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Abstract
Academically able history students (n = 10) from 2 high schools reflecting different ideological commitments and approaches to academic excellence were asked to think aloud as they read current newspaper articles on 2 topics: school prayer and Starbucks' treatment of its Guatemalan coffee workers. The purpose was to explore how adolescents use their knowledge of history when interpreting current affairs during an everyday activity of political and cultural life. Principal findings are: (a) Students expressed their thoughts with the aid of background narratives that contrasted how things were at some point "back then" and how things are now, (b) the 2 groups used different historical events and ideas to simultaneously enunciate their background narratives and contextualize each news-story case, and (c) students with different background narratives represented the facts of the same news story differently. Conclusions address cultural resources students exploited (common frameworks of historical eras and of core values, interpreted here as key orienting devices for political talk in the public sphere), and the challenge to earlier research portraying adolescents as "presentist."
