About Us

Who We Are

John Davenport

Craig Thurtell

HNN’s Teacher’s Edition is a one-stop free resource of historically-grounded lesson plans and reading materials on current events for busy elementary, middle, and high school teachers.

Our mission is to provide comprehensive packages of background material, readings, visual aids, and ready-to-use lesson plans to teachers and students. We believe that such comprehensiveness is essential to student success and lays the foundation for responsible citizenship.

Our volunteer team of teachers and researchers prepare news backgrounders on topics in the news, then create a suggested lesson plan that builds off of the material presented in the backgrounder.

Each backgrounder contains a summary of the topic, what both sides of the political aisle have to say about it, what the historical background is, suggests additional readings for both students and teachers, and collects interesting stories about the topic that would make an excellent addition to lectures and classroom discussion!

Each lesson plan is prepared by teachers with extensive classroom experience and encourages the development of higher thinking skills, and conform to Common Core Standards.

John Davenport

Bio

John Davenport holds a PhD from the University of Connecticut and is the author of several world histories and historical biographies. His most recent books include The French Revolution and D-Day and the Liberation of France. Davenport has been a middle school social studies teacher for 14 years, and currently teaches at Corte Madera School in Portola Valley, California. He lives in San Carlos, California, with his wife, Jennifer, and his sons, William and Andrew.

Anecdote

My love of history dates back to my boyhood. Besides being the son of a World War II veteran, who spoke often of his wartime experiences, I was an avid viewer of sword-and-sandals epics, cowboy shows, and war movies. In fact, I devoured anything on TV or in the theaters having to do with the past. As I matured, books became the staple of my history diet, especially books having to do with the rough and tumble of the American experience. But my heart still drifted back to those early formative moments sitting on the living room floor, in front of a small black-and-white TV, watching such shows as Daniel Boone, Gunsmoke, Combat, The Rat Patrol, and Twelve O’clock High that stimulated a consuming interest in the lives of those who had come before me. To this day, while reading across a wide range of history, I still keep a special bookshelf, devoted solely to books that carry me away to the frontier, the Old West, or the skies over Germany, a collection that allows me, for a brief time, to once again wear a coonskin cap or pilot a B-17. A boy and his historical imagination are not easily parted.

Craig Thurtell

Bio

Craig Thurtell taught U.S. history and a little English for over twenty-five years, mostly in several public high schools, retiring in June 2011 after sixteen years at Ardsley High School in New York.  He has also spent brief stints teaching at the college level.  He continues to be active in history education, especially in the movement to teach history as a discipline, and has his eyes open for a writing project.  He earned a B.A. in English from the University of Michigan, an M.A. in the Teaching of History from Teachers College, Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University.  He lives in Cornwall, New York with his wife Margo.  His daughter, Leila, lives in New York City.

Anecdote

From second grade, I have always loved to write.  But, for quite a while, history had nothing to do with it.  The history courses I took in high school were forgettable, and forgotten.  Literature moved me, and English literature seemed to be the appropriate pursuit for an aspiring writer.  By my junior year in college, I had decided to become a poet, and I devoted myself to that craft for the next two or three years, until my commitment eased into terminal decline.  So I hung out for a while (easy to do in Ann Arbor),then decided that I had to become more serious about politics (also easy to do in Ann Arbor).  Soon enough, I realized that I couldn’t act intelligently in politics unless I understood history.  It was the mid-seventies, the Cold War was still going strong, so I decided to read Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution.  It’s pretty much been all history all the time ever since.  Before long, it occurred to me that my new love of history and my longstanding love of writing could be joined:  I could become a historian.  I discovered eventually that I love teaching. I’m still trying to do both.