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Polychronicon 135: Post-modern Holocaust Historiography
Teaching History feature
The field of Holocaust studies has been hit by an intellectual earthquake whose precise magnitude and long-term consequences cannot be ascertained at this stage. In 2007 Saul Friedländer published The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews 1939-1945. The book has been rightly celebrated as the first victim-centred synthetic history...
Polychronicon 135: Post-modern Holocaust Historiography
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Podcast: Richard Evans Medlicott -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...
Podcast: Richard Evans Medlicott -The Origins of the First World War
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What kinds of feedback help students produce better historical narratives of the interwar years?
Teaching History article
Narrative has begun to take its place alongside the essay, for so long the stereotypical currency of the history teacher and student. In this work, based on his experiences as a PGCE student, Alex Rodker argues powerfully that it is time now to consider how to help students to produce...
What kinds of feedback help students produce better historical narratives of the interwar years?
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Cunning Plan 152.1: visual sources
Teaching History feature
The principles outlined here were developed in response to three key concerns. The first was consideration of the needs of students learning English as an additional language who face particular challenges with reading and writing.
Images could perhaps offer them more direct, less abstract, ways into an understanding of challenging...
Cunning Plan 152.1: visual sources
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The Romanov Tercentenary: nostalgia versus history on the eve of the Great War
Historian article
The spring of 2013 was unusually significant for devotees of the Romanov dynasty. Though there was little international recognition of the fact, the season marked the 400th anniversary of the accession of Russia's first Romanov tsar. Historically, the story was a most dramatic one, for Mikhail Fedorovich had not seized...
The Romanov Tercentenary: nostalgia versus history on the eve of the Great War
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Teaching about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and events happening there
Article
The events of the last few days appear to have come out of nowhere to many people, especially children. While tensions have existed in the region for some time Russia’s decision to attack Ukraine was without provocation.
To have war return in such a way to the edges of Europe...
Teaching about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and events happening there
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Integrating heritage education and public history at school
Teaching History article
As a busy teacher of history and part-time doctoral student exploring history, heritage and identity, Joris thought a lot about heritage, students’ understanding of heritage and how such ideas could best be brought into the history classroom. Meanwhile, he discovered that the buildings next to his school were about to...
Integrating heritage education and public history at school
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Three lessons about a funeral: Second World War cemeteries and twenty years of curriculum change
Article
Mike Murray analyses the way in which curriculum development has broadened and strengthened our conceptions of high standards in historical learning for school students. He pays tribute to ground-breaking new theoretical principles from the Schools History Project and from new emphases upon contextual knowledge and ‘interpretations' in the first National...
Three lessons about a funeral: Second World War cemeteries and twenty years of curriculum change
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Being historically rigorous with creativity
Teaching History article
After a Fellowship in Holocaust Education at the Imperial War Museum, Andy Lawrence decided that something was missing in normal approaches to teaching emotive and controversial issues such as genocide, a deficit demonstrated by recent research by the Holocaust Education Development Programme. As part of his fellowship, Lawrence created an...
Being historically rigorous with creativity
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Berlin and the Holocaust: a sense of place?
Teaching History article
As more and more schools take students on visits to locations associated with the history of the Holocaust, history teachers have to find ways to make these places historically meaningful for their students. David Waters shows here how he introduced his students to the multiple narratives associated with the history...
Berlin and the Holocaust: a sense of place?
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Challenging stereotypes and avoiding the superficial: a suggested approach to teaching the Holocaust
Teaching History article
Alison Kitson provides a rationale for a scheme of work for Year 9 (13-14 year-olds). She argues that teachers should analyse the kind of historical learning that is taking place when the Holocaust is studied. Critical of the assumption that learning will take place as a result of exposure, she...
Challenging stereotypes and avoiding the superficial: a suggested approach to teaching the Holocaust
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New approaches to teaching the History of Appeasement in the classroom
Multipage Article
This project has been created on the initiative of Professor Julie. V. Gottlieb, Dept. of History, University of Sheffield. British political history, political conflict, appeasement and the Munich Crisis (1938) itself is the focus of her research and publications. Rather than approach these topics from ‘traditional’, elite and history from...
New approaches to teaching the History of Appeasement in the classroom
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Film series: Power and authority in Germany, 1871-1991
Germany 1871-1945: Introduction
The rise and fall of Germany in the 20th Century is one of the major political arcs of the modern period, and one that many feel familiar with – from the unification of the Germanic states, the defeat of the Kaiser in 1918, revolution, a weak Weimar Republic all the...
Film series: Power and authority in Germany, 1871-1991
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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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The knowledge illusion
Teaching History article
Focusing on students’ attempts to explain the relative significance of different factors in Hitler’s rise to power, Catherine McCrory explores the vexed question of why students who seem able to express necessary historical knowledge on one occasion cannot effectively reproduce it on another. Drawing on a detailed analysis of what...
The knowledge illusion
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Cunning Plan 174: creating a narrative of the interwar years
Teaching History feature
The major aim of this sequence of lessons was to teach Year 8 how to create and refine a narrative. I chose a period I was substantively confident on, which lent itself well to the narrative form, had a number of prominent academic narratives published about it and followed neatly...
Cunning Plan 174: creating a narrative of the interwar years
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Remembering the First World War: Using a battlefield tour of the Western Front
Teaching History article
Remembering the First World War: Using a battlefield tour of the Western Front to help pupils take a more critical approach to what they encounter
The first year of the government's First World War Centenary Battlefield Tours Programme is now under way, allowing increasing numbers of students from across Britain...
Remembering the First World War: Using a battlefield tour of the Western Front
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'I've been in the Reichstag': Rethinking roleplay
Teaching History article
Ian Luff constructs a rationale for the use of drama, practical demonstration and roleplay in pupils' learning. He follows this with a wealth of practical examples and detailed advice based on his own professional experience and his experience in running training sessions for other teachers. His analysis of the value...
'I've been in the Reichstag': Rethinking roleplay
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Drop the dead dictator: a Year 9 newsroom simulation
Teaching History article
Rosalind Stirzaker has big ambitions for her students. She wants them to do more than make a simple list of the key causes of the Second World War. Yes, she wants them to complete a piece of written work, but she wants – and gets – a great deal more...
Drop the dead dictator: a Year 9 newsroom simulation
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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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Podcast Series: German History 1918-1948
Multipage Article
An HA Podcasted History of Modern German History: 1918-1948 featuring: Sir Ian Kershaw, Professor Jill Stephenson of the University of Edinburgh, Dr Christina von Hodenberg of Queen Mary, University of London and Professor Benjamin Ziemann of the University of Sheffield.
Podcast Series: German History 1918-1948
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Triumphs Show 144: Active learning to engage ‘challenging students'
Teaching History feature
Active learning to engage and challenge ‘challenging students'
Historical significance may have been the ‘forgotten element' in 2002 when Rob Phillips first offered us the acronym ‘GREAT', but it has been seized upon with enthusiasm by the history education community. Christine Counsell's now famous five ‘R's (remarkable, remembered, resonant, resulting...
Triumphs Show 144: Active learning to engage ‘challenging students'
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What Have Historians Been Arguing About... immigration in French history
Historian feature
3 July 2024 marks the 50th anniversary of a significant, yet little known, event in French history: the declaration of an end to the recruitment of economic migrants. Over the previous decades, some three million migrant workers had arrived to surprisingly little fanfare, building the economic growth later mythologized by...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About... immigration in French history
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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
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Decolonise, don’t diversify: enabling a paradigm shift in the KS3 history curriculum
Teaching History article
In this article, Dan Lyndon-Cohen makes the case that history departments should move from diversifying the curriculum to decolonising it. After reflecting on some examples of how he made the content of his lessons more representative, he explores how the influence of writers such as Michel-Rolph Trouillot and Emma Dabiri...
Decolonise, don’t diversify: enabling a paradigm shift in the KS3 history curriculum
