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Polychronicon 129: Reinterpreting Peterloo
Teaching History feature
The Peterloo massacre is one of the best-documented events in British history. It was the bloodiest political event of the 19th century on English soil.
At St Peter's Fields in central Manchester on Monday 16 August 1819, a rally of around 60,000 people seeking parliamentary reform was violently dispersed by...
Polychronicon 129: Reinterpreting Peterloo
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Child labour in eighteenth century London
Historian article
On 1 March 1771, thirteen year-old John Davies, a London charity school boy, left his home in Half MoonAlley and made his way to Bishopsgate Street. There he joined thirteen other boys of similar age who, like him, were new recruits of the Marine Society, a charity that sent poor...
Child labour in eighteenth century London
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Numismatics and History
Classic Pamphlet
Numismatics may be defined as the science of money in its physical aspects. It is only indirectly connected with the theory of money, which belongs to the sphere of economics. Its subject-matter consists of the material objects which in most societies are used to measure the worth of goods and...
Numismatics and History
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Year 7 use musical language to think about King John
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
As an enthusiastic musician, Alison Meikle is always looking for ways to use music in the history classroom. While Teaching History has seen plenty of articles on using musical sources as evidence (e.g. Mastin in Teaching...
Year 7 use musical language to think about King John
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CRIC Research Project
Link
Recent conflicts in Europe, as well as abroad, have brought the deliberate destruction of the heritage of others, as a means of inflicting pain, to the foreground. With this has come the realisation that the processes involved and thus the long-term consequences are poorly understood. Heritage reconstruction is not merely...
CRIC Research Project
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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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Prehistoric Scotland
Classic Pamphlet
Prehistory is an attempt to reconstruct the story of human societies inhabiting a given region before the full historical record opens there. Its data, furnished by archaeology, are the constructions members of such societies erected and the durable objects they made. The events which should form its subject matter naturally...
Prehistoric Scotland
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Teaching 20th-Century History Resources
Article
We hope you enjoyed reading Exploring and Teaching Twentieth-Century History. To help you explore the topic further we’ve put together a selection of just a few additional 20th-century history and teaching resources below.
All these resources are available free to HA Secondary Members – find out more about Secondary Membership.
20th-century history podcast series
We have recorded...
Teaching 20th-Century History Resources
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King John
Classic Pamphlet
In the opinion of Stubbs King John was totally, not even competently, bad... Stubbs was the predominant, but no the sole voice of his generation. J.R. Green was already claiming that John was ‘the ablest and most ruthless of the Angevins... In the rapidity and breadth of this political combination...
King John
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Edwardian England
Classic Pamphlet
The Edwardian era is still less than a lifetime away. Yet the memoirs of surviving Edwardians, written any time between the nineteen-twenties and the nineteen sixties, have often made it sound like a remote epoch. The years between the death of Queen Victoria in 1901 and the outbreak of the...
Edwardian England
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Polychronicon 137: Bringing space travel down to Earth
Teaching History feature
It nearly began like this: ‘On Christmas Eve 1968, two episcopalians and a Roman Catholic were in orbit around the Moon.' I was writing a book called Earthrise, about the first views of Earth from space. Most other books about the Apollo programme of the 1960s and 1970s took an...
Polychronicon 137: Bringing space travel down to Earth
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Child Health & School meals: Nottingham 1906-1945
Historian article
Following Jamie Oliver’s devastating television series on the inadequacy of school meals the present government has been quick to be seen to address the situation. In September 2005, Ruth Kelly, the then Education Secretary, announced a war on junk food in schools.1 This was nothing new, because the history of...
Child Health & School meals: Nottingham 1906-1945
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A team-taught conspiracy: Year 8 are caught up in a genuine historical debate
Teaching History article
Are top sets always our top priority? Of course, we know that every child matters (should that now have capital letters?) but those of us who teach in an ability-setted context also know that a bottom set left unable to access the curriculum is likely to pose bigger problems than...
A team-taught conspiracy: Year 8 are caught up in a genuine historical debate
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How Nelson Became a Hero
Article
The fittest man in the world for the command' of the Mediterranean, Lord Minto declared of Horatio Nelson on 24 April 1798, following Nelson's inventive assault on Spanish ships off Cape St. Vincent. 'Admiral Nelson's victory [at the Nile]… is one of the most glorious and comprehensive victories ever achieved...
How Nelson Became a Hero
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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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Gladstone spiritual or Gladstone material? A rationale for using documents at AS and A2
Teaching History article
Rather than taking a sledgehammer approach to planning for the new AS and A2 courses Gary Howells has used the opportunity to reflect on characteristics of students' historical learning in the post-16 phase. He argues for a much fuller rationale for using documents than mere preparation for exams or coursework....
Gladstone spiritual or Gladstone material? A rationale for using documents at AS and A2
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A most horrid malicious bloody flame: using Samuel Pepys to improve Year 8 boys' historical writing
Teaching History article
Unusually, instead of moving from a narrative to an analytic structure, David Waters moves his pupils from causal analysis to narrative. By the time pupils are ready to produce their storyboard narrative, their thinking about the Great Fire has been shaped and re-shaped not only by structural exercises and argument...
A most horrid malicious bloody flame: using Samuel Pepys to improve Year 8 boys' historical writing
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Martin Luther King - Judge for Yourself
Book Review
Judge For Yourself: Martin Luther King by Christine Hatt, pub 2009,Evans Publishing, p/b £9.99, ISBN: 978 0 237 53624 4
Reviewed by Alf Wilkinson
This is a re-issue of a book published in 2002, but now out in paperback for the first time. The first part of the book is...
Martin Luther King - Judge for Yourself
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Irish Unionism 1885-1922
Classic Pamphlet
It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of Irish unionism for British and Irish politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The movement was supported almost exclusively by Irish Protestants who were of Anglo-Irish or Scotch-Irish descent and who comprised roughly one-quarter of the population of Ireland. Its...
Irish Unionism 1885-1922
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Free Film Education Resources
Article
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...
Free Film Education Resources
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Working with Boudicca texts - contemporary, juvenile and scholarly
Teaching History article
Please note: this article was written before the the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may now be outdated.
Robert Guyver describes a model for teaching Boudicca’s rebellion to pupils aged 7 to 13. Drawing on the tradition of critical source evaluation, he nonetheless shuns aspects of that tradition in favour of...
Working with Boudicca texts - contemporary, juvenile and scholarly
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Reflecting on rights: teaching pupils about pre-1832 British politics using a realistic role-play
Teaching History article
Ian Luff’s discussion of role-play and his many practical examples (Ian Luff (2000) in Issue 100) drew a huge and positive response from readers. Luff emphasised the simple and the realistic, and, at the same time, showed how to get maximum value from these winning activities through a tight learning...
Reflecting on rights: teaching pupils about pre-1832 British politics using a realistic role-play
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Bill Hall - Empire at War
Empire at War
Bill Hall was born in Coventry in 1944. His grandfather came to Britain in 1901, and worked in the Daimler car factory. In this video Bill talks about the part his family played in supporting the war effort during World War Two.
Bill Hall - Empire at War
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Crime and Punishment Through Time
GCSE Topic Pack
Crime and Punishment is a development study that forms part of the SHP GCSE history course. It traces the concepts of, attitudes and approaches to crime and punishment and the maintainence of law and order through time. This helpful summary, written by a recent student, for students will guide you...
Crime and Punishment Through Time
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England's Immigrants 1330-1550
Multipage Article
An HA Podcast with Professor Mark Ormrod of the University of York looking at the research project England's Immigrants 1330-1550. In this podcast Professor Ormrod explores the extensive archival evidence about the names, origins, occupations and households of a significant number of foreigners who chose to make their lives and livelihoods in...
England's Immigrants 1330-1550
