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Slaying dragons and sorcerers in Year 12: in search of historical argument
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Reflecting on his GCSE and post-16 students' essays, Michael Fordham began to wonder if there were something missing in the way he taught students to write. Work on structure that was designed to strengthen argument...
Slaying dragons and sorcerers in Year 12: in search of historical argument
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Relevant, rigorous and revisited: using local history to make meaning of historical significance
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
The idea of engaging pupils with the relevance of local memorials is becoming commonplace in the history classroom. In Teaching History 109, Examining History Edition, Dale Banham's pupils used First World War memorials to assess...
Relevant, rigorous and revisited: using local history to make meaning of historical significance
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The International Journal Volume 6
Journal
Articles
Isabel Barca and Helena PintoHow Children Make Sense of Historic Streets: Walking through Downtown Guimaraes
Min Fui CheeTraining Teachers for the Effective Use of Museums
Terrie EpsteinThe Effects of Family/Community and School Discourses on Children's and Adolescents' Interpretations of United States History
David GerwinObject Lessons: Teachers,...
The International Journal Volume 6
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Revolutionaries In Europe: 1815-1848
Classic Pamphlet
In the three and a half decades which followed the defeat of Napoleon, conspiracy, riot and revolt were constant features of the European scene. No prison was storng enough to prevent Blanqui from plotting, no place of excile distant enough to seperate Mazzini from his revolutionary agents. Cities were insubordinate,...
Revolutionaries In Europe: 1815-1848
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Cultivating curiosity about complexity
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
A great deal has been written recently about the importance of encouraging and enabling all students to read beyond their comfort zones, beyond the textbook and certainly beyond the obvious requirements of an examination specification....
Cultivating curiosity about complexity
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Virtual Branch Recording: Crusader Criminals
Article
The religious wars of the Crusades are renowned for their military engagements. But the period was witness to brutality beyond the battlefield. More so than any other medieval war zone, the Holy Land was rife with unprecedented levels of criminality and violence.
In the first history of its kind, Steve Tibble explores...
Virtual Branch Recording: Crusader Criminals
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Who inherits the house? Using heritage to shape pupils’ thinking about historical significance
Teaching History article
Reflecting on the reasons why generic models for teaching historical significance are never quite adequate, Rachel Foster found herself considering, instead, the specific contexts in which arguments about historical significance arise. These reflections took her to the fascinating example of stately homes. Drawing on scholarship such as that of Peter...
Who inherits the house? Using heritage to shape pupils’ thinking about historical significance
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Teaching History 197: Public History
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
03 Editorial (Read article)
04 HA Secondary News
06 HA Update: Talk more to write better
08 Beyond and behind the ‘quiet bus lady’: tracing the popular memory of Rosa Parks with Year 9 – Ed Durbin (Read article)
16 Who inherits the house? Using heritage to shape pupils’ thinking about...
Teaching History 197: Public History
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Virtual Branch Recording: Humans
The 300,000 year struggle for equality
In this Virtual Branch talk, Dr Alvin Finkel challenges claims that egalitarian, peaceful societies disappeared with the founding of agriculture or with the founding of state-level social organisation.
Different authors have suggested that early human society was essentially egalitarian in nature, with hierarchies only later becoming common. The point at which...
Virtual Branch Recording: Humans
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Virtual Branch Recording: Vagabonds versus the Mendicity Society
Article
Red Lion Square was long one of London's most genteel addresses, home to nobles, scholars, and professionals. But on 25 March 1818, one house on the south side opened its doors to quite another class of person, as the Mendicity Society began its business. Set up to solve the growing...
Virtual Branch Recording: Vagabonds versus the Mendicity Society
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Recorded Webinar: Philip IV
Decline, decadence and the end of the Golden Age
Decline, decadence, crisis, stagnation, and adversity are terms powerfully associated with the reign of Spain’s Planet King; sombre tones that contrast sharply with the glittering cultural and artistic achievements (enhanced by his patronage) that led the period to be dubbed ‘the’ Golden Age, a label consciously competing with France’s later...
Recorded Webinar: Philip IV
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Virtual Branch Recording: Henry III and Simon de Montfort
Article
David Carpenter brings to life the dramatic events in the last phase of Henry III’s momentous reign, provides a fresh account of the king’s strenuous efforts to recover power and sheds new light on the rebel figure Simon de Montfort.
Professor David Carpenter is a Professor of Medieval History at King's College...
Virtual Branch Recording: Henry III and Simon de Montfort
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Disability history resources
Article
Disabled people are part of the fabric of every society past and present, yet the stories, achievements and struggles of disabled people have often been hidden or marginalised by societies who refuse to adapt. Coping with disability, societal attitudes towards disability and the stories, voices and contributions of disabled people...
Disability history resources
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Year 7 challenge stereotypes about the Mexica
Teaching History article
After discussing a new book about the Mexica (Aztecs) during a routine meeting with a trainee teacher, Niamh Jennings decided to construct a sequence of lessons around the history of the Mexica Empire. Struck by the vivid storytelling of historian Camilla Townsend in her book Fifth Sun, and fascinated by...
Year 7 challenge stereotypes about the Mexica
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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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Upwards till Lepanto
Article
Ottoman society centred on the Sultan. He was lawgiver, religious official, leader in battle-and until the late sixteenth century an active field commander on campaign. The Law of Fratricide of Mehmet (Mohammed) II, 1451-81, urged each new Sultan to kill his brothers in order to produce a capable ruler and...
Upwards till Lepanto
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Move Me On 192: analytical focus with diverse histories
Teaching History feature
Move Me On is designed to build critical, informed debate about the character of teacher training, teacher education and professional development. It is also designed to offer practical help to all involved in training new history teachers. Each issue presents a situation in initial teacher education/training with an emphasis upon...
Move Me On 192: analytical focus with diverse histories
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Film: Living with Violence at the End of the British Empire
Age of Emergency
In the 1950s, Britain fought a series of brutal wars against insurgents in the colonies of Malaya, Kenya, and Cyprus. How did people at home experience these wars? How did they learn about the use of torture and other unsettling tactics? And how did they respond to this knowledge?
In...
Film: Living with Violence at the End of the British Empire
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Using eighteenth-century material culture to develop evidential thinking in Year 8
Teaching History article
It seems that teapots really can talk. Eleanor Dimond took her undergraduate experience of studying material culture into the classroom, with startling results. Historians of material culture have developed distinctive evidential methods which, in stark contrast to typical GCSE and A-Level approaches, see a strong interplay between analysis of the physical attributes...
Using eighteenth-century material culture to develop evidential thinking in Year 8
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Fifties Britain through the senses: ‘never had it so good’?
Teaching History article
Maya Stiasny was faced with difficulties familiar to many of us. Her new Year 12 students were struggling to get to grips with a new period of history. They were not interrogating primary sources with sufficient vigour. Her solution, detailed here, was novel. Working on the rich social history of post-war...
Fifties Britain through the senses: ‘never had it so good’?
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Recorded webinar: Teaching the 'People's History' of the Munich Crisis
Mental health, class, gender and diversity
Professor Julie Gottlieb has written extensively on inter-war British political and gender history, and her more recent work has provided alternative perspectives on seemingly settled debates in the historiography of British foreign policy and the history of appeasement. Through the lens of women/gender, social history, and now psychology/emotion, she argues for a...
Recorded webinar: Teaching the 'People's History' of the Munich Crisis
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Film: A short history of Islamic thought
Article
In his book of the same name, A short history of Islamic thought, Dr Fitzroy Morrissey provides a concise introduction to the origins and sources of Islamic thought, from its beginnings in the 7th century to the current moment.
In this talk he explores the major ideas and introduces the...
Film: A short history of Islamic thought
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Developing KS3 students’ ability to challenge their history curriculum through an early introduction of significance
Teaching History article
Offered five weeks to teach ‘whatever he wanted’ to Year 7, Andrew Slater decided that he wished to tackle the concept of significance head-on early in his students’ time in his school. He chose the expectedly unfamiliar substantive content of the Khmer Empire, challenging his students to justify the significance of...
Developing KS3 students’ ability to challenge their history curriculum through an early introduction of significance
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Recorded Webinar: Nineteenth-century crime and punishment
Article
This webinar with Dr Emma D Watkins explores the changing understanding of crime and responses to it in the nineteenth-century. It provides a brief overview on the general shift from punishment of the body, to banishment, all the way through to imprisonment.
With a particular emphasis on the use of...
Recorded Webinar: Nineteenth-century crime and punishment
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Investigating ‘sense of place’ with Year 9 pupils
Teaching History article
Confined to his home during lockdown in 2020, teacher Josh Mellor became eager to explore the history of the physical environment on his doorstep. After reading about different approaches to using environmental history in the classroom, Mellor decided to design an enquiry to explore the changing landscape of the Fens in...
Investigating ‘sense of place’ with Year 9 pupils