Struck by the misinformation that their pupils were bringing from social media to the history classroom, Phillips and Jackson-Buckley were keen to help their pupils identify the signs of good quality history. They decided to focus on developing their pupils’ understanding of how history works, specifically, how historians construct their accounts of the past. In this article the authors share three typical viewpoints: common ideas from their pupils on how history is made. They then offer four analogies of historians as different professionals, from painter to video-game designer. The descriptions of the analogies are interspersed with examples of how the authors have integrated the analogies into their schemes of learning to gradually develop the conceptions of their pupils around how history is made...