Britain & Ireland 1901-present

War and conflict, technology, illness and medicine and the battle for civil and national rights have all been key elements of the 20th century through to today, thus, all of those themes and many more are explored in this section. Underpinning many of these articles and included here are articles exploring pedagogical issues, managing knowledge and transferring knowledge. Read more

Sort by: Date (Newest first) | Title A-Z
  • New approaches to teaching the History of Appeasement in the classroom

    Multipage Article

    This project has been created on the initiative of Professor Julie. V. Gottlieb, Dept. of History, University of Sheffield. British political history, political conflict, appeasement and the Munich Crisis (1938) itself is the focus of her research and publications. Rather than approach these topics from ‘traditional’, elite and history from...

    Click to view
  • Triumphs Show 193: Year 8 imagine the First World War trenches

    Article

    Deep into my PGCE year, I found myself discussing with my mentor how to pre-empt the barriers to understanding the past that students may face. One barrier we discussed was presentism: the tendency of students to interpret the past in light of their own modern knowledge, values and experiences. In particular, we considered...

    Click to view
  • What Have Historians Been Arguing About... youth culture?

    Article

    For such a boldly iconoclastic work, the Key Stage 3 textbook A New Focus on ... British Social History, c.1920–2000 (2023) provides a disarmingly conventional account of youth in the 1960s as ‘mostly better educated and informed than their parents had been at their age [and able] … to find...

    Click to view
  • Studying our own school’s archives to promote historical understanding in Year 7

    Article

    Helen Southwood here sets out an example of a hyperlocal history study the focus of which is her own school. She presents a rationale both for the study of hyperlocal history as a means of engaging students and developing their skills, and for the pedagogical use of previously uncatalogued school archives....

    Click to view
  • Fifties Britain through the senses: ‘never had it so good’?

    Article

    Maya Stiasny was faced with difficulties familiar to many of us. Her new Year 12 students were struggling to get to grips with a new period of history. They were not interrogating primary sources with sufficient vigour. Her solution, detailed here, was novel. Working on the rich social history of post-war...

    Click to view
  • Recorded Webinar: Nineteenth-century crime and punishment

    Article

    This webinar with Dr Emma D Watkins explores the changing understanding of crime and responses to it in the nineteenth-century. It provides a brief overview on the general shift from punishment of the body, to banishment, all the way through to imprisonment. With a particular emphasis on the use of...

    Click to view
  • Recorded webinar: Queer beyond London

    Article

    London has tended to dominate accounts of LGBTQ Britain… but how did local contexts beyond the capital affect queer identities and communities? This talk by Professor Matt Cook looks at Brighton, Plymouth, Manchester and Leeds to illustrate the difference locality makes to queer lives. * Please note: while this webinar...

    Click to view
  • Using Lesson Study to make microimprovements in teaching Year 8 how to use sources

    Article

    A highly distinctive and structured approach to teacher development, Lesson Study emerged in Japan but has since been adopted much more widely and now sees growing interest in the UK. Tony McConnell, Davinia Daley, Rebecca Levy, Lisa Waddell and Richard Waddington describe the process by which their school first investigated...

    Click to view
  • Triumphs Show: ‘The Strands of Memory’

    Article

    In 2014, a group of French pupils from Lycée Léopold Sédar Senghor in Évreux was due to meet a British Second World War veteran, Eric Rackham, to hear him talk about his war experiences. Sadly, he passed away before the planned meeting. Paradoxically, this failed meeting led to the development...

    Click to view
  • Investigating ‘sense of place’ with Year 9 pupils

    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...

    Click to view
  • Using oral history in the classroom

    Multipage Article

    The Oral History Society has kindly agreed to produce two new films aimed at history teachers who are new to carrying out or using oral histories either in their teaching or with students. These two films will equip teachers with the essential tools and knowledge for using and devising effective...

    Click to view
  • Introducing History Lab

    Article

    In 2021, teacher Richard Lewis founded History Lab as an idea for a history club that goes beyond the curriculum and enables students to think, form opinions and voice them as well as learning from one another's perspectives. The club can be led by a teacher, librarian or other knowledgeable...

    Click to view
  • Ensuring Gypsy, Roma and Traveller children do not feel unseen in the history classroom

    Article

    Richard Kerridge and Helen Snelson present a brief sequence of lessons using the life of the Gypsy woman Mary Squires as a way into the changes of industrialising Britain. More significantly, they also present a compelling rationale for why history teachers should be slotting in the stories of Gypsy, Roma...

    Click to view
  • Navigating the ‘imperial history wars’

    Article

    Concerned by the growing tendency of politicians and press to revive the moral balance-sheet approach to British imperial history and by some evidence of its resurgence in schools, Alex Benger set about devising a framework which would keep pupils’ analysis rigorously historical, rather than moral and politicised. In this article,...

    Click to view
  • Helping Year 9 to engage effectively with ‘other genocides’

    Article

    In this article, Andy Lawrence returns to arguments made in Teaching History 153 about the importance of teaching young people about other modern genocides in addition to the Holocaust. Building on those arguments with his own rationale, Lawrence also acknowledges the constraints on curriculum time that compel all departments to...

    Click to view
  • Do Gypsy, Roma and Traveller children see themselves in your history classroom?

    Multipage Article

    Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people are the largest minority ethnic group in some communities (and therefore in some schools) in the UK.  Richard Kerridge and Helen Snelson have worked with the historian Professor Becky Taylor to produce a range of teaching resources for teaching the history of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller...

    Click to view
  • Film: “The Talk Should Not Be Broadcast”: Homosexuality and the BBC before 1967

    Article

    In the centenary year of the BBC, this Virtual Branch talk from Marcus Collins relates the strange tale of how the BBC did and did not broadcast about homosexuality in the 1950s and 1960s and what it tells us about sexuality, broadcasting and the origins of permissiveness in mid-twentieth century Britain.  Marcus Collins...

    Click to view
  • Secondary Education and Social Change in the UK since 1945: KS3 resource packs

    Multipage Article

    Although secondary education become an almost universal experience for British 11-year-olds after the Second World War, it is striking how rarely this key social transformation is used to engage current school-age pupils studying post-1945 British history. // Can't see the video? Download it here The lessons on these pages are...

    Click to view
  • Teaching Britain’s ‘civil rights’ history

    Article

    Hannah Elias and Martin Spafford begin this article by explaining why they believe it is essential for young people to learn about the ‘heterogeneous, rich and complex’ history of the struggle for civil rights in Britain. Drawing on their diverse experiences of researching, writing and teaching history at school and university...

    Click to view
  • Bringing school into the classroom

    Article

    The Secondary Education and Social Change (SESC) research project team at the University of Cambridge collaborated with four secondary school history teachers to produce resource packs for teaching Key Stage 3 pupils about post-war British social history through the history of secondary education. In this article, Chris Jeppesen explains the...

    Click to view