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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  • Using ‘Assessment for Learning' to help students assume responsibility

    Article

    Robin Conway's interest in student led enquiry derived from a concern to encourage his students to take much more responsibility for their own learning. Here he explains how his department gradually learned to entrust students with defining the enquiry questions and planning the kinds of teaching and learning activities to be...

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  • The Second World War

    Article

    On 5 September 1939 the German Führer, Adolf Hitler, paid a surprise visit to the corps which was in the forefront of his army's ferocious assault upon Poland. As they passed the remains of a smashed Polish artillery regiment, the corps commander, General Guderian, astonished Hitler by telling him that...

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  • Using visual sources to understand the arguments for women's suffrage

    Article

    Visual sources, Jane Card argues, are a powerful resource for historical learning but using them in the classroom requires careful thought and planning. Card here shares how she has used visual source material in order to teach her students about the women's suffrage movement. In particular, Card shows how a...

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  • Alexandra and Rasputin

    Article

    Has the role of Alexandra and Rasputin in the downfall of the Romanovs been exaggerated out of all proportion? If a country is defeated in war, the rulers run the risk of being overthrown. In 1918 the Kaiser left Germany for Holland, Germany became a Republic; the Austro-Hungarian Empire came...

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  • Triumphs Show 141: using family photos to bring the diversity of Jewish lives to life

    Article

    Headteachers, Hungarians and hats: using family photos to bring the diversity of Jewish lives to life It is 9.35am on a wet Tuesday. As the rain falls outside, fingers twitch in a Y ear 9 history classroom. The instruction is given and 28 pairs of hands spring into action, rifling...

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  • A question of attribution: working with ghetto photographs

    Article

    Holocaust imagery is very familiar, clichéd even. How can we get pupils thinking about it in novel ways and seeing differently? Phillips reports work completed with his PGCE students, proposes a scaffold of questions with which to deconstruct images and applies it to  archive images and to Hollywood representations. Images...

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  • Berlin and the Holocaust: a sense of place?

    Article

    As more and more schools take students on visits to locations associated with the history of the Holocaust, history teachers have to find ways to make these places historically meaningful for their students. David Waters shows here how he introduced his students to the multiple narratives associated with the history...

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  • Investigating students' prior understandings of the Holocaust

    Article

    Students make sense of new learning on the basis of their prior understandings: we cannot move our students' thinking on unless we understand what they already know. In this article, Edwards and O'Dowd report how they set out to scope a group of Y ear 8  students' prior learning and...

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  • Deepening post-16 students' historical engagement with the Holocaust

    Article

    Peter Morgan represents what is best about the reflective practitioner - an experienced teacher of some 15 years' standing, he continues to challenge himself and to seek ways to improve and develop his classroom practice. Deeply influenced by the pedagogy and resources that he encountered on the CPD of the Institute...

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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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  • Polychronicon 141: Adolf Eichmann

    Article

    Almost 60 years ago Adolf Eichmann went on trial for crimes committed against the Jews while he was in the service of the Nazi regime. His capture by the Israeli secret service and his abduction from Argentina triggered a number of journalistic books that portrayed him as a pathological monster...

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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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  • 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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  • Being historically rigorous with creativity

    Article

    After a Fellowship in Holocaust Education at the Imperial War Museum, Andy Lawrence decided that something was missing in normal approaches to teaching emotive and controversial issues such as genocide, a deficit demonstrated by recent research by the Holocaust Education Development Programme. As part of his fellowship, Lawrence created an...

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  • Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust

    Article

    Daniel Goldhagen defines anti-semitism as ‘negative beliefs and emotions about Jews qua Jews.' Nazis believed Jews to be the source of Germany's misfortunes, and that they must be denied German citizenship and removed from German society. Hitler never compromised on the need to settle what he regarded as the Jewish...

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  • 1914: The Coming of the First World War

    Article

    This pamphlet argues that the outbreak of the First World War represented not so much the culmination of a long process started by Bismarck and his successors, as the relatively sudden breakdown of a system that had in fact preserved the peace and contained the dangerous Eastern Question for over...

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  • Stalinism

    Article

    Stalin's remarkable career raises quite fundamental questions for anyone interested in history. Marxists, whose philosophy should cause them to downgrade the role of ‘great men' as an explanation of great events, have problems in fitting Stalin into the materialist interpretation of history: did not this man ride rough-shod over the...

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  • Developing multiperspectivity through cartoon analysis

    Article

    Studying cartoons can be an engaging experience for students but it can also present students with considerable difficulties. Cartoons are typically highly complex texts that are often very hard to interpret and students need to develop appropriate reading strategies to interpret cartoons effectively. In this article Ulrich Schnakenberg explores ways...

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  • The Russian Constitutional Monarchy, 1907-17

    Article

    The defeat of the revolution of 1905 afforded the absolutist Tsarist monarchy an opportunity to reform the administration and to seek a new basis of support in place of the declining gentry class. Historians have been divided ever since over the constitutional system's chances of success. Had Tsardom advanced far...

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  • The League of Nations

    Article

    It is common to see the failure of the League of Nations in its inability to stand up to the crises of the inter-war years.Peter Raffo shows that the League was flawed from the start. Never more than a voluntary association of sovereign states hoping to create ‘an atmosphere capable...

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