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Navigating the ‘imperial history wars’
Teaching History article
Concerned by the growing tendency of politicians and press to revive the moral balance-sheet approach to British imperial history and by some evidence of its resurgence in schools, Alex Benger set about devising a framework which would keep pupils’ analysis rigorously historical, rather than moral and politicised. In this article,...
Navigating the ‘imperial history wars’
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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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On the frontlines of teaching the history of the First World War
Teaching History article
It is very common for people in politics and the media to make assumptions about what happens in history classrooms. Too often these preconceptions are based on little more than anecdote, examples from the Internet or memories of what someone experienced at school themselves.
In this article, Catriona Pennell reports...
On the frontlines of teaching the history of the First World War
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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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Churchill: The Greatest Briton Unmasked
Book Review
Churchill: The Greatest Briton Unmasked by Nigel Knight. David & Charles, Sept 2008, £14.99; ISBN: 978 0 7153 2855 2
Reviewed by Alf Wilkinson
Nigel Knight, a lecturer in British Government at Cambridge, has written a revisionist analysis of Churchill and his achievements. Based on extensive research he has set...
Churchill: The Greatest Briton Unmasked
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Modelling the discipline
Teaching History article
David Hibbert and Zaiba Patel decided to work together after becoming concerned that school history curricula might not enable students to interrogate popular British mythologising about World War II. Building on these pre-existing concerns, their collaboration with the historian Yasmin Khan yielded an Interpretations enquiry which asked students to consider...
Modelling the discipline
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'Please send socks': How much can Reg Wilkes tell us about the Great War?
Teaching History article
This was an opportunity all good historians dream about. A large box crammed with artefacts about a soldier who fought in the First World War, just begging to be read, studied, sorted and organised. Being faced with such a wealth of uncatalogued primary evidence could have proved daunting enough without...
'Please send socks': How much can Reg Wilkes tell us about the Great War?
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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
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Richard Evans Medlicott lecture: The Origins of the First World War
Medlicott Podcast
This year the Historical Association's Medlicott medal for services to history went to Professor Sir Richard Evans. Richard Evans is the Regius Professor of History at Cambridge and President of Wolfson College, Cambridge. He has written numerous highly respected and internationally best-selling books. Evans is bests known for his works on...
Richard Evans Medlicott lecture: The Origins of the First World War
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Using The Wipers Times to build an enquiry on the First World War
Teaching History article
Teaching ‘the lesson of satire': using The Wipers Times to build an enquiry on the First World War
‘Blackadder for real' is how the British journalist and broadcaster, Ian Hislop, characterised The Wipers Time, the newspaper published on the front line by members of the 12th Battalion Sherwood, and recently brought...
Using The Wipers Times to build an enquiry on the First World War
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Helping Year 9 explore the cultural legacies of WW1
Teaching History article
A world turned molten: helping Year 9 to explore the cultural legacies of the First World War
Rachel Foster shows how her own study of cultural history led to a new dimension in her planning. She wanted to show her students not only that historians are interested in many different...
Helping Year 9 explore the cultural legacies of WW1
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Podcast Series: The British Empire 1800-Present
Multipage Article
An HA Podcasted History of the British Empire 1800-Present featuring Dr Seán Lang of Anglia Ruskin University, Dr John Stuart of Kingston University London, Professor A. J. Stockwell and Dr Larry Butler of the University of East Anglia.
Podcast Series: The British Empire 1800-Present
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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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Britain in the 1950s
Links
The National Archives' Education Service explores Britain in the 1950s
The National Archives' Education Service's latest resource is now available online.
Following on from their document collections looking at the partition of India and the swinging Sixties, Fifties Britain is an invaluable collection of dozens of documents covering a wide...
Britain in the 1950s
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Polychronicon 134: The Great War and Cultural History
Teaching History feature
Over the past two decades the historiography of the Great War has witnessed something of a revolution. Although historical revisionism is, of course, nothing out of the ordinary, the speed with which long-held assumptions about the First World War and its impact have been swept away has been quite astonishing....
Polychronicon 134: The Great War and Cultural History
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Shaping what matters: Year 9 decide why we should care about the Windrush scandal
Teaching History article
Mark Fowle began work on an enquiry to contextualise the Windrush scandal for his pupils in south London, in response to the first national Stephen Lawrence Day, in 2018. He went on to work with his colleagues in a new school to broaden pupils’ historical perspective through stories of migration...
Shaping what matters: Year 9 decide why we should care about the Windrush scandal
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Triumphs Show 193: Year 8 imagine the First World War trenches
Article
Deep into my PGCE year, I found myself discussing with my mentor how to pre-empt the barriers to understanding the past that students may face. One barrier we discussed was presentism: the tendency of students to interpret the past in light of their own modern knowledge, values and experiences. In particular, we considered...
Triumphs Show 193: Year 8 imagine the First World War trenches
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What Have Historians Been Arguing About... youth culture?
Teaching History feature
For such a boldly iconoclastic work, the Key Stage 3 textbook A New Focus on ... British Social History, c.1920–2000 (2023) provides a disarmingly conventional account of youth in the 1960s as ‘mostly better educated and informed than their parents had been at their age [and able] … to find...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About... youth culture?
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Helping Year 9 to engage effectively with ‘other genocides’
Teaching History article
In this article, Andy Lawrence returns to arguments made in Teaching History 153 about the importance of teaching young people about other modern genocides in addition to the Holocaust. Building on those arguments with his own rationale, Lawrence also acknowledges the constraints on curriculum time that compel all departments to...
Helping Year 9 to engage effectively with ‘other genocides’
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Teaching Britain’s ‘civil rights’ history
Teaching History article
Hannah Elias and Martin Spafford begin this article by explaining why they believe it is essential for young people to learn about the ‘heterogeneous, rich and complex’ history of the struggle for civil rights in Britain. Drawing on their diverse experiences of researching, writing and teaching history at school and university...
Teaching Britain’s ‘civil rights’ history
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Putting black into the Union Jack: weaving Black history into the Year 7 to 9 curriculum
Teaching History article
Making a passionate case for teaching Black British history in the secondary school curriculum, Hannah shares here the personal journey she has travelled in planning for Black British history in her curriculum. She cites her inspirations and offers striking examples to illustrate her rationale and approach to teaching this history....
Putting black into the Union Jack: weaving Black history into the Year 7 to 9 curriculum
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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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Teaching Gypsy, Roma and Traveller history
Article
Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people are the largest minority ethnic group in some communities (and therefore in some schools) in the UK. Yet the past of Gypsy, Roma, Traveller people may rarely be part of history lessons. The result is that pupils of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller heritage may not...
Teaching Gypsy, Roma and Traveller history
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Exploring and Teaching Twentieth-Century History
A secondary education publication of the Historical Association
This resource is free to everyone. For access to our library of high-quality secondary history materials along with free or discounted CPD and membership of a thriving community of history teachers and subject leaders, join the Historical Association today
For a long time, history curricula on the 20th century prioritised...
Exploring and Teaching Twentieth-Century History
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The great Liberal landslide: the 1906 General Election in perspective
Historian article
On 1 May 1997 the Conservative party suffered an electoral defeat so overwhelming that political commentators were left rummaging through the statistics of the previous two centuries to find anything similar. The Times concluded on 3 May that it was the party's worst performance since 1832, though 'The disaster suffered...
The great Liberal landslide: the 1906 General Election in perspective
