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The Roaring Twenties: teaching a decade of change across Key Stages 1 and 2
Primary History article
This article explores how one topic can be used in different ways to support historical understanding at Key Stage 1 or Key Stage 2. The themes highlighted could link into possible golden threads to enable connections to be made across a school’s curriculum. The ‘Roaring Twenties’ also provide a real...
The Roaring Twenties: teaching a decade of change across Key Stages 1 and 2
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What Have Historians Been Arguing About... piracy and empire in the early modern world
Teaching History feature
The topic of early modern global piracy has attracted increasing scholarly attention in recent decades, partly due to its own intrinsic interest and, it must be said, its entertainment value. However, historians have also explored its connections with broader themes such as empire and colonisation, social history, global economic networks,...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About... piracy and empire in the early modern world
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Objects and objections: getting critical about using artefacts in primary history
Primary History article
Jenny uses her experience and expertise from a school committed to using museum education to outline ways in which artefacts can be used effectively in primary settings. This article is based on practice at Langley Heritage Primary Academy. She outlines some of the challenges and how practice was refined, including actual...
Objects and objections: getting critical about using artefacts in primary history
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Have we become better at organising and running primary history visits?
Primary History article
Visits have been a mainstream of primary history for decades. In this article Tim Lomas looks at the way schools have approached history visits and how these have changed in recent years. There are examples of possible activities through the primary years and a summary of what seems to represent...
Have we become better at organising and running primary history visits?
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How foundational concepts, supporting concepts and concrete examples can help untangle the past at Key Stage 3
Teaching History article
A central organising principle of any curriculum is the substantive concepts that underpin it. They provide a secure structure and enable students to develop deep understanding through multiple encounters with essential abstract ideas that are given concrete form in different historical contexts. Identifying the different levels or tiers to which different...
How foundational concepts, supporting concepts and concrete examples can help untangle the past at Key Stage 3
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Out and About in South London
Historian feature
In an unusual Out and About feature, the Young Historian Local History Senior Prize winner Flora Wilton Tregear shows us what her local area can tell us about the history of public health.
Taking the DLR out from Lewisham you pass through Deptford Bridge station towards Greenwich. Here my father...
Out and About in South London
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Who were the Greeks and how diverse was their society?
Primary History article
Susie Townsend explores ancient Greece through the use of maps in this innovative and interesting article. The focus here is on diversity within ancient Greek civilisations and the article includes some activities to support learning. There is something for everyone to take from this piece.
Who were the Greeks and how diverse was their society?
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Opinion: the populist politics of Joseph Chamberlain and Donald Trump
Historian feature
What are the pitfalls and pluses of comparing historical figures with contemporary politicians? Chris Godden argues that recent comparisons of Donald Trump with one of his predecessors may be wide of the mark, but that a more illuminating parallel may be found with one of Britain’s most controversial nineteenth-century politicians.
Opinion: the populist politics of Joseph Chamberlain and Donald Trump
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The Historian 148: Legacy of war
The magazine of the Historical Association
4 Reviews
5 Editorial (Read article for free)
6 Blood and Iron: the violent birth of modern Germany – A nation forged in war – Katja Hoyer (Read article)
12 Richard III and the Princes in the Tower: update – Tim Thornton (Read article)
16 Monty’s school: the benign side of Viscount...
The Historian 148: Legacy of war
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The Historian 149: Out now
The magazine of the Historical Association
Read The Historian 149: Pandemics
This edition of The Historian follows immediately after the annual Local and Community History Month, which we launched many years ago. Although our expressed purpose on this occasion is to place a special focus on the concept of pandemics and epidemics, a number of our...
The Historian 149: Out now
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Real Lives: Eduard Friedrich Kärger
Historian feature
In this article, Alex van der Ham and Ling-Hua Huang explain how a casual browse through a nineteenth century journal led to an intriguing research journey into the author of a scientific dissertation. Here they discovered interesting insights into Prussian society in the years leading to the Unification of Germany,...
Real Lives: Eduard Friedrich Kärger
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Interpreting Cyrus the Great for the lower school curriculum
Teaching History article
Tom Leather describes in this article the process by which he and his department extended their ancient history curriculum through an interpretations enquiry about Cyrus the Great. This tested both the subject knowledge of a number of members of the department, and their planning process. His reflections are illuminating not just...
Interpreting Cyrus the Great for the lower school curriculum
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In conversation with Henrike Lähnemann
Historian feature
In The Life of Nuns: love, politics, and religion in medieval German convents (Open Book Publishers, 2024), Henrike Lähnemann and Eva Schlotheuber explore female religious communities from the late medieval and early Reformation-era in northern Germany, revealing them to be vibrant centres of learning, administration, devotion, friendship, and negotiation. The book challenges...
In conversation with Henrike Lähnemann
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Planning a more diverse and coherent Year 7 curriculum
Teaching History article
In this article, Jacob Olivey describes his department’s efforts to both diversify their Key Stage 3 curriculum and secure greater curricular coherence. Building on a large body of research and practice, Olivey sought new forms of curricular coherence through the selection and sequencing of substantive content across the curriculum. He...
Planning a more diverse and coherent Year 7 curriculum
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Britain on pause: remembering the 1926 General Strike
Primary History article
In this article, Kate Rigby looks back at the 1926 General Strike and considers how this could be used to explore significance, cause and consequence in Key Stage 2...
Britain on pause: remembering the 1926 General Strike
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Teaching History 184: Out now
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
Read Teaching History 184: Different lenses
For millennia, human beings have used lenses as tools: to help them see further, to magnify or to correct defects of vision. Yet lenses can distort as well as illuminate the unseen.
Robert Hooke, the seventeenth-century scientist who helped popularise the microscope through his...
Teaching History 184: Out now
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Teaching History 202: Organising Principles
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
03 Editorial (Read article)
04 HA Secondary News
06 HA Update
08 How foundational concepts, supporting concepts and concrete examples can help untangle the past at Key Stage 3 – Gareth Lennon (Read article)
16 Making substantive concepts (do the) work: towards a strategy of conceptual progression at Key Stage 3...
Teaching History 202: Organising Principles
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Using turning points in anti-racist history to explore historical significance at Key Stage 3
Teaching History article
In this article, Joel Sharples explains the organising principles that underpinned his planning for a new enquiry sequence inspired by a local photography exhibition. The exhibition’s title ‘Brick Lane 1978: The Turning Point’ prompted him to think afresh about the idea of ‘a turning point’ – a concept that he...
Using turning points in anti-racist history to explore historical significance at Key Stage 3
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Broadening and deepening narratives of Benin for Year 8
Teaching History article
Josh Garry describes his effort to refresh his approach to teaching the British transatlantic slave trade. Drawing on reading, lectures and discussions during an Historical Association Teacher Fellowship programme, Garry built a sequence of lessons designed to contextualise the trade while showing African agency and complexity. The result was a sequence...
Broadening and deepening narratives of Benin for Year 8
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Using Femina to reframe Year 7 pupils’ understanding of the medieval world
Teaching History article
Concerned about the absence of women’s perspectives in her Year 7 curriculum, and inspired by Ramirez’s book Femina, Freya George set out on a research project that sought to put medieval women at the heart of a new enquiry. Rather than simply telling stories about medieval women, however, George encouraged...
Using Femina to reframe Year 7 pupils’ understanding of the medieval world
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Using learning outside the classroom at historic sites to explore British history units
Primary History article
British history in the National Curriculum (2014) provides extensive opportunities for learning outside the classroom, from the earliest times to the present day. Visiting historic sites is one experience of learning outside the classroom that provides a meaningful and stimulating focus for understanding Britain’s past. This said, any site and...
Using learning outside the classroom at historic sites to explore British history units
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Using local history to illuminate the complexities of interpretation with Year 8
Teaching History article
Jack Harris found that his pupils had little knowledge of Sir Harry Smith, the historical figure after whom their school was named, and who was commemorated in various ways in their local community. Researching Smith’s career and reputation, including his role in British colonialism, he uncovered varied interpretations. Harris worked...
Using local history to illuminate the complexities of interpretation with Year 8
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Move Me On 202: trainee is struggling to make history accessible...
Teaching History feature
Move Me On is designed to build critical, informed debate about the character of teacher training, teacher education and professional development. It is also designed to offer practical help to all involved in training new history teachers. Each issue presents a situation in initial teacher education/training with an emphasis upon...
Move Me On 202: trainee is struggling to make history accessible...
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Social Darwinism: the myth and its reinvention
Historian article
‘Social Darwinism’ has been associated in academia and popular consciousness with negative concepts such as hyper-nationalism and eugenics. Geoffrey M. Hodgson challenges the notion that Social Darwinism or its proponents were ever well-defined. By tracing the use of ‘Social Darwinism’ across academic disciplines and globally over a long period, Hodgson...
Social Darwinism: the myth and its reinvention
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Working 9–5: how painters, plumbers and programmers help our pupils understand the role of the historian
Teaching History article
Struck by the misinformation that their pupils were bringing from social media to the history classroom, Phillips and Jackson-Buckley were keen to help their pupils identify the signs of good quality history. They decided to focus on developing their pupils’ understanding of how history works, specifically, how historians construct their...
Working 9–5: how painters, plumbers and programmers help our pupils understand the role of the historian
