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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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Recorded webinar: The People of 1381
Article
This lecture with Adrian Bell, Helen Lacey and Helen Killick introduces key findings of the AHRC-funded project The People of 1381. Which people and social groups were involved in England’s biggest pre-civil war revolt? How much can we find out about their lives: where did they come from, what actions...
Recorded webinar: The People of 1381
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Using 1980s popular music to explore historical significance
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Scott Allsop helped his students to uncover the implicit criteria informing someone else's attribution of historical significance to past events. That ‘someone else' was Billy Joel whose 1989 song became the focus for deconstructive analysis....
Using 1980s popular music to explore historical significance
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A modest proposal for change in Canadian history education
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Peter Seixas recounts the development of a history education reform project in Canada. Like all good histories, it is a complex story and a matter of unanticipated consequences and ironic narrative twists.
Seixas' history is,...
A modest proposal for change in Canadian history education
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'Assessing Pupil Progress'
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
England's Qualification and Curriculum Development Authority (QCDA) has been working on a new way of trying to support teachers in handling interim assessment during Key Stage 3. It is called Assessing Pupil Progress (APP).
Jerome...
'Assessing Pupil Progress'
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Managing the scope of study
Teaching History article
Anna Dickson and her department sought a solution to the challenges posed to their pupils by the expanded curricular scope of the new GCSE. In particular, they wanted to address the difficulties their pupils experienced in understanding the Cold War. Dickson outlines here how she drew on the work of...
Managing the scope of study
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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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Drilling down: how one history department is working towards progression in pupils' thinking about diversity across Years 7, 8 and 9
Teaching History article
Matthew Bradshaw shares the early, tentative efforts of his history department to shape a new Key Stage 3 workscheme in the light of the 2008 National Curriculum for England. While his department's scheme is designed to secure progression in all conceptual areas, he chooses to focus here on the concept...
Drilling down: how one history department is working towards progression in pupils' thinking about diversity across Years 7, 8 and 9
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New alchemy or fatal attraction? History and citizenship
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
The citizenship curriculum at both Key Stages 3 and 4 is currently being redefined and much has been said recently about the contribution that history could or should make to citizenship agendas and to the...
New alchemy or fatal attraction? History and citizenship
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The Dilemma of Senator Williams
IJHLTR Article
Abstract
The titled “Senator Williams, Do You Vote For or Against on the Diego Resolution before Senate” encourages students to engage in historical empathy and critical inquiry on the possible military intervention in the small hypothetical country of Ersatz. The Diego Resolution asks the Senate to endorse the President’s plan to move a...
The Dilemma of Senator Williams
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Opportunities, challenges and questions: continual assessment in Year 9
Teaching History article
Our means of assessment might pose a problem. History teachers regularly set specific targets, with implicit or explicit reference to National Curriculum Levels, which are designed to move our pupils on and make them better historians. How, though, are we to prevent them from achieving their targets in a rather...
Opportunities, challenges and questions: continual assessment in Year 9
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A hankering for the blank spaces: enabling the very able to explore the limits of GCSE
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Many of us would love to have the problems encountered by Oliver Knight at his previous school. His students were simply doing too well - leaving him wondering how to stretch them to the limit...
A hankering for the blank spaces: enabling the very able to explore the limits of GCSE
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Polychronicon 130: Dental, transcendental, regimental: Making Mangal Pandey
Teaching History feature
Have you stuggled to find an invigorating, exciting local enquiry to motivate your Year 9 class ? How do you engage students in lively debate? This was the challenge for one Norfolk school who wanted to develop a local study on the Poor Law and to create opportunities for students...
Polychronicon 130: Dental, transcendental, regimental: Making Mangal Pandey
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Film: The life and legend of the Sultan Saladin
Article
Jonathan Phillips’s 2020 HA Virtual Conference keynote talk on The life and legend of the Sultan Saladin reveals how a man initially branded as ‘the son of Satan’ became so esteemed in Europe and, through extensive new research, we will follow how his character and achievements have acted as a role model for...
Film: The life and legend of the Sultan Saladin
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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
Teaching History 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. He showed that precisely-worded enquiry questions, positioned thoughtfully across the Key Stage, help to ensure progression, challenge and coherence. His picturesque image for this...
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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Using ancient texts to improve pupils' critical thinking
Teaching History article
Did Alexander really ask, ‘Do I appear to you to be a bastard?' Using ancient texts to improve pupils' critical thinking
Beth Baker and Steven Mastin make the case for teaching ancient history in the post-14 curriculum. Pointing out the damaging messages that could be conveyed by assuming that ancient...
Using ancient texts to improve pupils' critical thinking
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Podcast Series: Ancient British and Irish Pagan Religion
Ancient British and Irish Pagan Religion
In this podcast Professor Ronald Hutton of the University of Bristol looks at Ancient British and Irish Pagan Religion.
Podcast Series: Ancient British and Irish Pagan Religion
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Film: Heligoland: Britain, Germany, and the Struggle for the North Sea
Article
Professor Jan Rüger joined the Virtual Branch on 9th February 2023 to talk about his book Heligoland: Britain, Germany, and the Struggle for the North Sea, tracing a rich history of contact and conflict from the Napoleonic Wars to the Cold War.
For generations this North Sea island expressed a German...
Film: Heligoland: Britain, Germany, and the Struggle for the North Sea
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The History of Afro-Brazilian People
IJHLTR Article
International Journal of Historical Learning, Teaching and Research [IJHLTR], Volume 15, Number 1 – Autumn/Winter 2017ISSN: 14472-9474
Abstract
This work is part of the following research projects: ‘Indians, Quilombolas, and Napalm’ funded by the Ministry of Education (MEC/CAPES-Brazil), and ‘Teaching-learning methodology and evaluation in controversial social issues of humanities and its...
The History of Afro-Brazilian People
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Cooperative Learning: the place of pupil involvement in a history textbook
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Pupil involvement is at the heart of every good history lesson. Its planning ensures that pupils are given the opportunity to think for themselves, share ideas, discuss evidence and debate points. The history education community...
Cooperative Learning: the place of pupil involvement in a history textbook
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Recorded webinar: John F. Kennedy and the Vietnam War
An enduring counterfactual
Would US President John F. Kennedy have avoided the catastrophe that became the Vietnam War if Lee Harvey Oswald had not assassinated him in Dallas on that fateful day of 22 November 1963? This question – or a version of it – has animated discussions of the Vietnam War for...
Recorded webinar: John F. Kennedy and the Vietnam War
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Virtual Branch Recording: The East India Company and Empire
Foundations and Memory
What can the early history of the English East India Company tell us about the foundations of the British Empire, and where does that history sit within current debates about Britain’s imperial legacy? In this session Mark Williams offers a timely insight into the history of one of the most significant...
Virtual Branch Recording: The East India Company and Empire
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Polychronicon 128: The Death of Captain Cook
Teaching History feature
In popular perception, anthropologists and historians cut very different figures. The anthropologist, a hybrid of Indiana Jones and a Kiplingesque colonial official, wears a bush hat or pith helmet and tirelessly trudges up mountains or hacks through jungle in search of lost tribes and ancient, unchanging, folklore. The historian, a...
Polychronicon 128: The Death of Captain Cook
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Learning from the Aftermath of the Holocaust
Article
International Journal of Historical Learning, Teaching and Research [IJHLTR], Volume 14, Number 2 – Spring/Summer 2017
ISSN: 14472-9474
Abstract
In this article I seek to encourage those involved in Holocaust education in schools to engage not just with the Holocaust but also with its aftermath. I conceptualise the latter in terms of two...
Learning from the Aftermath of the Holocaust
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Harnessing the power of community to expand students’ historical horizons
Teaching History article
Many history teachers will already be familiar with ‘meanwhile, elsewhere...’, a website offering freely downloadable homework resources on individuals, events and developments in world history. In this article the website’s creators, Richard Kennett and Will Bailey-Watson, set out a curricular rationale for the project. They argue that using homework tasks...
Harnessing the power of community to expand students’ historical horizons
