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Polychronicon 167: The strange career of Richard Nixon
Teaching History feature
If you know just one thing about the career of the 37th President of the United States, it is likely to be this: Watergate. Nixon’s resignation in August 1974 was caused by his decision to cover up a burglary at the Democratic Party’s campaign headquarters for the 1972 election, which...
Polychronicon 167: The strange career of Richard Nixon
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War Plan Red: the American Plan for war with Britain
Article
John Major discusses an astonishing aspect of past Anglo-American history. All great powers have developed contingency plans for war with each other, and the United States in the early twentieth century was no exception. Each of Washington’s schemes was given a distinctive colour. Green mapped out intervention in neighbouring Mexico,...
War Plan Red: the American Plan for war with Britain
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Active remembrance
Teaching History article
A year after the end of the First World War, George V stated: "I believe that my people in every part of the Empire fervently wish to perpetuate the memory of the Great Deliverance and those who laid down their lives to achieve it."
From that moment, the idea of large-scale remembrance...
Active remembrance
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Film: What a strange place to be buried
Virtual Branch Film
Anna Cusack joined the HA Virtual Branch to discuss unique burial locations in London c.1600-1800. Anna recently completed a PhD at Birkbeck, University of London on the marginal dead of seventeenth and eighteenth-century London, focusing specifically on suicides, executed criminals, Quakers, and Jews and the treatment of their bodily remains...
Film: What a strange place to be buried
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Cunning Plan 106: Political literacy
Teaching History feature
The onset of citizenship brings with it the need to cover political literacy. The topic can be seen as dry and complex by Year 9 pupils. But ‘democracy is not boring’ (Lang in Teaching History 96). We need to educate our pupils to understand the complexity and features of a...
Cunning Plan 106: Political literacy
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Witchcraft - Using fiction with Year 8s
Teaching History article
Which women were executed for witchcraft? And which pupils cared?
Paula Worth was concerned that her low-attaining set were only going through the motions when tackling causal explanation. Identifying, prioritising and weighing causes seemed an empty routine rather than a fascinating puzzle engaging intellect and imagination. She was also concerned...
Witchcraft - Using fiction with Year 8s
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Disciplining cross-curricularity?
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Why should we think in inter-disciplinary rather than cross-curricular terms when planning collaborative work with colleagues in other subjects? What scope is there for working in inter-disciplinary ways and what is the value of such...
Disciplining cross-curricularity?
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Year 8 and interpretations of the First World War
Teaching History article
Dan Smith was concerned that his pupils were drawing on over-simplified generalisations about different periods of the past when they were considering why interpretations change over time. This led him to consider how pupils’ contextual knowledge and chronological fluency might be used more explicitly in order to avoid weak generalisations...
Year 8 and interpretations of the First World War
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Polychronicon 162: Reinterpreting the May 1968 events in France
Teaching History feature
As Kristin Ross has persuasively argued, by the 1980s interpretations of the French events of May 1968 had shrunk to a narrow set of received ideas around student protest, labelled by Chris Reynolds a ‘doxa’. Media discourse is dominated by a narrow range of former participants labelled ‘memory barons’ –...
Polychronicon 162: Reinterpreting the May 1968 events in France
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Polychronicon 161: John Lilburne
Teaching History feature
John Lilburne might have been destined for obscurity in less interesting times. He was the second son of a minor gentry family, apprenticed to a London woollen merchant in 1632. It was his master’s connections that drew him into religious opposition to Charles I and the illegal book trade, resulting...
Polychronicon 161: John Lilburne
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Move Me On 161: Knowledge & Understanding
Teaching History feature
This issue’s problem: Caroline Herschel doesn’t really notice and respond effectively to what the lesson she has just taught reveals about students’ knowledge and understanding.
Caroline Herschel is a hard-working, conscientious trainee who is anxious to feel that she has got things ‘right’. She is well organised and plans lessons well...
Move Me On 161: Knowledge & Understanding
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Recorded webinar: Indian Suffragettes: women's activism in South Asia and beyond
Article
Between 1917 and 1947, women in the Indian subcontinent were engaged in active debates and noteworthy demonstrations for the vote, building up a national suffrage movement. In this talk Professor Sumita Mukherjee discusses the activities of Indian suffragettes in this period, showing how they were connected with British and other...
Recorded webinar: Indian Suffragettes: women's activism in South Asia and beyond
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Introductory film: Brezhnev - Interpretations
Part of the HA Interpretations Film Series: Power and authority in Russia and the Soviet Union
Log in below to preview the introductory film - available to all registered users of the website.
This open access introductory film forms part of our ongoing film series on Power and authority in Russia and the Soviet Union. All the films are available through the Student Zone with corporate secondary membership. ...
Introductory film: Brezhnev - Interpretations
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Duffy's devices: teaching Year 13 to read and write
Teaching History article
Rachel Ward’s intriguing title seems a little out of place in an edition on teaching the most able. The point she makes, though, is that even our very brightest post-16 students need to be encouraged both to engage with the historiography surrounding their course and to learn to write with...
Duffy's devices: teaching Year 13 to read and write
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Recorded Webinar: India and the Second World War
Article
Two-and-a-half million men from undivided India served the British during the Second World War. Their experiences are little remembered today, neither in the West where a Euro/US-centric memory of the war dominates, nor in South Asia, which privileges nationalist histories of independence from the British Empire. What was it like...
Recorded Webinar: India and the Second World War
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Empathy without illusions
Teaching History article
Empathy may have disappeared from official documents but the history teacher who does not still regularly think about it, plan for it and teach it would be hard to find. What is history if not, in part, an attempt to understand how people thought and felt in the past? This...
Empathy without illusions
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'You be Britain and I'll be Germany...' Inter-school e-mailing in Year 9
Teaching History article
E-mailing is fast becoming our preferred means of communication and for good reason. It is immediate: we can fire off a few lines and receive a reply within seconds. It is also flexible: unlike a telephone conversation, we do not have to reply there and then; we can go away...
'You be Britain and I'll be Germany...' Inter-school e-mailing in Year 9
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Engaging Year 9 students in party politics
Teaching History article
Sarah Black wanted to remedy Year 9's lack of knowledge about nineteenth-century politics. With just five lessons to work with, she decided to devise a sequence on Gladstone and Disraeli, shaping the sequence with an enquiry question that invited argument about change and continuity. Black analyses the status and function of different layers of knowledge within her sequence, evaluates the interaction...
Engaging Year 9 students in party politics
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Enabling Year 7 to write essays on Magna Carta
Teaching History article
Setting out to teach Magna Carta to the full attainment range in Year 7, Mark King decided to choose a question that reflected real scholarly debates and also to ensure that pupils held enough knowledge in long-term memory to be able to think about that question meaningfully. As he gradually prepared his pupils to produce their own causation arguments in response to that question, King was startled by...
Enabling Year 7 to write essays on Magna Carta
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The Harkness Method: achieving higher-order thinking with sixth-form
Teaching History article
Hark the herald tables sing! Achieving higher-order thinking with a chorus of sixth-form pupils
On 9 April 1930, a philanthropist called Edward Harkness donated millions of dollars to the Phillips Exeter Academy in the USA. He hoped that his donation could be used to find a new way for students to sit around a table...
The Harkness Method: achieving higher-order thinking with sixth-form
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Nazi perpetrators in Holocaust education
Teaching History article
The Holocaust is often framed, in textbooks and exam syllabi, from a perpetrator perspective as a narrative of Nazi policy. We are offered a different orientation here. Interrogating and understanding the Holocaust involves understanding why the people who perpetrated the Holocaust did the things that they did. As Wolf Kaiser...
Nazi perpetrators in Holocaust education
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Exploring and Teaching the Korean War
A secondary education publication of the Historical Association in partnership with the Korean War Legacy Foundation and World History Digital Education
The Korean War has been called ‘The Forgotten War’. Yet it was profoundly significant to the development of the Cold War. It had a cataclysmic impact on both North and South Korea which continues to affect both nations’ development to this day. And it continues to influence relationships between the...
Exploring and Teaching the Korean War
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Finding voices in the past: exploring identity through the biography of a house
Teaching History article
Heather De Silva, Jenny Smith and Jason Tranter outline a new study unit, planned jointly by their history and geography departments and designed specifically to meet the new requirements for local history required by England’s recently revised National Curriculum for history. They aimed to help pupils to capture a part...
Finding voices in the past: exploring identity through the biography of a house
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Move Me On 158: Modelling tasks
Teaching History feature
This issue's problem: Arthur Wellesley is struggling to model tasks effectively for students.
Arthur has made a positive start to his training, but remains rather nervous in the classroom. He recognises the importance of well-planned lessons and his outline plans generally have a clear, logical structure. His mentor thinks that he...
Move Me On 158: Modelling tasks
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Triumphs Show 158: interactive learning walls and substantive vocabulary
Teaching History feature
Year 10 use an interactive learning wall to cement their understanding of substantive vocabulary
It is the first term of their GCSE course and Year 10 are already starting to flag a little. They are enjoying studying the Russian Revolution, but are struggling to remember all the new words they...
Triumphs Show 158: interactive learning walls and substantive vocabulary
