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The German Revolution 1918-19
Classic Pamphlet
Like other revolutions the German revolution of November 1918 was a product of different causes, some of which formed part of the events immediately preceding it, while other belonged to the less recent past. The revolution began as the improvised revolt of an exhausted and disillusioned population against an authoritarian...
The German Revolution 1918-19
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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
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Between the Revolutions: Russia 1905 to 1917
Classic Pamphlet
"The key question is this - is the peaceful renovation of the country possible? Or is it possible only by internal revolution?"This quotation succintly expresses the problem that faced both contemporaries and subsequant generations of historians confronting the development of Russia between the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. The upheavals...
Between the Revolutions: Russia 1905 to 1917
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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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Polychronicon 162: Reinterpreting the May 1968 events in France
Teaching History feature
As Kristin Ross has persuasively argued, by the 1980s interpretations of the French events of May 1968 had shrunk to a narrow set of received ideas around student protest, labelled by Chris Reynolds a ‘doxa’. Media discourse is dominated by a narrow range of former participants labelled ‘memory barons’ –...
Polychronicon 162: Reinterpreting the May 1968 events in France
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The Russian Constitutional Monarchy, 1907-17
Classic Pamphlet
The defeat of the revolution of 1905 afforded the absolutist Tsarist monarchy an opportunity to reform the administration and to seek a new basis of support in place of the declining gentry class. Historians have been divided ever since over the constitutional system's chances of success. Had Tsardom advanced far...
The Russian Constitutional Monarchy, 1907-17
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After the Uprising of 1956: Hungarian Students in Britain
Historian article
Much has been written during the last 50 years about the events leading up to and during the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. Less consideration has been given to the students who arrived in Britain as refugees. During the weeks following the Soviet intervention in Hungary around 25,000 people were killed...
After the Uprising of 1956: Hungarian Students in Britain
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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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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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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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Year 8 and interpretations of the First World War
Teaching History article
Dan Smith was concerned that his pupils were drawing on over-simplified generalisations about different periods of the past when they were considering why interpretations change over time. This led him to consider how pupils’ contextual knowledge and chronological fluency might be used more explicitly in order to avoid weak generalisations...
Year 8 and interpretations of the First World War
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Film: The Partitions of Poland-Lithuania (1772-1795)
Repercussions for German-Polish Relations and their Legacy.
Karin Friedrich recently joined the Virtual Branch to discuss aspects of its complex history in her talk on the partitions of Poland, their repercussions for German-Polish relations and their legacy. Professor Friedrich is chair in Early Modern European History at the University of Aberdeen, co-director of the Centre for Early Modern...
Film: The Partitions of Poland-Lithuania (1772-1795)
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Moving Year 9 towards more complex causal explanations of Holocaust perpetration
Teaching History article
Building on research by the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education, Matthew Duncan was concerned that his students were drawn to simplistic explanations of Holocaust perpetrators’ actions. As well as the UCL Centre’s research, Duncan drew on history education research from Canada and history teachers’ theorisation in England for inspiration in...
Moving Year 9 towards more complex causal explanations of Holocaust perpetration
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Helping Year 9 evaluate explanations for the Holocaust
Teaching History article
‘It made my brain hurt, but in a good way': helping Year 9 learn to make and to evaluate explanations for the Holocaust
Why genocides occur is a perplexing and complex question. Leanne Judson reports a strategy designed to help students think about perpetration and evaluate and propose explanations for...
Helping Year 9 evaluate explanations for the Holocaust
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'Victims of history': Challenging students’ perceptions of women in history
Teaching History article
As postgraduate historians with teaching responsibilities at the University of York, Bridget Lockyer and Abigail Tazzyman were concerned to tackle some of the challenges reported by their students who had generally only encountered women’s history in a disconnected way through stand-alone topics or modules. Their response was to create a...
'Victims of history': Challenging students’ perceptions of women in history
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A question of attribution: working with ghetto photographs
Teaching History article
Holocaust imagery is very familiar, clichéd even. How can we get pupils thinking about it in novel ways and seeing differently? Phillips reports work completed with his PGCE students, proposes a scaffold of questions with which to deconstruct images and applies it to archive images and to Hollywood representations. Images...
A question of attribution: working with ghetto photographs
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GCSE Podcasts: The League of Nations
Multipage Article
Aaron Wilkes and Katrina Shearman of Castle High School in Dudley discuss one of the key topics for modern world history students: The League of Nations.
We have produced three podcasts with the first looking at the Origins, Structure and Limitations of the League of Nations, the second podcast examining the League of...
GCSE Podcasts: The League of Nations
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Imagining cities: exploring historical sites as contested spaces
Teaching History article
Geraint Brown and Matt Stanford share the daunting challenge and intriguing opportunities that are presented by leading a school history trip to a site as complex as Berlin. That the city is a palimpsest, layered with stories and tissued with conflicting identities, experiences and meanings, makes planning a trip extremely...
Imagining cities: exploring historical sites as contested spaces
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Introductory Film: Germany 1871-1945
Part of the HA Interpretations Film Series: Power and authority in Germany 1871-1991
Log in below to preview the introductory film - available to all registered users of the website.
This open access introductory film forms part of our NEW nine-part filmed series on the development of power and authority in Germany 1871-1991 available through the Student Zone with corporate secondary membership.
In this...
Introductory Film: Germany 1871-1945
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The League of Nations
Classic Pamphlet
It is common to see the failure of the League of Nations in its inability to stand up to the crises of the inter-war years.Peter Raffo shows that the League was flawed from the start. Never more than a voluntary association of sovereign states hoping to create ‘an atmosphere capable...
The League of Nations
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Polychronicon 168: Interwar internationalisms
Teaching History feature
Research on the inter war years (1919-39) has exploded in recent years. Led by exciting studies of global and international institutions by Susan Pedersen, Patricia Clavin and Mark Mazower, historians have moved beyond narrowly political and diplomatic accounts of the leading personalities and agencies attached to key institutions such as...
Polychronicon 168: Interwar internationalisms
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Stalinism
Classic Pamphlet
Stalin's remarkable career raises quite fundamental questions for anyone interested in history. Marxists, whose philosophy should cause them to downgrade the role of ‘great men' as an explanation of great events, have problems in fitting Stalin into the materialist interpretation of history: did not this man ride rough-shod over the...
Stalinism
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Triumphs Show: ‘The Strands of Memory’
Teaching History feature
In 2014, a group of French pupils from Lycée Léopold Sédar Senghor in Évreux was due to meet a British Second World War veteran, Eric Rackham, to hear him talk about his war experiences. Sadly, he passed away before the planned meeting. Paradoxically, this failed meeting led to the development...
Triumphs Show: ‘The Strands of Memory’
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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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Triumphs Show 160: Prezi and propaganda
Teaching History feature: celebrating and sharing success
Laura Tilley recognised that her Year 9 students were finding it difficult to work out the intended message of visual propaganda. To help her students make better use of the substantive knowledge they already had, she devised an interactive activity using a presentation software, Prezi. This approach provided students with...
Triumphs Show 160: Prezi and propaganda
