reach. The conflicts playing out in that region today are inseparable from decisions made by European powers 150 years ago. The borders drawn without regard for the people living within them, resources extracted, governance structures imposed and then abandoned all are part of the story of today’s headlines. When students understand colonialism not as a chapter in a textbook but as a set of consequences still unfolding, they understand something true and important about how the world works.
Why This Matters for Your Student
History taught this way does something that a timeline never can. It gives students a framework for understanding the present, not just the past. They stop asking why they have to study something that happened before they were born, because they can see that it didn’t really stop happening. It just changed shape.
That’s the goal. Not memorization. Not coverage. This sort of understanding is the kind that sticks because it connects to something real.
If this is the kind of history-meets-headlines thinking you want for your student, my Current Events classes on Outschool do this every single week.
Want to know more about how I structure my courses around big questions rather than chronological timelines? Read my post on why I teach history thematically. And if you’re curious about the sources I use to bring these connections to life, check out my list of the top five American history websites I rely on in my teaching.
