Europe 1901-present

While war seems to be a backdrop to events in Europe in this time period the articles collected here explore many of the wider impacts and elements to the war. Medicine and technology are explored alongside dramatic changes in social attitudes. The political events that disrupt and shape Europe of the 20th century are explored though a range of engaging articles that include Russia and the USSR, Fascism and European co-operation.

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  • Muslim Rescuers of the Holocaust CPD

    Multipage Article

    This CPD unit focuses on the experience of Muslim rescuers during the Holocaust and the Second World War. It was written by Andrew Wrenn, Cambridgeshire Humanities Advisor, to complement  another unit published earlier on this website called Muslim Tommies which dealt with the experience of Muslim soldiers fighting for Britain...

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  • Mussolini's marriage and a game in the playground: using analogy to help pupils understand the past

    Article

    Diana Laffin and Maggie Wilson want their pupils to connect with people in the past and to experience some of their emotions. The emotional factor is a difficult one in history, both for pupils and professional historians. When studying Eden’s actions at Suez, for example, what we lack is a...

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  • My journey to Bosnia: The Balkans Conflict 22 years on

    Multipage Article

    In these pages HA Education Manager Melanie Jones shares her own personal experiences and reflections from a recent educational visit to Bosnia, and looks at ways in which British schools might be able to explore aspects of the 1990s Balkans Conflict.  In September 2017 I was approached by a small charitable organisation Remembering...

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  • Narrating “Histories of Spain”

    Article

    International Journal of Historical Learning, Teaching and Research [IJHLTR], Volume 15, Number 1 – Autumn/Winter 2017 ISSN: 14472-9474 Abstract This study analyses the role of Spanish teacher training students as narrators of what they consider to be the history of Spain. Results of this empirical study are based on a random...

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  • Nazi perpetrators in Holocaust education

    Article

    The Holocaust is often framed, in textbooks and exam syllabi, from a perpetrator perspective as a narrative of Nazi policy. We are offered a different orientation here. Interrogating and understanding the Holocaust involves understanding why the people who perpetrated the Holocaust did the things that they did. As Wolf Kaiser...

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  • Nazism and Stalinism

    Article

    Is it legitimate to compare the Nazi and Stalinist regimes? There might seem little room for doubt. It is often taken as self-evident that the two regimes were variations of a common type. They are bracketed together in school and university courses, as well as text books, under labels such...

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  • Neville Chamberlain: Villain or Hero?

    Article

    Perhaps no other British figure of the twentieth century has been as vilified or as celebrated as Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister from 1937 to 1940. In 1999, a BBC Radio 4 poll of prominent historians, politicians and commentators rated Chamberlain as one of the worst Prime Ministers of...

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  • New approaches to teaching the History of Appeasement in the classroom

    Multipage Article

    This project has been created on the initiative of Professor Julie. V. Gottlieb, Dept. of History, University of Sheffield. British political history, political conflict, appeasement and the Munich Crisis (1938) itself is the focus of her research and publications. Rather than approach these topics from ‘traditional’, elite and history from...

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  • Nutshell 141 - HEDP

    Article

    Why has the Institute of Education in London set up their  ‘Holocaust Education Development Programme': isn't there already an awful lot of attention given to the Holocaust in schools? It is true that the Holocaust has become ‘probably the most talked about and oft-represented event of the twentieth century' and...

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  • On the frontlines of teaching the history of the First World War

    Article

    It is very common for people in politics and the media to make assumptions about what happens in history classrooms. Too often these preconceptions are based on little more than anecdote, examples from the Internet or memories of what someone experienced at school themselves. In this article, Catriona Pennell reports...

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  • Parallel catastrophes? Uniqueness, redemption and the Shoah

    Article

    Nicolas Kinloch’s 1998 review of Michael Burleigh’s Ethics and Extermination in Teaching History, 93, sparked a debate amongst our readers about the teaching of the Holocaust, concerning both rationales and practical approaches. Citing the damage caused to pupils’ understanding by a Spielberg view of history, he emphasised that the rationale...

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  • Podcast Series: Britain's Cold War

    Multipage Article

    In this set of podcasts our author Dr Helen Parr examines Britain's role in the Cold War. Katharine Hudson, General Secretary of CND, looks at the history of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in Britain.

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  • Podcast Series: German History 1918-1948

    Multipage Article

    An HA Podcasted History of Modern German History: 1918-1948 featuring: Sir Ian Kershaw, Professor Jill Stephenson of the University of Edinburgh, Dr Christina von Hodenberg of Queen Mary, University of London and Professor Benjamin Ziemann of the University of Sheffield.

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  • Podcast Series: Russia and the USSR

    Multipage Article

    An HA Podcasted History of Russia and the USSR featuring Dr Beryl Williams, Dr Jonathan Davis of Anglia Ruskin University, Dr Edwin Bacon of Birkbeck University of London and Professor Peter Waldron of the University of East Anglia.

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  • Podcast: Richard Evans Medlicott -The Origins of the First World War

    Article

    This year the Historical Association's Medlicott medal for services to history went to Professor Sir Richard Evans. Richard Evans is the Regius Professor of History at Cambridge and President of Wolfson College, Cambridge. He has written numerous highly respected and internationally best-selling books. Evans is bests known for his works on...

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  • Polychronicon 115: historians and the Holocaust

    Article

    Polychronicon was a fourteenth-century chronicle that brought together much of the knowledge of its own age. Our Polychronicon in Teaching History is a regular feature helping school history teachers to update their subject knowledge, with special emphasis on recent historiography and changing interpretation. This edition of 'Polychronicon' focuses on historians...

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  • Polychronicon 119: The Second World War and popular culture

    Article

    Polychronicon was a fourteenth-century chronicle that brought together much of the knowledge of its own age. Our Polychronicon in Teaching History is a regular feature helping school history teachers to update their subject knowledge, with special emphasis on recent historiography and changing interpretation. This edition of 'Polychronicon' investigates World War...

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  • Polychronicon 134: The Great War and Cultural History

    Article

    Over the past two decades the historiography of the Great War has witnessed something of a revolution. Although historical revisionism is, of course, nothing out of the ordinary, the speed with which long-held assumptions about the First World War and its impact have been swept away has been quite astonishing....

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  • Polychronicon 135: Post-modern Holocaust Historiography

    Article

    The field of Holocaust studies has been hit by an intellectual earthquake whose precise magnitude and long-term consequences cannot be ascertained at this stage. In 2007 Saul Friedländer published The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews 1939-1945. The book has been rightly celebrated as the first victim-centred synthetic history...

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  • Polychronicon 140: Why did the Cold War End?

    Article

    The end of the Cold War is a controversial subject. Contemporary analysts did not see it coming. Any explanation of its ending which seeks to build up a network of causation will therefore be forced to make arguments based on events whose significance was not  necessarily seen at the time....

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