-
Artefacts in history education
Article
In history when we say objects we mean artefacts, that is, things made by people rather than natural objects. They provide archaeological evidence and can have various forms, from something tiny like a button to a huge building or ruins. The most ordinary objects can yield much historical evidence and...
Artefacts in history education
-
History, artefacts and storytelling in the 2011 primary curriculum
Primary History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
This article will argue that although history can seem a ‘hard' discipline for young children, it can be made accessible and exciting through telling stories about objects. The article does not contain advice about obtaining objects:...
History, artefacts and storytelling in the 2011 primary curriculum
-
‘This extract is no good, Miss!’
Journal article
Frustrated that her A-level students were being overly dismissive when asked to judge the convincingness of academic historians’ arguments, Paula Worth drew on previous history-teacher research and theories of history for inspiration. After noting that her students would unjustly reject esteemed historians’ accounts for lack of comprehensiveness, Worth explains here...
‘This extract is no good, Miss!’
-
Reading? What reading?
Journal article
Discussions with sixth-form students about reading led Carolyn Massey and Paul Wiggin to start a sixth-formreading group. They describe here the series of themed sessions that they planned, and the student discussion and reflections that resulted. Listening to their students discuss their reading led Massey and Wiggin to reflect on what is meant by ‘reading around’ the subject, and its role in students’ intellectual...
Reading? What reading?
-
Progression and coherence in history
Primary History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
"The focus for much of the planning and the teaching is on pockets of knowledge at basic levels. Thus, the notion that pupils can progress and do better over time in history is not well established...
Progression and coherence in history
-
Integration and cross-curricularity: History, Humanities And Social Studies
Primary History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
From the late 1960s until 1989 history was almost universally taught in primary schools as an element in integrated crosscurricular programmes, normally social studies or humanities.
The 1989/1990 National Curriculum: History radically changed this. It introduced...
Integration and cross-curricularity: History, Humanities And Social Studies
-
Two women linked across three thousand years of history
Primary History article
16 May 1976 – a warm sunny day as Zheng was to recall – began as a typical day on site and ended with a remarkable discovery. Zheng Zhenxiang was leading an archaeological team at Yinxu, Anyang in China looking for evidence of tombs from the Shang Dynasty period. This...
Two women linked across three thousand years of history
-
Sir William Capell and a Royal Chain: The Afterlives (and Death) of King Edward V
History journal blog
This blog post and interview complement the first view publication of the author's History journal article: ‘Sir William Capell and a Royal Chain: the Afterlives (and Death) of King Edward V’.
The disappearance in 1483 of King Edward V and his brother Richard, duke of York - the 'Princes in the Tower' -...
Sir William Capell and a Royal Chain: The Afterlives (and Death) of King Edward V
-
Investigating the Indus Valley (2600-1900 B.C.)
Primary History article
In 1924 The Illustrated London News broke the story of a sensational discovery in the Indian subcontinent. Ruined mounds at Mohenjodaro and Harappa, 600 km apart, were forgotten cities of a lost civilisation. Nearly all we know about the Indus Civilisation comes from archaeology. What survives leaves many unanswered questions,...
Investigating the Indus Valley (2600-1900 B.C.)
-
Questions and answers about questions and answers
Teaching History article
Intrigued by the wide range of pupils’ responses to a sourcebased essay question, Jonathan Sellin decided to investigate why pupils were using sources in such different ways. Probing his own philosophical assumptions about history, and how they have changed over time, prompted Sellin to explore pupils’ assumptions about how historians use sources to make claims about the past. By asking pupils to...
Questions and answers about questions and answers
-
The Duchy of Courland and a Baltic colonial venture across the ocean
Historian article
The Duchy of Courland’s attempts to establish outposts in the Caribbean and Africa were not the only Baltic ventures across the Atlantic during the seventeenth century. However, the expeditions of the small vassal dukedom were possibly the most unlikely. The article introduces the motivations behind the Couronian colonial project, as...
The Duchy of Courland and a Baltic colonial venture across the ocean
-
Inverting the telescope: investigating sources from a different perspective
Teaching History article
As historians, we are dependent on evidence, which comes in many varieties. Rosalind Stirzaker here introduces a project which she ran two years ago to encourage her students to think about artefacts in a different way. They have examined randomly preserved artefacts such as those of Pompeii, and sets of...
Inverting the telescope: investigating sources from a different perspective
-
1066: The Limits of our Knowledge
Historian article
As the most pivotal and traumatic event in English history, the Norman Conquest continues to generate controversy and debate, especially among those who know little about it or enjoy passing judgement on the past. Who had the better claim to the English throne, William the Conqueror or Harold Godwineson? Was...
1066: The Limits of our Knowledge
-
Ofsted consultation – the HA response
30th April 2019
It is important that Ofsted responds to teachers' and schools' concerns and thoughts and updates its procedures. That is a key reason why we have been happy to draw together the thoughts of the history teaching community to the recent Ofsted public consultation. Much of what they are proposing to...
Ofsted consultation – the HA response
-
History Abridged: Libraries
Historian feature
History Abridged: This feature seeks to take a person, event or period and abridge, or focus on, an important event or detail that can get lost in the big picture. See all History Abridged articles
The collecting of stories through written record is one of the most important methods societies...
History Abridged: Libraries
-
Teaching the Historic Environment
Guidance for teaching the Historic Environment in new GCSE courses
The GCSE History criteria specify that the courses should cover three geographical contexts: local, British and European/wider world. The requirement to include some local history has been developed into the study of a locality in its Historic Environment. This has been developed in four different ways by the Awarding bodies...
Teaching the Historic Environment
-
On the frontlines of teaching the history of the First World War
Teaching History article
It is very common for people in politics and the media to make assumptions about what happens in history classrooms. Too often these preconceptions are based on little more than anecdote, examples from the Internet or memories of what someone experienced at school themselves.
In this article, Catriona Pennell reports...
On the frontlines of teaching the history of the First World War
-
On-demand webinar series: Avoiding confusion and challenging misconceptions in primary history
HA webinar series for primary teachers and history subject leaders
This practical series of webinars will identify what confuses pupils in primary history and how such confusion and misconceptions can be avoided and challenged. Through examples of careful planning and activities it will show how pupils can develop an accurate and nuanced understanding of chronology and change, cause and consequence,...
On-demand webinar series: Avoiding confusion and challenging misconceptions in primary history
-
Webinar series: Developing students’ historical thinking at A-level
HA webinar series for subject leaders and teachers of history at KS5
What does this series cover?
This webinar series will help you to support your A-level students to gain detailed knowledge of particular periods and to engage in rigorous historical thinking. The topics covered will include building students’ knowledge, developing students’ disciplinary understanding in order to help them construct arguments in...
Webinar series: Developing students’ historical thinking at A-level
-
Who's afraid of the Big Bad Bronze Age?
Primary History article
It’s September 1992 and in Dover archaeologists from the Canterbury Archaeological Trust are working alongside construction workers when six metres below ground they find some waterlogged planks. Thankfully, an expert in maritime archaeology is on site and he recognises that this could be a lot more than abandoned timber. Uncovering...
Who's afraid of the Big Bad Bronze Age?
-
Welsh archers at Agincourt: myth and reality
Historian article
Adam Chapman debates the evidence for a Welsh presence among Henry V’s highly-successful force of archers at Agincourt in 1415.
Michael Drayton, in his poem of 1627, The Bataille of Agincourt, described the Welsh presence in Henry V's army: ‘who no lesse honour ow'd To their own king, nor yet...
Welsh archers at Agincourt: myth and reality
-
Teaching History 195: Perspectives in Time
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
03 Editorial (Read article)
04 HA Secondary News
06 Disembarking the religious rollercoaster: a new ‘direction’ for studying the consequences of the Reformation – Sarah Jackson-Buckley and Jessie Phillips (Read article)
18 ‘Public guardians, bold yet wary’? How visual evidence reflects change and continuity in attitudes to the police in...
Teaching History 195: Perspectives in Time
-
The Power of Context: using a visual source
Teaching History article
Drawing on her wealth of experience and expertise in using visual sources in the classroom, in this article Jane Card explores how a single painting, a portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay and her cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray, might form the basis for a sequence of lessons.
Arguing that although highly...
The Power of Context: using a visual source
-
New, Novice or Nervous? 160: Progression in evidential understanding
Teaching History feature
You have a wealth of fascinating sources you would love to explore with students but despair at their seeming inability to connect ‘source work' with the construction of historical claims. Year 7 get stuck in the ‘it's biased so we can never know' trap again and again. Year 9 students...
New, Novice or Nervous? 160: Progression in evidential understanding
-
Anything but enlightened: child slavery in the Roman world
Historian article
Through evidence and models, Ulrike Roth explores the role of child slavery in ancient Rome.
Ancient Rome has been a source of inspiration throughout the ages. Some of the most remarkable thinkers in human history have drawn on one or other of Roman society’s great achievements. The profound reflection on,...
Anything but enlightened: child slavery in the Roman world
