Psychological Specialties in Historical Contexts: Enriching the Classroom Experience for Teachers and Students

This edited collection presents the histories of various subdisciplines in psychology. Our intended audience includes teachers of psychology as well as scholars. Authors were asked to develop teaching materials for instructors who may be teaching outside of their own fields or for instructors who are content experts in their fields but may not (yet) know the histories of their fields. Authors therefore wrote illustrative rather than comprehensive histories, with accompanying vignettes intended for immediate classroom use. The chapters and vignettes are exciting, rich in texture, and loaded with details, examples, and events that are not typically contained in textbooks. For each of the 28 chapters in the volume, authors drafted short vignettes intended to be accessible for instructors looking for a concise and poignant story or teaching example to take into their classes. Authors typically selected vignettes to address (1) a relevant technological innovation (e.g., the development of implicit association tests), (2) a pioneering individual (e.g., Kurt Lewin), and (3) a cultural event that shaped the field (e.g., the murder of Kitty Genovese). The editors hope that a psychology instructor who is not a historian can open this work, find a chapter or vignette related to class topics, invest a short time to read, learn, and prepare, and then take a fresh new teaching example into class and into future classes