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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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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Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.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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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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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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Triumphs Show 176: Using material culture as a means to generate an enquiry on the British Empire
Teaching History feature
Triumphs Show is a regular feature which offers a quick way for teachers to celebrate their successes and share inspirational ideas with one another. While the ideas are always explained in sufficient depth for others to be able to take them forward in their own practice, the simple format allows...
Triumphs Show 176: Using material culture as a means to generate an enquiry on the British Empire
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Polychronicon 160: Interpreting 'The Birth of a Nation'
Teaching History feature
Controversial from the first year of its release in 1915, 'The Birth of a Nation' has been hailed as both the greatest film ever made and the most racist. On 8 February 1915, it premiered in Los Angeles as 'The Clansman', the name of the novel and play upon which...
Polychronicon 160: Interpreting 'The Birth of a Nation'
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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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How visual evidence reflects change and continuity in attitudes to the police in the 19th and early 20th centuries
Teaching History article
While history teachers (and examiners) regularly invite students to consider what cartoons or paintings reveal about contemporary attitudes to particular social or political developments, such sources are often difficult to interpret and to use appropriately. Drawing on a wealth of detailed research and a passion to support teachers and students with...
How visual evidence reflects change and continuity in attitudes to the police in the 19th and early 20th centuries
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The Victorian Age
Classic Pamphlet
This Classic Pamphlet was published in 1937 (the centenary of the accession of Queen Victoria, who succeeded to the throne on June 20, 1837).
Synopsis of contents:
1. Is the Victorian Age a distinct 'period' of history?
Landmarks establishing its beginning: the Reform Bill, railways, other inventions, new leaders in...
The Victorian Age
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Understanding Slavery
Free Online Resource
Teaching the transatlantic slave trade and its abolition in British history is now a compulsory component of the revised KS3 History curriculum.
The Understanding Slavery Initiative (USI) is a national education project set up in 2003. The initiative has been developed in partnership with the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich,...
Understanding Slavery
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Using databases to explore the real depth in the data
Teaching History article
Is it a good thing to have a lot of evidence? Surely the historian would answer that yes, it is: the more evidence that can be used, the better. The problem with this approach, though, is that too much data can be overwhelming for the history student - and, in...
Using databases to explore the real depth in the data
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Polychronicon 173: From American Indians to Native Americans
Teaching History journal feature
Few sub-fields of American history have undergone as many changes over time as the study of Native Americans/American Indians. While nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians portrayed Native Americans as savage barbarians or ignored them entirely, late twentieth-century historians portrayed them as victims of circumstance and aggressive European conquest. Today, modern...
Polychronicon 173: From American Indians to Native Americans
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Unravelling the complexity of the causes of British abolition with Year 8
Teaching History article
Elizabeth Marsay wanted to ensure that her students were not hindered in their causal explanations of the abolition of slavery by being exposed to overly categorical, simplistic, and monocausal narratives in the classroom. By drawing on both English and Canadian theorisation about causation, Marsay outlines how her introduction of competing...
Unravelling the complexity of the causes of British abolition with Year 8
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What Have Historians Been Arguing About... migration and empire
A Polychronicon of the past
In autumn 2019, Kara Walker’s monumental sculpture, Fons Americanus, went on display in the Tate Modern, offering a poignant, troubling challenge to national commemoration. Walker depicts not the lingering vestiges of imperial glory, but sharks, tears, and haunted memories. She brings history into conversation with its contemporary legacies and engages...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About... migration and empire
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Northamptonshire in a Global Context
Key Stages 2 and 3
Produced by the Northamptonshire Black History Association and originally published in 2008, this is one of a set of resources for schools offering a more inclusive map of the past that includes an appreciation of Black History within the local, national and global context. The resources provide a range of opportunities to promote diversity within the curriculum....
Northamptonshire in a Global Context
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Podcast: Re-imagining Democracy
Podcast
This podcast feature Professor Mark Philp of the University of Warwick discussing how people's perceptions of democracy changed between 1750 and 1850 and is based on the findings of the Re-imagining democracy project, begun in 2005 by Joanna Innes and Mark Philp.
Re-imagining Democracy: 1750-1850
1. Introduction. Democracy from negative...
Podcast: Re-imagining Democracy
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Lord North: The Noble Lord in the Blue Ribbon
Classic Pamphlet
In the last weeks of his life Lord North, we are told, expressed anxiety about his place in history - ‘how he stood and would stand in the world'. This, he owned, ‘might be a weakness, but he could not help it'. It was a weakness one suspects that he...
Lord North: The Noble Lord in the Blue Ribbon
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Professional wrestling in the history department: a case study in planning the teaching of the British Empire at Key Stage 3
Article
Three years ago ( TH 99, Curriculum Planning Edition), Michael Riley illustrated ways in which history departments could exploit the increased flexibility of the revised National Curriculum.1 He showed that precisely-worded enquiry questions, positioned thoughtfully across the Key Stage, help to ensure progression, challenge and coherence. His picturesque image for...
Professional wrestling in the history department: a case study in planning the teaching of the British Empire at Key Stage 3
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The Chapel and the Nation
Classic Pamphlet
The Noncoformitst chapel has played a crucial role in the history of the English and Welsh nations. When the great French historian Elie Halevy sought to explain the contrast between the turbulent history of his own country and the peaceful evolution of England in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries...
The Chapel and the Nation
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The Scottish Enlightenment
Classic Pamphlet
In recent decades, Scotland's distinctive contribution to the Enlightenment has been of increasing interest to scholars. Often very remarkable in an analytical view, such studies may nevertheless miss their sense of the story by treating Scottish insight in abstraction from Scottish life. Taking a more concrete approach, the present study...
The Scottish Enlightenment
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Assessing the Battle of Waterloo in the classroom
Teaching History article
Defying the Iron Duke: assessing the Battle of Waterloo in the classroom
The approaching bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo has stimulated debate about how it should be commemorated. This article reports a collaboration between the Waterloo200 Committee and Tom Wheeley, history teacher, to create a lesson sequence analysing the...
Assessing the Battle of Waterloo in the classroom
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The Industrial Revolution in England
Classic Pamphlet
Revolutions of the magnitude of the industrial revolution in England provoke historical controversy: such a revolution is a major discontinuity which a profession more skilled in explaining small changes finds difficult to understand. A revolution that touches a whole society is so diffuse that its significant events are difficult to...
The Industrial Revolution in England
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The effect of the loss of the American Colonies upon British Policy
Classic Pamphlet
(1) Problems of an Empire in ruinsTwo weeks after Yorktown, but before the news of that disaster had reached England, George III wrote to Lord North that "The dye is now cast whether this shall be a great Empire or the least dignified of European states." England had not fought...
The effect of the loss of the American Colonies upon British Policy
