Historical thinking involves the ability to identify, analyze and evaluate the relationships among historical causes and effects, distinguishing between those that are long term and proximate. Historical thinking also involves the ability to distinguish between causation and correlation, and an awareness of contingency, the way that historical events result from a complex variety of factors that come together in unpredictable ways and often have unanticipated consequences.
Historical thinking involves the ability to identify, compare and evaluate multiple perspectives on a given historical event in order to draw conclusions about that event. It also involves the ability to describe, compare, and evaluate multiple historical developments within one society, one or more developments across or between different societies, and in various chronological and geographical contexts.
Also referenced as Continuity. Historical thinking involves the ability to recognize, analyze, and evaluate the dynamics of historical continuity and change over periods of time of varying length, as well as the ability to relate these patterns to larger historical processes or themes.
Historical thinking involves the ability to connect historical events and processes to specific circumstances in time and place, as well as broader regional, national or global processes.
Historical thinking involves the ability to describe, select, and evaluate evidence relevant about the past from diverse sources (including written documents, works of art, archaeological artifacts, oral traditions, and other primary sources) and draw conclusions about their relevance to different historical issues.
Historical thinking involves the ability to describe, analyze, and evaluate the different ways historians interpret the past. This includes understanding the various types of questions historians ask, as well as considering how the particular circumstances and contexts in which individual historians work and write shape their interpretations of past events and historical evidence.
Historical thinking involves the ability to create an argument and support it using relevant evidence.
Historical thinking involves the ability to develop understanding of the past by making meaningful and persuasive historical and/or cross disciplinary connections between a given historical issue and other historical contexts, periods, themes, or disciplines.