NSES Content Standard G History and Nature of Science: History of science  Grades 5-8, page 171  Tracing the history of science can show how difficult it was for scientific innovators to break through the accepted ideas of their time to reach the conclusions that we currently take for granted.

 
Benchmark 10A Historical Perspectives: Displacing the Earth from the Center of the Universe
Grades 9-12, page 241
Writing in Italian rather than in Latin (the language of scholars at the time), Galileo presented arguments for and against the two main views of the universe in a way that favored the newer view. That brought the issue to the educated people of the time and created political, religious, and scientific controversy.

Science for All Americans Historical Perspectives:
Chapter 10, page 145
There are two principal reasons for including some knowledge of history among the recommendations. One reason is that generalizations about how the scientific enterprise operates would be empty without concrete examples. Consider, for example, the proposition that new ideas are limited by the context in which they are conceived; are often rejected by the scientific establishment; sometimes spring from unexpected findings; and usually grow slowly, through contributions from many different investigators. Without historical examples, these generalizations would be no more than slogans, however well they might be remembered. For this purpose, any number of episodes might have been selected.