-
What Have Historians Been Arguing About... Chinese history?
Teaching History feature
Teaching Chinese history in the UK runs up against some immediate obstacles. It lacks the familiar staging posts of European history: Chairman Mao is among the few well-known names, and terms such as Cultural Revolution and Opium War may attract recognition, but are often not understood in detail. The situation...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About... Chinese history?
-
Alexander II
Classic Pamphlet
The ‘great reforms' of Tsar Alexander II (1855-81) are generally recognised as the most significant events in modern Russian history between the reign of Peter the Great and the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. The most important of Alexander's reforms, the emancipation of he serfs in 1861, has been described...
Alexander II
-
A medieval credit crunch
Historian article
The project: A three-year research project started in December 2007 with the aim of investigating the credit arrangements of a succession of English monarchs with a number of Italian merchant societies. The study, based at the ICMA Centre, University of Reading, is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)....
A medieval credit crunch
-
Regional Aspects of the Scottish Reformation
Classic Pamphlet
Reformation Perspective
In recent years studies of the Scottish Reformation have undergone a marked change. Religion is seldom advanced as the sole mainspring of the events of 1560 and explanations have been increasingly sought in political and economic terms. On the political side growing opposition to French influence within Scotland...
Regional Aspects of the Scottish Reformation
-
Newcastle and the General Strike 1926
Historian article
The nine-day General Strike of May 1926 retains a totemic place in the nation's history nearly 100 years later. The Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill was among those who attempted to characterise it as anarchy and revolution, but this was hyperbole and largely inaccurate for, as Ellen Wilkinson (then...
Newcastle and the General Strike 1926
-
Introducing History Lab
A crowd-sourced history club
In 2021, teacher Richard Lewis founded History Lab as an idea for a history club that goes beyond the curriculum and enables students to think, form opinions and voice them as well as learning from one another's perspectives. The club can be led by a teacher, librarian or other knowledgeable...
Introducing History Lab
-
Film: Brezhnev's early life and career
Film Series: Power and authority in Russia and the Soviet Union
In this film Dr Edwin Bacon takes us through Brezhnev’s early life and career: his birth in Ukraine in 1906, the opportunities brought by the revolution, his role in the battle of Ukraine and his eventual arrival to the Politburo at the end of the 1950s. Dr Bacon looks at...
Film: Brezhnev's early life and career
-
Podcast Series: The Age of Revolutions
Multipage Article
This podcast series was commissioned as part of the HA’s education programme on the Age of Revolutions period, funded by the Age of Revolution legacy project. They were recorded with leading academic historians and are intended to shed light on a variety of perspectives on the period.
These podcasts were...
Podcast Series: The Age of Revolutions
-
The Battle of Waterloo: Sunday 18 June 1815
Historian article
John Morewood explores the events of 18 June 1815 in detail and asks just how accurate is our view of what happened on the field of Waterloo.
Summary
Waterloo is the most famous battle in a four-battle campaign fought from 15 June to 19 June 1815. On one side were...
The Battle of Waterloo: Sunday 18 June 1815
-
Virtual Branch Recording: Henry V, Henry the Conqueror?
Article
Henry V - Henry the Conqueror?
In this lecture former HA President Anne Curry Emeritus Professor of Medieval History Southampton addresses the question Henry V - Henry the Conqueror?'. She explores the relationship between Henry V, his court and those in France.
(Please note: if you have HA Membership and are...
Virtual Branch Recording: Henry V, Henry the Conqueror?
-
Stalin, Propaganda, and Soviet Society during the Great Terror
Historian article
Sarah Davies explores the evidence that even in the most repressive phases of Stalin’s rule, there existed a flourishing ‘shadow culture’, a lively and efficient unofficial network of information and ideas. 'Today a man only talks freely with his wife — at night, with the blankets pulled over his head.’...
Stalin, Propaganda, and Soviet Society during the Great Terror
-
Why are you wearing a watch? Complicating narratives of economic and social progress
Teaching History article
Frustrated by the traditional narrative of the industrial revolution as a steady march of progress, and disappointed by her students’ dull and deterministic statements about historical change, Hannah Sibona decided to complicate the tidy narrative of continual improvement.
Inspired by an article by E.P. Thompson, Sibona reflected that introducing her...
Why are you wearing a watch? Complicating narratives of economic and social progress
-
The first trans-Atlantic hero? General James Wolfe and British North America
Article
Early on the morning of 8 June 1758, British frigates unleashed their broadsides upon French shore defences at Gabarus Bay, on the foggy and surf-lashed island of Cape Breton. Under cover of the warships' guns, a motley flotilla of craft headed towards the land. Propelled by straining Royal Navy oarsmen,...
The first trans-Atlantic hero? General James Wolfe and British North America
-
Podcast: Why Medieval History Matters?
Medieval History
Why Medieval History Matters, Professor Anne Curry, President of the HA ‘I don't mind there being some medievalists around for ornamental purposes, but there is no reason for the state to pay for them'. So, allegedly, said Charles Clarke when Education Secretary in 2003. In fact, medieval history has never...
Podcast: Why Medieval History Matters?
-
Will China Democratise?
Historian article
Michael T. Davis compares the parallels between the democratic expectations, or possibilities, of modern-day China with Britain's democratic evolution from the eighteenth century to the emerging democracy of the nineteenth century.
The future is an unfamiliar place for historians. Yet we stand on the edge of an historic shift away...
Will China Democratise?
-
Absence and myopia in A-level coursework
Teaching History article
It is a charge commonly laid at history teachers that we, myopically, teach only the same-old same-old. Steven Driver has taken extreme steps to avoid this by focusing on a particular neglected event – the American occupation of Nicaragua in the early twentieth century – as part of his preparation...
Absence and myopia in A-level coursework
-
The soldier in Later Medieval England
Historian article
Traditionally, the Middle Ages have been portrayed as the ‘Feudal Age', when men were given land in return for performance of unpaid military service. Whilst this may have formed the basis of the English military system in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, it was most certainly not the way armies...
The soldier in Later Medieval England
-
Film: Creating a more positive interpretation of the Middle Ages at Key Stage 3
Secondary History Workshop Annual Conference 2019
Popular perceptions of life, politics and morality in the Middle Ages are overwhelmingly negative, a far cry from images being developed by historians through their research. This workshop explores how to tweak and change familiar topics (including the reign of Richard III) to create a more historically accurate, positive and...
Film: Creating a more positive interpretation of the Middle Ages at Key Stage 3
-
Reinventing the Charter: from Sir Edward Coke to 'freeborn John'
Historian article
When was Magna Carta launched on its modern career as a symbol of freedom and liberty? Justin Champion looks at the role of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century lawyers and politicians in shaping how we see the Charter today.
‘For every person who knows what the contents of Magna Carta actually...
Reinventing the Charter: from Sir Edward Coke to 'freeborn John'
-
The Personal Rule of Charles I 1629-40
Classic Pamphlet
Historians are often accused of viewing the past with hindsight, or of being wise after the event. Not being prophets or soothsayers, we have to look backwards in time because we cannot look forwards. The real question is from what vantage point or perspective we view a particular part of...
The Personal Rule of Charles I 1629-40
-
Women in Late Medieval Bristol
Classic Pamphlet
During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Bristol was one of England's greatest towns, with a population of perhaps 100,000 after the Black Death of 1348. Its status was recognised in 1373, with its creation as the realm's first provincial urban county, but only in 1542, with the creation of the...
Women in Late Medieval Bristol
-
The Eighteenth Century in Britain: Long or Short?
Article
W. A. Speck reviews an historical debate central to the interpretation of the eighteenth century in Britain. Few British historians treat the eighteenth century as consisting simply of the hundred years from 1701 to 1800. Until recently political historians tended to end it in 1783. Many textbooks reflect this treatment...
The Eighteenth Century in Britain: Long or Short?
-
Whose past is it anyway? Telling Russian and Soviet history through diverse Jewish voices
Teaching History article
When Alistair Dickins came to teach A-level Russian and Soviet history (1855–1964) he was rather surprised by the very limited references to Jewish history within the exam board specification. His own detailed knowledge in this area (a ‘little side-project’ from his doctorate on the Russian Revolution), led to a revision of the course. This article...
Whose past is it anyway? Telling Russian and Soviet history through diverse Jewish voices
-
Cunning Plan 183: Teaching a broader Britain, 1625–1714
Teaching History feature
‘Gruesome!’ was how we decided to describe our teaching of seventeenth-century British history, although ‘inadequate’ was probably more accurate. Oh, how much was wrong! We had…
Incoherence. The Civil War and Protectorate years plonked in between the Elizabethan Age and the origins of the industrial revolution. We had lost years!
A...
Cunning Plan 183: Teaching a broader Britain, 1625–1714
-
Polychronicon 165: The 1917 revolutions in 2017: 100 years on
Teaching History feature
The interpretive and empirical frameworks utilised by scholars in their quest to understand the Russian revolutions have evolved and transformed over 100 years. The opening of archives after the collapse of the Soviet Union enabled access to a swathe of new primary sources, some of which have had a transformative...
Polychronicon 165: The 1917 revolutions in 2017: 100 years on