Social studies and language arts teachers can enliven and enrich history studies through personalization. This approach can empower children to see history itself as having a spirit as well as a body. Reading and writing activities should allow students to see history as the kind of study that opens the individual up to different visions. Children studying history should not have to memorize faceless events and nameless people; rather they should be permitted to personalize history by comparing others' lives to their own and seeing similarities and dissimilarities. Granting children the opportunity to see multiple perspectives could mean allowing them to analyze texts which are there for probing, to recount personal stories as part of history, and even to read picture books whose accessibility makes them good starters in social studies and language arts classrooms. Finally, children will begin to see that reality is often shaped by writers and by the interaction between reader and text. (Twenty-one references, including a selection of historical biographies and fiction appropriate for personalized instruction, are attached.) (KEH)