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Power and Democracy - GCSE
Links to Articles & Podcasts
Power and Democracy
Power and Democracy - GCSE
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Women and power
Historian members' resource spotlight
Echoing the theme of the autumn issue of The Historian, this resource highlight examines aspects of the broad theme of women and power. We start by looking at some of the most overtly powerful women in history, from well-known Tudor monarchs to lesser-examined figures such as Æthelflæd. Power can be wielded in other...
Women and power
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Cunning Plan 94: Study Unit 2: Crowns, Parliaments and Peoples, 1500-1750
Article
Flesh and blood people bring history to life. Capture the interest of our Year 8 pupils by making sure they engage with human dilemmas and dangers. A focus on individual people as the starting point for enquiries helps pupils to tackle the ‘big' stories (overviews) and difficult concepts.
Cunning Plan 94: Study Unit 2: Crowns, Parliaments and Peoples, 1500-1750
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Polychronicon 126: Stonehenge
Teaching History feature
Secondary history ought to pay more attention to stones:
1. they are accessible, logistically and educationally, and highly instructive. The Neolithic is everywhere, and generally speaking, free2. venture outside the classroom, into real space or cyberspace, and you stumble into it eventually.3. Archaeological interpretation is an accessible way into aspects...
Polychronicon 126: Stonehenge
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Narrative: the under-rated skill
Teaching History article
‘Mere narrative’, ‘lapses into narrative’, ‘a narrative answer that fails to answer the question set’. These phrases flow in the blood of history teachers, from public examination criteria to regular classroom discourse. Whilst most of us use narrative in our teaching methods, we have demonised narrative in pupils’ written answers....
Narrative: the under-rated skill
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Move Me On 125: Lack of conceptual clarity
Teaching History feature
This Issue's Problem: Steve Cloye is over half way through his first main teaching placement and has been struggling with the PGCE. His degree was in American Studies, and although this included American history he lacks confidence in his subject knowledge, and particularly in his understanding of the nature of the...
Move Me On 125: Lack of conceptual clarity
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Triumphs Show 121: 60th Anniversary commemoration of the end of WWII
Teaching History feature
It’s early July 2004, and the history department of Harrogate Grammar School are chatting in the staff room enjoying a bit of spare time now that exam classes have disappeared. The subject of what the department will do next year when it comes to trips, speakers and special days comes...
Triumphs Show 121: 60th Anniversary commemoration of the end of WWII
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Ants and the Tet Offensive: teaching Year 11 to tell the difference
Article
The history department at Morpeth School in East London has improved performance at GCSE. The department has also done something unusual: it has abandoned coursework. This might seem a surprising decision but the rationale is interesting and clear. Arguably, the fundamental examination skills are identical to those needed for coursework...
Ants and the Tet Offensive: teaching Year 11 to tell the difference
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Edwardian England
Classic Pamphlet
The Edwardian era is still less than a lifetime away. Yet the memoirs of surviving Edwardians, written any time between the nineteen-twenties and the nineteen sixties, have often made it sound like a remote epoch. The years between the death of Queen Victoria in 1901 and the outbreak of the...
Edwardian England
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From ‘double vision’ to panorama: exploring interpretations of Nazi popularity
Teaching History article
Jim Carroll relished the opportunity, in the new A-level specification he was teaching, to find an effective way of teaching his students to analyse interpretations in their coursework essays. Reflecting on the difficulties he had faced as a trainee teacher teaching younger pupils about interpretations, and dissatisfied with examination board...
From ‘double vision’ to panorama: exploring interpretations of Nazi popularity
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Cunning Plan 167: teaching the industrial revolution
Teaching History article
‘Disastrous and terrible.’ For Arnold Toynbee, the historian who gave us the phrase ‘industrial revolution’, these three words sum up the period of dramatic technological change that took place in Britain across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We may not habitually use Toynbee’s description in the classroom, but it is...
Cunning Plan 167: teaching the industrial revolution
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‘You hear about it for real in school.’ Avoiding, containing and risk-taking in the classroom
Teaching History article
In this article, Alison Kitson and Alan McCully discuss the findings of their research into history teaching in the most divided part of the United Kingdom: Northern Ireland. Drawing on interviews with students and teachers, they consider what history teaching might contribute to an understanding of the current situation and...
‘You hear about it for real in school.’ Avoiding, containing and risk-taking in the classroom
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Our commitment to diversity
History of all for all
In summer 2020 the Historical Association in partnership with the The Royal Historical Society, The Institute of Historical Research, Runnymede Trust and Schools History Project established a steering group to review content and approaches in GCSE and A-Level History examination specifications and in the history curriculum generally. This was in response to...
Our commitment to diversity
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How Nelson Became a Hero
Article
The fittest man in the world for the command' of the Mediterranean, Lord Minto declared of Horatio Nelson on 24 April 1798, following Nelson's inventive assault on Spanish ships off Cape St. Vincent. 'Admiral Nelson's victory [at the Nile]… is one of the most glorious and comprehensive victories ever achieved...
How Nelson Became a Hero
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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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Nutshell
Article
This edition of 'Nutshell' discusses 'using Performance Management objectives to improve your history teaching'.
Nutshell
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'Really weird and freaky': using a Thomas Hardy short story as a source of evidence in the Year 8 classroom
Teaching History article
Can 25 so-called ‘low ability’ girls access 30 pages of difficult text? Yes, much more easily they can access the tiny, sanitised, made-easy ‘gobbets’ that they are normally exposed to in the name of ‘access’. Mary Woolley makes the point that boring texts are those that tell you only essential...
'Really weird and freaky': using a Thomas Hardy short story as a source of evidence in the Year 8 classroom
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A-Level Essay: To what extent does the art of the Edo period of Japan reflect the contentment of the classes within its society?
Article
The Edo period in Japanese history fell between the years 1600 and 1867, beginning when Tokugawa Ieyatsu, a daimyo (samurai lord), became the strongest power in Japan, and ending with Tokugawa Keiki’s abdication. The Tokugawas claimed the hereditary title of Shogun, supreme governor of Japan. (The emperor had become a...
A-Level Essay: To what extent does the art of the Edo period of Japan reflect the contentment of the classes within its society?
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Harold Son of Godwin
Classic Pamphlet
To lecture on Harold Godwinson, earl of Wessex, King Harold II of England, in the year 1966 at Hastings is a presumption. We appear to know much about him, and yet in fact there are many gaps in knowledge. Much information, so plausible at first sight, proves unreliable on closer...
Harold Son of Godwin
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Move Me On 106: Teaching AS level
Teaching History feature
This Issues Problem: Matilda Angevin, PGCE history student, is finding it hard to get to grips with teaching AS Level.
Move Me On 106: Teaching AS level
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Databases, spreadsheets, and historical enquiry at Key Stage 3
Teaching History article
Databases and spreadsheets used to terrify many history teachers and even where some skill was gained, these tools were approached in a spirit of professional worthiness rather than of intellectual excitement. Rob Alfano oozes intellectual excitement and it is pretty obvious that he communicates this to his pupils. His approaches...
Databases, spreadsheets, and historical enquiry at Key Stage 3
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Move Me On 109: Pressured into using teaching styles she is uncomfortable with
Teaching History feature
This Issue's Problem: Marie, PGCE history trainee, feels that she is being pressured into using teaching styles with which she feels uncomfortable.
Move Me On 109: Pressured into using teaching styles she is uncomfortable with
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New opportunities for history: implementing the citizenship curriculum in England's secondary schools - a QCA perspective
Teaching History article
In September 2002 Citizenship becomes a completely new subject in England’s secondary schools. Jerome Freeman, Principal Officer for History with the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) — the authority responsible for advising the British government on curriculum content and qualification standards in England - outlines QCA’s view on the connections...
New opportunities for history: implementing the citizenship curriculum in England's secondary schools - a QCA perspective
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History's future: facing the challenge
Teaching History article
Trevor Fisher argues that pressures on our subject are now so intense and multi-faceted that a wider coalition is necessary if history is to fight back. Our difficulties are compounded, he suggests, by a lack of consensus and by acute lack of knowledge about school history among those who produce...
History's future: facing the challenge
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Peter the Great
Classic Pamphlet
No European ruler except Napoleon I has impressed both contemporise and later historians so profoundly as Peter I of Russia by the originality and the personal character of his achievements. Like Napoleon, Peter appeared to some observers, at least in his later years, as almost more than human. He seemed...
Peter the Great
