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.
书中的这些章节几乎成了案例研讨，因为其中包括持有不同观点的人们的说辞，甚至是持有对立观点的人们对同一问题的看法。不仅如此，这些章节还提供背景信息、注释，以及为学生设计的一系列问题。这些问题往往盘指事件核心，因为他们被精心挑选出来以促使学生从历史学家的角度去看待问题：明确说话人的角度、分析提出的观点、质疑事件之间的联系等。比如，某本教科书就外国盟友问题引用了华盛顿、杰斐逊和约翰·亚当斯的观点，并提问：“约翰·亚当斯认为美国独立战争后的国际形势将会如何？华盛顿对待法国盟军的态度如何？如何解释他的这一态度？”最后，还问道：“一个国家所采取的对待盟友的策略是否应当保持不变，还是应当随着形势的改变而变化？”在这些书中，历史已不再是历史学家们依序排列的公认史实了。
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.”
如同政治观点一样，不同的教科书所采用的教学法并非分成阵营分明、相互对立的两派，而是构成了一整个系列。政治上，从左倾到右倾；教学上，则从传统的布道式的事实罗列，到中间地带的叙述为主配合探索性提问以及探讨性文章为主配以叙述长文加以扩充，再到最严密的案例分析类教材。目前教材的共同之处在于社会科学的介入，这也是它们迥异于50年代的教材之处。在八年级的历史书中，“概念”一词构成了各类小学阶段社会学研究系列的基石。例如，哈考特·布茁斯·乔瓦诺维奇出版社在其1970年出版的教材系列的序言中自豪地说，该套历史教材运用“以概念为横向架构”，结合“以行为主题为纵向架构”的编写体系。