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

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  • 'Victims of history': Challenging students’ perceptions of women in history

    Article

    As postgraduate historians with teaching responsibilities at the University of York, Bridget Lockyer and Abigail Tazzyman were concerned to tackle some of the challenges reported by their students who had generally only encountered women’s history in a disconnected way through stand-alone topics or modules. Their response was to create a...

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  • 1914: The Coming of the First World War

    Article

    This pamphlet argues that the outbreak of the First World War represented not so much the culmination of a long process started by Bismarck and his successors, as the relatively sudden breakdown of a system that had in fact preserved the peace and contained the dangerous Eastern Question for over...

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  • 50th Anniversary of 'Carve her name with pride'

    Article

    The classic British war film Carve Her Name With Pride was based on the true story of Violette Szabó GC, the 23 year old French speaking single mother who volunteered during WW2 to be an agent for the top secret Special Operations Executive (SOE). Shortly after parachuting into German occupied...

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  • Arnold Wilkins: Pioneer of British Radar

    Article

    Whenever British radar is discussed the name that usually comes to mind is that of Robert Watson Watt. Our history books and our dictionaries of biography consistently attribute the discovery of radar in Britain solely to Watson Watt, with little or no mention of the key role played by his...

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  • Beyond tokenism: diverse history post-14

    Article

    Nick Dennis shows how a ‘multidirectional memory’ approach to teaching history can move history teachers beyond seeing black history as separate or distracting from the history that must be aught at examination level. He gives examples of ways in which a diverse history can be built into examination courses, strengthening...

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  • Breaking the 20 year rule: very modern history at GCSE

    Article

    History is the study of the past; some of the past is more recent than a glance over many schemes of work might lead us to think. Chris Culpin makes the case for ignoring the 20 year rule and tackling head on – and, crucially, historically – the big issues...

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  • 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...

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  • Britain in the 1950s

    Article

    The National Archives' Education Service explores Britain in the 1950s The National Archives' Education Service's latest resource is now available online. Following on from their document collections looking at the partition of India and the swinging Sixties, Fifties Britain is an invaluable collection of dozens of documents covering a wide...

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  • British Defence and Appeasement Between the Wars 1919-1939

    Article

    Armed forces never exist in isolation, but always operate against a background of political, economic, social, cultural, intellectual and ideological conditions and attitudes, as well as in relation to diplomatic and strategic factors. Some governments regards their military forces especially their armies, more as instruments for maintaining internal order than...

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  • Building an overview of the historic roots of antisemitism

    Article

    ‘But I still don't get why the Jews': using cause and change to answer pupils' demand for an overview of antisemitism Research by the Centre for Holocaust Education has suggested that students need and want more help with building an overview of the historical roots of antisemitism and that they...

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  • Census 2021: using the census in the history classroom

    Article

    As we approach the next census in March 2021, we are reminded of what a rich historical source the census is. For historians, using the census can shine a light on particular people and places – a snapshot in time. Big stories can be told through a sharp local lens...

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  • Churchill: The Greatest Briton Unmasked

    Article

    Churchill: The Greatest Briton Unmasked by Nigel Knight. David & Charles, Sept 2008, £14.99; ISBN: 978 0 7153 2855 2 Reviewed by Alf Wilkinson Nigel Knight, a lecturer in British Government at Cambridge, has written a revisionist analysis of Churchill and his achievements. Based on extensive research he has set...

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  • Cunning Plan 100: teaching the First World War in Year 9

    Article

    History teacher and head of department stand outside noisy Year 9 class. Bombs (paper ones) fly everywhere; in corner of room mutiny is being discussed ... many pupils are refusing to follow their leader's last minute orders - they will not be opting for history! The war of attrition (excessive...

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  • Cunning Plan 144: promoting independent student enquiry

    Article

    Getting students to generate their own questions can seem like a formidable challenge, even for experienced teachers with extensive subject knowledge developed over years of teaching. Imagine how much more alarming it appeared to a student-teacher being encouraged to take risks by handing more responsibility to the students. Could it...

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  • Decolonise, don’t diversify: enabling a paradigm shift in the KS3 history curriculum

    Article

    In this article, Dan Lyndon-Cohen makes the case that history departments should move from diversifying the curriculum to decolonising it. After reflecting on some examples of how he made the content of his lessons more representative, he explores how the influence of writers such as Michel-Rolph Trouillot and Emma Dabiri...

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  • Diversifying the curriculum: one department’s holistic approach

    Article

    In this article, Theo Woods shares the experience of one history department as they embarked on a substantial process of curriculum review and development. The department sought to address concerns that the range of history taught in their school, across the full seven years of students’ secondary experience, was too ‘traditional,...

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  • Edwardian England

    Article

    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...

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  • Elementary Education in the Nineteenth Century

    Article

    All schemes for education involve some consideration of the surrounding society, its existing structure and how it will-and should-develop. Thus the interaction of educational provision and institutions with patterns of employment, social mobility and political behaviour are fascinatingly complex. The spate of valuable local studies emphasizes this complexity and makes...

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  • England Arise! The General Election of 1945

    Article

    ‘The past week will live in history for two things’, announced the Sunday Times of 29 July 1945, ‘first the return of a Labour majority to Parliament and the end of Churchill's great war Premiership.’ Most other newspapers concurred. The Daily Mirror, of 27 July, proclaimed that the 1945 general election...

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  • 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...

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