Early American historians provided the public and policy-makers with information about US history that provided both entertainment and policy suggestions. As American historians became more professionalised in the early twentieth century, they concentrated more on their own scholarly concerns and less on policy-relevant writings. In recent decades, however, there has been a gradual revival of interest among academic historians in policy-making. In the 1950s and 1960s American education history was revitalised from two different directions. Some scholars questioned the highly positive, in-house histories previously written by education professors. Later a group of “revisionist” education historians pointed to the failures of American public schools and the neglect of children living in poverty. During the creation of Head Start and the Elementary and Secondary Education programme in the mid-1960s, there was a lack of historically relevant education policy studies. Education historians now have joined other scholars in analysing these programmes as well as the recent billion-dollar initiative to improve American history teaching.