I wanted to give my Year 8 students ownership of their work on the British Empire by allowing them to suggest our ‘enquiry question'. In order to introduce the Empire, I brought in sugar, spices, bananas, chilli peppers and cotton. I then showed maps demonstrating the Empire at its height....

'No war is inevitable until it starts.' Good quote. Not mine, but A.J.P. Taylor's. The outbreak of the First World War is a good way to test it! Did the statesmen of the day know the First World War was coming? Put another way, why was there no general European...

This unit could still become a trawl through two World Wars and then the Cold War (if you don't run out of time). So, when reviewing your planning why not take advantage of being at the turn of a century? Ask pupils what will the twentieth century be remembered for?...

In this article, Dan Lyndon-Cohen makes the case that history departments should move from diversifying the curriculum to decolonising it. After reflecting on some examples of how he made the content of his lessons more representative, he explores how the influence of writers such as Michel-Rolph Trouillot and Emma Dabiri...

From a compartmentalised to a complicated past: developing transferable knowledge at A-level Students find it difficult to join up the different things they study into a complex account of the past. Examination specifications do not necessarily help with this because of the way in which history is divided up into...

This resource is free to everyone. For access to our library of high-quality secondary history materials along with free or discounted CPD and membership of a thriving community of history teachers and subject leaders, join the Historical Association today  For a long time, history curricula on the 20th century prioritised...

The Korean War has been called ‘The Forgotten War’. Yet it was profoundly significant to the development of the Cold War. It had a cataclysmic impact on both North and South Korea which continues to affect both nations’ development to this day. And it continues to influence relationships between the...

In this lecture Professor Mitter uses film and other propaganda works to explore how key events of global history are being represented in China to develop a different understanding of its own past. The talk addresses a number of the factors for this change in how China is reflecting on...

In this HA Virtual Branch talk Professor Richard Toye explores Churchill’s response to the USSR and how his actions during the early Cold War years intersected with his views of traditional Anglo-Russian tensions and the legacy of the ‘Great Game’. Richard Toye is Professor of Modern History at the University...

This film was taken at the HA Annual Conference 2019 in Chester and features the HA's President: Professor Tony Badger who presented Friday's keynote lecture.  Find out more about the HA Conference. In a country that prides itself on its egalitarianism and its democracy, it is perhaps surprising that family...

Why is the term 'Armenian Genocide' controversial, with many countries still not acknowledging a genocide at all? What do we know about the event of 1915 and the plight of the Armenian community in Turkey? How can we grapple with a history that many people want to forget? In this...

‘What exactly is parliament?' finding the place of substantive knowledge in history The relationship between knowledge and literacy is a central concern for all teachers. In his teaching, Palek noted that his students were struggling to understand complex substantive concepts such as ‘parliament' and decided to explore the relationship between students'...

New Deal is the name given to the policies of the American president Franklin D. Roosevelt during the 1930s. Elected in 1932, at a time of great economic depression, he sought to alleviate distress by using the inherent powers of government, and the New Deal era come to be seen...

The Boy in Striped Pyjamas - free resource to coincide with the upcoming feature film release of John Boyne's critically acclaimed novel THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PYJAMAS, Film Education and Miramax Films have produced a comprehensive online resource for schools. It provides an extensive range of materials, activities and...

Longsands Academy, a secondary school in Saint Neots, Cambridgeshire was awarded an HA Quality Mark Silver Award in 2016. The History Department at Longsands chose to build on this success by applying for a First World War Then and Now grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund to run a community...

Connecting the dots: helping Year 9 to debate the purposes of Holocaust and genocide education Why do we teach about the Holocaust and about other genocides? The Holocaust has been a compulsory part of the English National Curriculum since 1991; however, curriculum documents say little about why pupils should learn...

In this article, Andy Lawrence returns to arguments made in Teaching History 153 about the importance of teaching young people about other modern genocides in addition to the Holocaust. Building on those arguments with his own rationale, Lawrence also acknowledges the constraints on curriculum time that compel all departments to...

High school history teacher Brent Dyck is one of our Canadian readers. He has offered this item to The Historian as a contribution to our commitment to explore the historical approaches and values that we are seeking to convey to young people and the wider public. We hope that you may...

Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. When is a work of art a work of history? How can we get our students to appreciate the difference without ignoring the overlap? How should we ask our students to approach the historical film...

Here is a wonderful reminder of the richness of materials available to history teachers. With ever greater emphasis being placed on different learning styles, it is a good moment to remind ourselves that we can cater for virtually all of them in our classrooms. This includes a preference for learning...