Meeting the Historical Imperative: Resolving the “Levels” Problem in History Classrooms

This paper draws on data from history classrooms to explore the “levels” or scales problem. The “levels problem,” as Thomas Holt explained in his 1995 AHA presidential address, is the complex challenge all historians face in establishing the connections or “continuity between the behavioral explanations sited at the individual level of human experience and those at the level of society and social forces.” Holt identified this as the imperative to simultaneously capture the linkages between very large abstract structures or historical processes and those events, actions or behaviors at much smaller scales of time and space. Though Holt did not refer to history classrooms, teachers and students of history have long recognized the difficulties in building such connections across the micro and macro scales of time and space. Using research taken from both high school and university attempts to construct linkages across  temporal-spatial scales--such as the Big History Project and World History for Us All, this paper identifies some of the benefits and complications teachers and students face in meeting the levels problem. The results and implications should be of importance for secondary and university teachers of history as well as teacher educators and those interested in the tuning projects.