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Planning a more diverse and coherent Year 7 curriculum
Teaching History article
In this article, Jacob Olivey describes his department’s efforts to both diversify their Key Stage 3 curriculum and secure greater curricular coherence. Building on a large body of research and practice, Olivey sought new forms of curricular coherence through the selection and sequencing of substantive content across the curriculum. He...
Planning a more diverse and coherent Year 7 curriculum
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'I feel if I say this in my essay it’s not going to be as strong’
Teaching History article
Jim Carroll was concerned that A-level textbooks failed to provide his students with a model of the multi-voicedness that characterises written history. In order to show his students that historians constantly engage in argument as they write, Carroll turned to academic scholarship for models of multi-voiced history. Carroll explains here...
'I feel if I say this in my essay it’s not going to be as strong’
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The New Imperialism
Classic Pamphlet
This Classic Pamphlet first published in 1970 comes with a new introduction written by the author M. E. Chamberlain.The New Imperialism - Introduction by M. E. Chamberlain Professor Emeritus at Swansea University. May 2010.When this pamphlet was first published imperialism was a hot political topic and battle raged between Marxist and...
The New Imperialism
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Film: Building Anglo-Saxon England
Article
Building Anglo-Saxon England demonstrates how recent excavations enable us to grasp for the first time the diversity of the Anglo-Saxon built environment. The book explores how the natural landscape was modified for human activity, and how settlements were laid out with geometrical precision by specialist surveyors. It also shows how...
Film: Building Anglo-Saxon England
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Developing Year 8 students' conceptual thinking about diversity in Victorian society
Teaching History article
Developing Year 8 students' conceptual thinking about diversity in Victorian society
Elizabeth Carr writes here about a new scheme of work she developed to teach students about diversity in Victorian society. When dealing with a concept such as diversity, it can be easy for students to slip into stereotypes based...
Developing Year 8 students' conceptual thinking about diversity in Victorian society
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Diversifying the curriculum: one department’s holistic approach
Teaching History article
In this article, Theo Woods shares the experience of one history department as they embarked on a substantial process of curriculum review and development. The department sought to address concerns that the range of history taught in their school, across the full seven years of students’ secondary experience, was too ‘traditional,...
Diversifying the curriculum: one department’s holistic approach
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Film: Rethinking the origins of the Cold War
Churchill's Great Game
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...
Film: Rethinking the origins of the Cold War
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Transatlantic slavery – shaping the question, lengthening the narrative, broadening the meaning
Teaching History article
Nathanael Davies explains his radical rethink of how to teach transatlantic slavery. He explains how he came to question his earlier approach of focusing on the causation of ‘abolition’ and ‘emancipation’ and, instead, allowed scholarship, sources and his own students’ meaning-making to guide him to a different, and much more...
Transatlantic slavery – shaping the question, lengthening the narrative, broadening the meaning
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Were industrial towns 'death-traps'? Year 9 learn to question generalisations and to challenge their preconceptions about the 'boring' 19th century
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Kimberley Anthony and her history colleagues were troubled by Year 9's assumption that World War II was the only interesting thing that they were going to do in Year 9. Nineteenth-century industrialisation, even their own...
Were industrial towns 'death-traps'? Year 9 learn to question generalisations and to challenge their preconceptions about the 'boring' 19th century
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Using visual sources to understand the arguments for women's suffrage
Teaching History 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...
Using visual sources to understand the arguments for women's suffrage
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Recorded Webinar: ‘Drawing the Line’: the 1947 Partition of India
Article
August 2022 marks 75 years since British India was divided at independence into two separate states: India and Pakistan (the latter including today’s Bangladesh). As with the 70th commemoration in 2017, this anniversary will trigger a great deal of collective remembering in Britain just as in South Asia itself.
Freedom from...
Recorded Webinar: ‘Drawing the Line’: the 1947 Partition of India
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Learning from a pandemic
Teaching History article
In order to contextualise and make sense of the Covid-19 pandemic, Verity Morgan worked with her school’s long-standing partner school in Ghana to devise an innovative project combining history and science, past and present. In this article, Morgan sets out the rationale for the project, her detailed adaptation of a British Council...
Learning from a pandemic
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Sudan Holy Mountain: Jebel Barkal and its Temples
Guide Book
This guide book was produced by Timothy Kendall and El-Hassan Ahmed Mohamed (Co-Directors NCAM Archaeological Mission at Jebel Barkal) and has been published on our website by their kind permission (© 2022 Timothy Kendall and El-Hassan Ahmed Mohamed) to support our podcast that examines the history of Ancient Nubia and the Kushite...
Sudan Holy Mountain: Jebel Barkal and its Temples
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1066 and all what?
Article
Over dinner on 14 October a friend challenged me: ‘You’re a history teacher. How come everyone knows about the Battle of Hastings? There must have been loads of battles. Why that one?’ The year 1066 had an iconic role in English historical thought long before Sellar and Yeatman immortalised it...
1066 and all what?
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Triumphs Show 155: beyond trivial judgements of 'bias'
Teaching History feature: celebrating and sharing success
Towards victory in that battle...
10A were nearly a term into their GCSE history course, working on an 1890-1918 British history ‘depth study'. They had already completed work on the Liberal welfare reforms and on the women's suffrage movement, and they had been practising a range of source evaluation approaches....
Triumphs Show 155: beyond trivial judgements of 'bias'
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Triumphs Show 167: Keeping the 1960s complicated
Teaching History feature: celebrating and sharing success
During her PGCE year, it became evident to Rachel Coleman just how much pupils struggled with the complicated nature of history. They were troubled in particular by the lack of definitive answers, by the range of perspectives that might be held at the time of a particular event or development...
Triumphs Show 167: Keeping the 1960s complicated
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Magna Carta Enquiry: free lesson sequence
Magna Carta Scheme of Work
The following sequence of lessons is designed to build on pupils' existing knowledge and understanding of the medieval period. In particular it is assumed that pupils will already have an outline knowledge of the main features of medieval kingship and how monarchs exercised their power.
In determining the focus for...
Magna Carta Enquiry: free lesson sequence
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The Indian Mutiny - Pamphlet
Classic Pamphlet
Harrison's booklet takes an evaluative look, at not just the effects of the Indian Mutiny on Indo-British history, but at the reporting of this event over the years. He begins with a look at the prejudices of British writers and British historians' attitude towards the mutiny, highlighting the flawed confidence western...
The Indian Mutiny - Pamphlet
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Polychronicon 118: interpretations of Henry VII
Teaching History feature
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' explores the historical...
Polychronicon 118: interpretations of Henry VII
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Women in British Coal Mining
Historian article
With the final closure of Britain’s deep coal mines, Chris Wrigley examines the long-standing involvement of women in and around this challenging and dangerous form of work.
With the closure in 2015 of Thoresby and Kellingley mines, the last two working deep coal mines in Britain, leaving only open-cast coal...
Women in British Coal Mining
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Film: The ladies-in-waiting who served the six wives of Henry VIII
Virtual Branch
Every queen had ladies-in-waiting. Her confidantes and chaperones, they are the forgotten agents of the Tudor court. Experts at survival, negotiating the competing demands of their families and their queen, the ladies-in-waiting of Henry VIII’s wives were far more than decorative ‘extras’: they were serious political players who changed the...
Film: The ladies-in-waiting who served the six wives of Henry VIII
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Polychronicon 117: interpretations of Douglas Haig
Teaching History feature
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' considers the historical...
Polychronicon 117: interpretations of Douglas Haig
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Triumphs Show: ‘The Strands of Memory’
Teaching History feature
In 2014, a group of French pupils from Lycée Léopold Sédar Senghor in Évreux was due to meet a British Second World War veteran, Eric Rackham, to hear him talk about his war experiences. Sadly, he passed away before the planned meeting. Paradoxically, this failed meeting led to the development...
Triumphs Show: ‘The Strands of Memory’
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Catherine de Medici & the Ancien Regime
Classic Pamphlet
Catherine de Medici is one of the most controversial figures of the early modern period. Her name has come to symbolize her age and both have long retained an exceptionally powerful emotive force. Consequently they have attracted many writers primarily seeking to apportion blame for the sombre events of the...
Catherine de Medici & the Ancien Regime
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Cunning Plan 181: Incorporating a more global perspective within Key Stage 3
Teaching History feature
While lockdown, in response to the Covid-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020, brought a period of turbulence to the education sector, it also brought a wealth of generosity, with a vast range of free online CPD offered by different providers. One in particular was the webinar series ‘West African History before the 1600s’ hosted...
Cunning Plan 181: Incorporating a more global perspective within Key Stage 3