Emotions and appeasement

In April 2023, I attended an event at the University of Sheffield with my colleague, Katy Dixon, and a handful of our Year 10 historians. The event showcased the work of Professor Julie V. Gottlieb and playwright Nicola Baldwin who had written a play about the writer and critic of Appeasement, F.L. Lucas and his wife, Prudey. This dramatic work, The Nervous State, explored how people felt during 1938. At the same time, it recovered a woman’s voice from the past and that from another marginalised group, someone with mental illness, exploring their experiences in this era of accelerating international crisis.

Our students then engaged in immersive workshops, choosing from a journalling exercise inspired by Lucas’s chronicling, a document session comparing popular and intimate responses to the Munich Crisis, and a scene study from The Nervous State. The workshops provided insight into the processes and collaborations of an historian. As teachers, we were inspired to write an enquiry for Year 9 students that brought to the foreground three aspects of history: how historians use sources to construct interpretations, the process of knowledge exchange and the lens of the history of emotion...