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Teaching Red Scarf Girl
Article
Facing History and Ourselves is excited to announce a new study guide. Teaching Red Scarf Girl has been developed to help classrooms explore essential Facing History themes, including conformity, obedience, prejudice and justice. Red Scarf Girl, Ji-li Jiang's engaging memoir, provides an insightful window into the first tumultuous years of...
Teaching Red Scarf Girl
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The Personal Rule of Charles I 1629-40
Classic Pamphlet
Historians are often accused of viewing the past with hindsight, or of being wise after the event. Not being prophets or soothsayers, we have to look backwards in time because we cannot look forwards. The real question is from what vantage point or perspective we view a particular part of...
The Personal Rule of Charles I 1629-40
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The Eighteenth Century in Britain: Long or Short?
Article
W. A. Speck reviews an historical debate central to the interpretation of the eighteenth century in Britain. Few British historians treat the eighteenth century as consisting simply of the hundred years from 1701 to 1800. Until recently political historians tended to end it in 1783. Many textbooks reflect this treatment...
The Eighteenth Century in Britain: Long or Short?
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Recorded webinar: Britain's eighteenth-century tradition of popular riot and protest
Article
Eighteenth-century Britons were ruled by a restricted oligarchy of landowners and plutocrats. Yet the wider population had a proud tradition of assertiveness and readiness to protest. ‘Britons never will be slaves!’ as the chorus of 'Rule Britannia' (1740) announced pointedly (if somewhat ironically, in view of Britain’s role in the...
Recorded webinar: Britain's eighteenth-century tradition of popular riot and protest
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Film: Lenin's legacy
Film Series: Power and authority in Russia and the Soviet Union
With his body was embalmed and building high statues were erected to him Lenin’s memory seemed secured for ever. Yet how did his memory and his actual legacy differ? Did he really set the course for a future better Russia, or were his ideas of revolution better on paper than...
Film: Lenin's legacy
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Film: Lenin and the Russian Civil War
Film Series: Power and authority in Russia and the Soviet Union
Revolution is never simple. Lenin and the Bolsheviks quickly found that not everyone in Russia or outside of it approved of their new radical agenda. Russia was plunged into a civil war of devastating circumstances. How would its new leader manage and how much were the needs of the people...
Film: Lenin and the Russian Civil War
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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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Film: Stalin - Early Life
Film Series: Power and authority in Russia and the Soviet Union
Joseph Stalin was born Joseph Besarionis dze Jughashvili in 1878 into a poor family in Gori, Georgia, part of the then Russian Empire. Stalin attended the Tbilisi Spiritual Seminary while his own radicalism grew, before joining the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. He edited the party's newspaper, Pravda, and raised funds for Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik faction through...
Film: Stalin - Early Life
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Film: Stalin - Rise to Power
Film Series: Power and authority in Russia and the Soviet Union
In this film, Professor James Harris (University of Leeds) discusses how interpretations have changed over the years regarding Stalin’s rise to power, and his transformation from rural Georgian to the ‘Man of Steel’ – Stalin. For many years, western interpretations were strongly influenced by his rival Trotsky, who defined Stalin...
Film: Stalin - Rise to Power
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Cunning Plan 183: Teaching a broader Britain, 1625–1714
Teaching History feature
‘Gruesome!’ was how we decided to describe our teaching of seventeenth-century British history, although ‘inadequate’ was probably more accurate. Oh, how much was wrong! We had…
Incoherence. The Civil War and Protectorate years plonked in between the Elizabethan Age and the origins of the industrial revolution. We had lost years!
A...
Cunning Plan 183: Teaching a broader Britain, 1625–1714
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Early Modern Britain 1509-1745
HA Secondary Resources (Key Stage 3)
While the 2014 Curriculum sets out the broad focus of each particular content area, considerable choice has been left to history departments in determining which particular events or developments to include and how they can best 'combine overview and depth studies to help pupils understand both the long arc of...
Early Modern Britain 1509-1745
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CARGO Classroom: digital resources for diverse histories
Visionary leaders of African and African Diaspora descent
To address the urgent need for digital learning resources, and to address the imbalance of perspectives in the History curriculum, CARGO Classroom is now providing multimedia learning tools for Key Stage 3 History via a freely accessible, interactive website: cargomovement.org/classroom
“CARGO is about doing. We talk a lot. We talk about...
CARGO Classroom: digital resources for diverse histories
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Cunning Plan 152.2: using Gillray’s cartoons with Year 8
Teaching History feature
The past 30 years have seen a general revival in scholarly activity relating to ‘all aspects of 18th-century British history'. However, this increase in academic study, which has broadly coincided with the introduction and development of the National Curriculum in England, has not resulted in the period being studied in great...
Cunning Plan 152.2: using Gillray’s cartoons with Year 8
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Virtual Branch Recording: Rebellion and Resistance of the Enslaved in the Atlantic World
Article
This talk explored the struggle for liberation from the perspective of the enslaved, wherever possible in their own words. Dr Sudhir Hazareesingh shines a light on the lives of revolutionaries like Toussaint Louverture, José Antonio Aponte, Nat Turner, and the pregnant rebel Solitude; touching on the stories of the freed...
Virtual Branch Recording: Rebellion and Resistance of the Enslaved in the Atlantic World
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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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The Evolution of the British Electoral System 1832-1987
Classic Pamphlet
During the last 20 years our perspective on the great Victorian question of parliamentary reform has noticeably changed. We have acquired a comprehensive picture of the organisation and political socialisation of those who won the vote; and some interesting debates have developed about the social characteristics of the electors and...
The Evolution of the British Electoral System 1832-1987
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The Origins of Mass Society: Speech, Sex and Drink in Urbanising Britain, 1780-1870
Virtual Branch Lecture Recording
Professor Peter Mandler is the current president of the Historical Association. As part of our 'presidents season' for the HA Virtual Branch he gave a fascinating talk on The Origins of Mass Society: Speech, Sex and Drink in Urbanising Britain, 1780-1870.
In this talk he explores the impact of the changes in...
The Origins of Mass Society: Speech, Sex and Drink in Urbanising Britain, 1780-1870
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Polychronicon 139: Civic denouncer: The lives of Pavlik Morozov
Teaching History feature
Germaine Greer (in the context of the Pirelli Calendar) once commented that the defining feature of a legend was that almost nothing said and believed about it was true. Pavlik Morozov, notorious both inside Russia and internationally for having denounced his father, almost certainly never did so. In September 1932, local...
Polychronicon 139: Civic denouncer: The lives of Pavlik Morozov
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English Puritanism
Classic Pamphlet
When the modern world was christened Puritanism appeared as a bad fairy and bestowed upon it certain dubious gifts: capitalism, democracy, America. This is a fairy story, but like all fairy stories it contains a small grain of truth. But what was Puritanism? Already in the seventeenth century a critic...
English Puritanism
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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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Napoleon III and the French Second Empire
Article
The French Second Empire has been variously described as a precursor of Twentieth Century Fascism and a prime example of a modernising regime. Roger Price continues recents efforts to achieve a more balanced assessment by setting the regime within its particular social and political context. The origins of the Second...
Napoleon III and the French Second Empire
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Cunning Plan 151: When and for whom has 1688 been 'Glorious'?
Teaching History feature
This enquiry is about how interpretations are formed and why they change. It aims to show Year 9, right at the end of their study of British history, the ways in which meanings of 1688 have shifted over time. It will test students' knowledge and strengthen their chronology of 300...
Cunning Plan 151: When and for whom has 1688 been 'Glorious'?
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Teaching History 201: Interpreting the Past
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
03 Editorial (Read article)
04 HA Secondary News
06 HA Update: SEND matters
08 Working 9–5: how painters, plumbers and programmers help our pupils understand the role of the historian – Jessie Phillips and Sarah Jackson-Buckley (Read article)
18 What use is the myth of Winston Churchill? Teaching Year 9...
Teaching History 201: Interpreting the Past
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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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Recorded webinar: Secondary history and the climate crisis
Article
How might we integrate a focus on our relationship with the natural world through time in our existing curriculum? Why should we teach about key turning points in human history that have shaped this relationship in profound ways? What is history's role in explaining how we got to this point? ...
Recorded webinar: Secondary history and the climate crisis
