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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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Recorded Webinar: Robespierre and Danton: Heroes of the French Revolution?
Article
One of the oldest myths of the French Revolution is the lethal rivalry between Robespierre and Danton: Robespierre the cold, bloodthirsty dictator who ruled France through Terror, versus Danton, the warm, humane, inspirational orator who wanted to stop Terror. Throughout the 19th century Robespierre was mostly depicted as a villain,...
Recorded Webinar: Robespierre and Danton: Heroes of the French Revolution?
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American Liberalism: The Career of a Concept
Podcast
Jonathan Bell: Senior Lecturer and Head of the Department of History at the University of Reading.What historians have come to term ‘liberalism' in an American context has taken on numerous meanings that provide a lens through which to examine broad trends in US history across the twentieth century. From the...
American Liberalism: The Career of a Concept
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Muslim Rescuers of the Holocaust CPD
CPD Unit
This CPD unit focuses on the experience of Muslim rescuers during the Holocaust and the Second World War. It was written by Andrew Wrenn, Cambridgeshire Humanities Advisor, to complement another unit published earlier on this website called Muslim Tommies which dealt with the experience of Muslim soldiers fighting for Britain...
Muslim Rescuers of the Holocaust CPD
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Teaching History 106: Citizens and Communities
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
This edition deals with the complex debate about whether history should be taught for intrinsic or extrinsic reasons. Balancing the rationaland the emotional in the teaching of contentious topics, Historical significance, Local historical enquiry, Citizenship, Teaching political concepts to post-16 students and much more...
‘Don’t worry, Mr. Trimble. We can...
Teaching History 106: Citizens and Communities
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Joan of Arc: Woman Warrior, Witch
Branch Podcast
In 2011 Professor Anne Curry, President of the Historical Association, gave a lecture on Joan of Arc to the Swansea Branch. This is a podcast of that lecture.
Joan of Arc: Woman Warrior, Witch
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The role of takeaways in shaping a history curriculum
Teaching History article
Jonathan Grande explains how he and his department faced up to the paradox that teaching rich detail is vital for good historical learning and is vital for students to remember in the short term, but is not essential to remember for ever. This article sets out his exploration of why...
The role of takeaways in shaping a history curriculum
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What Have Historians Been Arguing About... the history of Australia
Teaching History feature
In 1968, in his Boyer Lectures, the anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner argued that Australia’s sense of its past, its collective memory, had been built on a state of forgetting:
It is a structural matter, a view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About... the history of Australia
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The Jews of Medieval England: on-demand short course
Online self-guided short course for lifelong learners
A Jewish community was established in England shortly after the Norman Conquest. Initially confined to London, from the 1130s onwards Jews began to settle in other parts of the country, where they lived as English Jews for more than two centuries. Their life in England came to an end in...
The Jews of Medieval England: on-demand short course
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Three strategies to support pupils’ study of historical significance
Teaching History article
When Paula Worth met with history-teaching colleagues to explore how they could improve their teaching about historical significance, she found that she was far from alone in finding the process a daunting one. Prompted to investigate the difficulties she had encountered, Worth realised that that she had previously reached for...
Three strategies to support pupils’ study of historical significance
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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
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The Coming of War in 1939
Classic Pamphlet
I. The Legacy of Versailles
The Outbreak of a second world war on 1 September 1939 might have been expected to produce in due course a great controversy on ‘war guilt'. But there has been nothing comparable with the debate which took place during the 1920s on the 1914 issues. The...
The Coming of War in 1939
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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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Copernicus and the Reformation of Astronomy
Classic Pamphlet
During the past four centuries, the processes of nature have come to be viewed in a new light through the progressive acquisition of the systematized, verifiable knowledge that we call science. The associated advances in technology have profoundly affected the circumstances of our daily lives, and have revolutionised the mutual...
Copernicus and the Reformation of Astronomy
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Recorded webinar: History teachers as teachers of reading
Developing confident readers and writers in the history classroom and beyond
Students and teachers can perceive literacy, particularly the challenges of extended reading and writing, to be a barrier to enjoyment of and success in history. Repeated lockdowns over the past two years have, despite teachers’ most creative and dedicated responses to remote learning, made it even harder to help children...
Recorded webinar: History teachers as teachers of reading
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Film: Making the most of your secondary membership
A guide to key support for individual and corporate secondary members
Film: Making the most of your secondary membership
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Should empathy come out of the closet?
Teaching History article
What is historical empathy and why is it important? What has gone wrong and what had gone right in past attempts to develop students' empathetic understanding? What does progression look like in this area of historical thinking and what are the preconceptions that can act as barriers to progression? Lee...
Should empathy come out of the closet?
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Illuminating the shadow: making progress happen in casual thinking through speaking and listening
Teaching History article
Here is another breath of fresh air from the Thomas Tallis history department. In TH 103, Head of Department Tony Hier showed how he developed a rigorous framework for implementing government initiatives and improving departmental professional discourse at the same time. This time, from history teacher Vaughan Clark, we get...
Illuminating the shadow: making progress happen in casual thinking through speaking and listening
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Monty’s school: the benign side of Viscount Montgomery of Alamein
Historian article
Field-Marshal Montgomery has a reputation as a strong-willed battle-hardened leader, with a touch of the impetuous. Few know of his charitable side and yet in his later years this side was just as important to his activities. In this article we find out a bit more of this often simplistically...
Monty’s school: the benign side of Viscount Montgomery of Alamein
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Making history curious: Using Initial Stimulus Material (ISM) to promote enquiry, thinking and literacy
Teaching History article
The idea of gaining pupils’ attention, interest and curiosity at the start of the lesson with an intriguing image, story, analogy or puzzle has long been used by our best history teachers. Michael Riley, through writing and inset, popularised the term ‘hook’ and emphasised its special role at the start...
Making history curious: Using Initial Stimulus Material (ISM) to promote enquiry, thinking and literacy
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Investigating students' prior understandings of the Holocaust
Teaching History article
Students make sense of new learning on the basis of their prior understandings: we cannot move our students' thinking on unless we understand what they already know. In this article, Edwards and O'Dowd report how they set out to scope a group of Y ear 8 students' prior learning and...
Investigating students' prior understandings of the Holocaust
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Arnold Wilkins: Pioneer of British Radar
Historian article
Whenever British radar is discussed the name that usually comes to mind is that of Robert Watson Watt. Our history books and our dictionaries of biography consistently attribute the discovery of radar in Britain solely to Watson Watt, with little or no mention of the key role played by his...
Arnold Wilkins: Pioneer of British Radar
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Bob Dylan and the concept of evidence
Teaching History article
No edition of Teaching History devoted to creativity could be complete without returning to the riches that popular songs offer to historians and history teachers alike. The five Bob Dylan songs that Christopher Edwards explores here are chosen not merely for their ‘literary qualities' and ‘emotional charge'; they also provide...
Bob Dylan and the concept of evidence
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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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Using diagrammatic representations of counterfactuals to develop causal reasoning
Teaching History article
Tom Bennett begins his article with a tale of a frustrating afternoon with Year 7. We’ve all been there. In his case, his frustration was caused by his finding a conceptual gap between how well his class wanted to do and the actual quality of their causal thinking. Bennett decided...
Using diagrammatic representations of counterfactuals to develop causal reasoning
