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Confounding expectation at Key Stage 3: flower-songs from an indigenous empire
Teaching History article
In this article Nicolas Kinloch examines aspects of an indigenous empire: that of Aztec Mexico. He attempts to persuade a group of mixed-ability Year 8 students to examine - and question - some of the assumptions they bring to the study of this empire. Their attitudes reflect quite widespread beliefs...
Confounding expectation at Key Stage 3: flower-songs from an indigenous empire
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Teaching the Holocaust: the experience of Vad Vashem
Teaching History article
No institution is better known for its continuing work on the Holocaust than Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem. In this article Richelle Budd Caplan offers guidelines for teachers, based on its unrivalled experience. She demands that our teaching of this subject should aim to restore the identities of the victims. To do...
Teaching the Holocaust: the experience of Vad Vashem
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WWI and the flu pandemic
Historian article
In our continuing Aspects of War series Hugh Gault reveals that the flu pandemic, which began during the First World War, presented another danger that challenged people’s lives and relationships.
Wounded in the neck on the first day of the battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916, Arthur Conan Doyle’s son Kingsley...
WWI and the flu pandemic
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On the campaign trail: walking the Hundred Years War
Historian article
In the tradition of landscape historians, Peter Hoskins has explored some of the route marches taken by English armies during the Hundred Years War.
After the battle of Crécy in 1346 and the capture of Calais by Edward III in the following year the Hundred Years War settled into an...
On the campaign trail: walking the Hundred Years War
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Religion and Politics 1559-1642
Classic Pamphlet
It is a truism to say that religion and politics were inextricably mixed in the seventeenth century.
"So natural" wrote Richard Hooker,"is the union of religion with Justice, that we may boldly deem there is neither where both are not" Sir John Eliot observed that in the House of Commons...
Religion and Politics 1559-1642
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The making of Magna Carta
Historian article
Magna Carta provided a commentary on the ills of the realm in the time of King John. Sophie Ambler looks at what grievances were addressed in the Charter, how the Charter was made, and what the Charter tells us about King John himself.
The world from which Magna Carta came...
The making of Magna Carta
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Queen Anne
Classic Pamphlet
In this pamphlet, James Anderson Winn, author of a recent biography of Queen Anne, recommends a new approach to historians writing about this successful and popular queen. Female, overweight, and reticent, Anne has long been underestimated. Her letters, however, show how well she understood the motives of her ministers, and...
Queen Anne
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On British Soil: Hartlepool, 16 December, 1914
Historian article
Heugh Battery, a Victorian survivor, received a new lease of life in 1908 when introduction of an improved Vickers 6-inch Mark VII gun greatly added to earlier, far less telling firepower. The Victorian pile was refurbished two years later and a pair of the new cannon installed. In 1907, the...
On British Soil: Hartlepool, 16 December, 1914
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The English Captivity of James I, King of Scots
Article
This booklet tells the story of James the first, with the events leading up to his capture and detailing the eighteen years spent in it. Balfour-Melville puts into writing the colourful, if not tragic, life of the capture and mere 13 year reign James. Brought alive in words, a King...
The English Captivity of James I, King of Scots
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Gary Sheffield: Origins of the First World War
Podcast
Gary Sheffield, Professor of War studies, the University of Wolverhampton, is one of the UK's foremost historians on the First World War. He is the author of numerous books and previously held posts at the University of Birmingham and the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. In April 2014 he spoke at an HA event for teachers...
Gary Sheffield: Origins of the First World War
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Bayeux
Historian article
Bayeux, 23 kilometres west of Caen, was the first French town to be liberated in 1944 - on 7 June in fact, the day after the landings. Yet its origins go much further back than that: its first bishop was consecrated in the fourth century. It became part of Normandy...
Bayeux
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Anne Herbert: A life in the Wars of the Roses
Historian article
May I introduce you to Anne Herbert, Countess of Pembroke? I'm very fond of this modern imagined portrait by Graham Turner, partly because of the colour and detail but chiefly because it conveys a respect for the people who lived in the past and especially for Anne herself. My interest...
Anne Herbert: A life in the Wars of the Roses
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Peter Abelard
Classic Pamphlet
The Catalogue of Printed Books in the British Library contains a large number of entries under the name of Peter Abelard. Most relate to books published in the last two hundred years and most of the editions of works written by Abelard, as distinct from books about him or about...
Peter Abelard
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India in 1914
Historian article
Rather as Queen Victoria was never as ‘Victorian' as we tend to assume, so British India in the years leading up to 1914 does not present the cliched spectacle of colonists in pith helmets and shorts lording it over subservient natives that we might assume. Certainly that sort of relationship...
India in 1914
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Franz Ferdinand
Historian article
The Kapuzinerkirche (Church of the Capuchins) in Vienna's Neue Markt is one of the more curious attractions of the city, housing as it does the Kaisergruft crypt in which the Habsburgs are entombed, or rather in which their bodies are entombed: the hearts are usually kept in the Loreto Chapel...
Franz Ferdinand
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The world in 1913: friendly societies
Historian article
Friendly societies were designed to help members to cope with the illness, death or unemployment of a household's breadwinner. Each month members, mostly men, paid into the society, often at a meeting in a pub and in return payments from the pooled funds were made to ill members and to...
The world in 1913: friendly societies
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Women, education and literacy in Tudor and Stuart England
Historian article
To booke and pen: Women, education and literacy in Tudor and Stuart England
As a student in the early 1970s, I became acutely aware that formal provision for women's education was a relatively recent development. I was at Bedford College, which originated in 1849 as the first higher education institution...
Women, education and literacy in Tudor and Stuart England
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Women, War and Revolution
Classic Pamphlet
On the surface, the period 1914 to 1945 seems to have encompassed massive changes in the position of women in Europe, in response to the demands of war and revolution. Yet historians have questioned the extent of the transformation, since the acquisition of the vote, as well as improvements in...
Women, War and Revolution
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Kristallnacht
Historian article
Why Reichskristallnacht?
In The Third Reich Michael Burleigh writes: ‘We should be cautious in seeing spontaneity where frequency suggests instigation from a central source.' He comments on ‘a dialectic between "spontaneous" grassroot actions and "followup" state sponsored measures.' These remarks relate to 1935, the time of the Nuremberg Laws [the...
Kristallnacht
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Cyprus: another Middle East issue
Historian article
Although Cyprus, the third largest Mediterranean island, remained nominally under Turkish suzerainty until 1914, the British were established there after the 1878 Congress of Berlin. The idea then was that, from this base, Britain could protect Turkey against threats from Russia, while ensuring that the Turks reformed their treatment of...
Cyprus: another Middle East issue
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Neville Chamberlain: Villain or Hero?
Historian 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...
Neville Chamberlain: Villain or Hero?
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William the First and the Sussex Rapes
Classic Pamphlet
During his reign, and in particular in the five years after the battle of Hastings, William I carried out the most thorough reallocation of land in England ever to take place in so short a period of time; the results were summarized in Domesday Book in 1086.That great record shows...
William the First and the Sussex Rapes
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The mechanical heroes of the Battle of Britain
Historian article
The Battle of Britain is often described as the point at which the Nazi threat began to diminish and cracks began to form in Hitler's regime. The air campaign launched by the Germans in the summer of 1940 intended to wipe out the existence of the British Royal Air Force...
The mechanical heroes of the Battle of Britain
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The Paris Commune of 1871
Classic Pamphlet
Although a century has passed since the red flag flew for 72 days over the twenty town halls of Paris, the 1871 Commune de Paris cannot be said to belong primarily to historians. The picture of the Communards 'storming the gates of heaven' continues to serve both as a model...
The Paris Commune of 1871
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Oliver Cromwell 1658-1958
Classic Pamphlet
Ever since the death of Oliver Cromwell 300 years ago his reputation has been the subject of controversy. The royalist view of him was expressed by Clarendon: "a brave bad mad," an ambitious hypocrite. This interpretation was supported by many former Parliamentarians: Edmund Ludlow regarded Cromwell as the lost leader...
Oliver Cromwell 1658-1958
