Incorporation Of History Research Articles

Bringing Dance History to Life for Middle School Students

ABSTRACTEducating young dancers in history is invaluable to their development as artists and promotes college and career readiness. The world of dance is filled with many dance legends, and dance history comes alive when we create experiences in which students embody these legends. My incorporation of history into middle school dance classes includes many components such as exposing students to professional arts organizations, teaching artists, videos, artifacts, field trips, research, and then, most importantly, bringing these experiences together in a culminating experience and live presentation.

The future of the fossil record: Paleontology in the 21st century

In the past two decades, great progress in the biological sciences has come from the incorporation of history in understanding basic mechanisms in fields ranging from ecology and conservation biology to physiology and developmental biology. This conceptual expansion has been promoted in large part by theoretical, methodological, and empirical advances in two seemingly disparate fields. The first field is molecular biology, which opens powerful new windows on phylogenetic relationships, genome structure and function, and developmental mechanisms. The second field is paleontology, which affords a unique, direct, and expanding source of information into the anatomies, ecologies, physiologies, and spatial and temporal dynamics of past life. The fossil record is certainly rich in incident and rife with bizarre players, but an extensive body of research now treats the fossil record as a biological laboratory for rigorously framing and testing hypotheses at the intersection of paleontology with diverse disciplines across the full range of timescales encompassed by the earth and life sciences. This Special Feature collects some of the exciting and important new directions and insights, from the beginnings of life on Earth to the immediate precursor to the present-day biota (Fig. 1).

“I Come from a Black-Eyed Pea Background”: The Incorporation of History into Women's Discussions of Diet and Health

To promote healthy eating, it is important to understand how people conceptualize diet and factors shaping notions of particular foods and dietary patterns as healthy. We present data from eight focus groups exploring dietary issues among women aged 40–64. We analyze how women referenced their history and background in accounting for current diet. We highlight three emergent themes: (1) how we ate growing up; (2) what we eat where I come from; and (3) what my people see as healthy. We conclude that in these groups, nostalgic presentations of life-course experiences and personal identity were meaningful anchors for explaining current behaviors.

Extended Memory: Early Calculating Engines and Historical Computer Simulations

When framed within cognitive theory's extended mind hypothesis, Charles Babbage's 19th-century calculating machines illustrate a distinction between accuracy and flexibility. These properties affect how historical data and memory are organized, providing conceptual linkages for mind-machine integration. The distinction between accuracy and flexibility is also apparent in present-day computer simulations that use historical scenarios, such as virtual-reality software designed for the Bloody Sunday Inquiry, history-based video games and other art and entertainment software applications. These contemporary examples share one important feature of extended mind: the incorporation of history or personal memory into a shared memory system.

The Borders of Time, Place, and People in John Sayles's Lone Star

John Sayles's Lone Star (1996) is the embodiment of a “frontier” film; he himself has described it as “a story about borders” (West, “An Interview with John Sayles,” 14). The film's genre, its locale, its incorporation of history, ethnicity, generations, and sexual proscriptions, and even its use of pans to cut across time all cohere around this perspective. Nor, as I will indicate, is this concern with borders new to Sayles's art; Lone Star, which taps a number of motifs and conventions familiar to American culture, bringing together a multitude of meanings of boundaries and margins and frontiers, intensifies a theme that exists in every one of his films.