Bob Davis examines official high school history teaching and related government policies from the 1940s to the mid-1990s, providing essential background for those concerned with how history will be taught in the 21st century. Davis traces the demise of the old historiographical narrative of progress, the rise of an essentially content-free "skills"-based approach to education, and the emergence of the new orthodoxy of post-modern theory, identifying the weaknesses of each and suggesting fruitful directions for future development of history teaching. Whatever Happened to High School History? is a passionate and insightful account of crisis and decline in a subject that used to be the pillar of the secondary curriculum. An Our Schools/Our Selves book.