Elizabeth Marsay wanted to ensure that her students were not hindered in their causal explanations of the abolition of slavery by being exposed to overly categorical, simplistic, and monocausal narratives in the classroom. By drawing on both English and Canadian theorisation about causation, Marsay outlines how her introduction of competing...

This classic pamphlet takes you through the Votes for Women in Britain movement from its origins to its eventual success, following the case for women's suffrage presented, tactics and strategies, the anti-suffragist argument, party political complications, international perspectives, the Pankhursts and militancy, the revival of non-militant suffragism, the impact of...

Is it structure or the selection of knowledge that makes writing historical narrative so difficult? Where does a conceptual focus on change, or causation, come in? James Ellis set out to explore the challenges his Year 9 pupils faced in writing historical narratives about change. Inspired by the work of...

In this article Sophie Harley-McKeown identifies and addresses her Year 12 students’ blind spot over agentive explanation. Noticing that the examination board to which she teaches uses ‘motivations’ rather than ‘aims’ prompted her to consider whether her students really knew what that meant. Finding that her students’ causal explanations tended...

Michael T. Davis compares the parallels between the democratic expectations, or possibilities, of modern-day China with Britain's democratic evolution from the eighteenth century to the emerging democracy of the nineteenth century. The future is an unfamiliar place for historians. Yet we stand on the edge of an historic shift away...

After reflecting on the difference between his study of source extracts at university and how he was using source extracts in the classroom, Jonathan Sellin went in search of a new way to help his pupils to situate sources in context. Finding inspiration in the work of intellectual historian Quentin...