The Midwestern State University Department of History will host "Teaching History in the 21st Century," a conference for K-12 educators to acquire new teaching strategies. The conference will be Feb. 16-17 at the Cannedy Event Hall in the Wichita Falls Museum of Art at Midwestern State University (WFMA), 2 Eureka Circle.

Keynote speakers include Dr. Ron Tyler and Dr. Anne F. Hyde. Tyler is the retired director of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. He has also served as a professor of history and a director of the Texas State Historical Association and the Center for Studies in Texas History at the University of Texas at Austin, where he edited the Southwestern Historical Quarterly and The New Handbook of Texas.

Hyde is the author of the prizewinning book Empires, Nations, and Families: A New History of the North American West, 1800-1860. The book, which earned the 2011 Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, retells the story of the American West in the decades before the Civil War by focusing on the native empires, trappers, traders, bankers, and politicians who built a global fur trade.

The conference will also include six sessions with presentations by 18 historians. Discussion topics will include use of new technology in research and delivery of content, shaping curriculum at all levels, incorporating contemporary issues, applying historical thinking in the classroom, and more. Other speakers include historians from MSU Texas and many other area universities.