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...

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...

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...

The importance of fascism in 20th Century Europe is beyond question. But what was - or is - fascism?It is synonymous with authoritarian rule or the totalitarian state, or with both? In political terms, is fascism ‘right-wing' or ‘left-wing', revolutionary or reactionary? Why did it develop? Was it truly only...

32 Postkarten retells the story of a German-Jewish family from the outbreak of the Second World War to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. It is a story of the end of two love affairs, the one between Liesbeth and Walter, and the one between Germany and its Jews.  ...

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...

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....

"The key question is this - is the peaceful renovation of the country possible? Or is it possible only by internal revolution?"This quotation succintly expresses the problem that faced both contemporaries and subsequant generations of historians confronting the development of Russia between the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. The upheavals...

This classic pamphlet takes you through the Paris Peace Conference and the 'German Question', Peacemaking and the Treaty of Versailles, Europe and the German question after Versailles.

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...

Berlin is a microcosm of twentieth century European history; a city that still bears many of the signs and scars of its experiences and upheavals. It is a must for any history department teaching the Modern World, taking history out of the textbooks and breathing life into it. All pupils...

Much has been written during the last 50 years about the events leading up to and during the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. Less consideration has been given to the students who arrived in Britain as refugees. During the weeks following the Soviet intervention in Hungary around 25,000 people were killed...

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...

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...

Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. Much has been said and written about different learning styles in recent years. Some people have responded with evangelical enthusiasm, others exercise a more cautious approach, whilst a few disregard it completely. Certainly, there are...

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...

Rosalind Stirzaker has big ambitions for her students. She wants them to do more than make a simple list of the key causes of the Second World War. Yes, she wants them to complete a piece of written work, but she wants – and gets – a great deal more...

In the first of our special, extra ‘Europages’, funded by the Council of Europe (CoE), Mark McLaughlin briefly outlines the purpose and outcomes of a CoE project on ‘learning and teaching about the history of Europe in the twentieth century’. His short article reminds all history teachers of the need...

The new Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London has been very favourably received by the general public, and by teachers and their students. Initially controversial - was a war museum the ideal site for such an exhibition, for example? - it has since been widely praised for...

Clear themes run through the work of the history department at Huntington School. A remarkably consistent emphasis on language and literacy, including work on speaking and listening of many types, is a hallmark of this sequence of six Year 9 lessons on the Holocaust, described in detail by head of...