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Confounding expectation at Key Stage 3: flower-songs from an indigenous empire
Teaching History article
In this article Nicolas Kinloch examines aspects of an indigenous empire: that of Aztec Mexico. He attempts to persuade a group of mixed-ability Year 8 students to examine - and question - some of the assumptions they bring to the study of this empire. Their attitudes reflect quite widespread beliefs...
Confounding expectation at Key Stage 3: flower-songs from an indigenous empire
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Revealing the big picture: patterns, shapes and images at Key Stage 3.
Teaching History article
It is easy enough to incorporate overview and depth studies into a scheme-of-work. Units are carved up into those topics that last for several weeks and those that are covered in one. Isn’t that enough to satisfy the requirements of the National Curriculum? Many teachers have gone much further than...
Revealing the big picture: patterns, shapes and images at Key Stage 3.
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'Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?'
Teaching History article
How can the Holocaust be represented? In this article, Andrew Wrenn takes as his example the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He helps teachers encourage pupils to get beneath the surface, and look analytically at the Museum itself as an interpretation of the Holocaust. Such an investigation provides pupils and...
'Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?'
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Teaching the Holocaust: the experience of Vad Vashem
Teaching History article
No institution is better known for its continuing work on the Holocaust than Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem. In this article Richelle Budd Caplan offers guidelines for teachers, based on its unrivalled experience. She demands that our teaching of this subject should aim to restore the identities of the victims. To do...
Teaching the Holocaust: the experience of Vad Vashem
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T.E.A.C.H Online
T.E.A.C.H Online - Teaching Emotive and Controversial History
Please note: this unit was produced before the 2014 curriculum and therefore while much of the advice is still useful, some references and links may be out of date.
T.E.A.C.H. Online is a resource that follows on from the Historical Association's T.E.A.C.H. Report published in 2007 with support from DCSF. It offers further...
T.E.A.C.H Online
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Recorded webinar: History, Politics and Journalism
Teacher and Student Study Session
History, politics and journalism are intertwined. In this webinar (filmed in December 2021) Professor Anna Whitelock and members of her department from City, University of London explore the inter-related history, politics and journalism of Russia and the Cold War. First, Dina Fainberg explores Soviet relations with the world under Nikita...
Recorded webinar: History, Politics and Journalism
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Using individuals’ stories to help GCSE students to explain change and causation
Article
Should we, and how do we, develop in our students a sense of period – or a series of senses of period – in a thematic study spanning a thousand years? This was the problem faced by Matthew Fearns-Davies in preparing for the GCSE ‘Health and the People’ paper. He shows...
Using individuals’ stories to help GCSE students to explain change and causation
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What Have Historians Been Arguing About... the long-term impact of the Black Death on English towns
A Polychronicon of the Past
In the summer of 1348, the Chronicle of the Grey Friars at Lynn described how sailors had arrived in Melcombe (now Weymouth) bringing from Gascony ‘the seeds of the terrible pestilence’. The Black Death spread rapidly throughout England, killing approximately half the population. While the cause of the disease, the...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About... the long-term impact of the Black Death on English towns
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Medieval 'Signs and Marvels'
Historian article
Medieval ‘Signs and Marvels': insights into medieval ideas about nature and the cosmic order.
Many aspects of life in the Middle Ages puzzle the modern reader but some are stranger than others. What can possibly explain an event reported from Orford Castle, in Suffolk? This is an amazing tale and...
Medieval 'Signs and Marvels'
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Cunning Plan 166: developing an enquiry on the First Crusade
Teaching History feature
"What shall I say next? We were all indeed huddled together like sheep in a fold, trembling and frightened, surrounded on all sides by enemies so that we could not turn in any direction. It was clear to us that this had happened because of our sins. A great clamour rose to the sky, not...
Cunning Plan 166: developing an enquiry on the First Crusade
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A guide to Assessment Reform at Key Stage 4
Briefing Pack
Big changes in assessment at Key Stage 4 took place the last time specifications were reformed. If you want to compare the assessment approaches taken by different examination Boards, then this handy briefing guide will provide you with the introductory information you need to be able to make sense of...
A guide to Assessment Reform at Key Stage 4
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Article
test201
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Film: Brezhnev's early life and career
Film Series: Power and authority in Russia and the Soviet Union
In this film Dr Edwin Bacon takes us through Brezhnev’s early life and career: his birth in Ukraine in 1906, the opportunities brought by the revolution, his role in the battle of Ukraine and his eventual arrival to the Politburo at the end of the 1950s. Dr Bacon looks at...
Film: Brezhnev's early life and career
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Film: Lenin's early thought
Film Series: Power and authority in Russia and the Soviet Union
As Lenin’s own political outlook and beliefs developed so did the European movements of Socialism and Communism. Groups emerged that wanted to radically change society and social structures. Lenin positioned himself as one of the leaders and crucially one of the thinkers behind these new ideas and movements.
Dr Lara...
Film: Lenin's early thought
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Bristol and the Slave Trade
Classic Pamphlet
Captain Thomas Wyndham of Marshfield Park in Somerset was on voyage to Barbary where he sailed from Kingroad, near Bristol, with three ships full of goods and slaves thus beginning the association of African Trade and Bristol. In the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Bristol was not a place of...
Bristol and the Slave Trade
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Film: Stalin - Early Life
Film Series: Power and authority in Russia and the Soviet Union
Joseph Stalin was born Joseph Besarionis dze Jughashvili in 1878 into a poor family in Gori, Georgia, part of the then Russian Empire. Stalin attended the Tbilisi Spiritual Seminary while his own radicalism grew, before joining the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. He edited the party's newspaper, Pravda, and raised funds for Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik faction through...
Film: Stalin - Early Life
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Lesson sequence: The First World War - taster lesson
Article
This enquiry explores the experience of Theo Reid, a soldier in the First World War. It uses his letters from across four years of service in multiple arenas to enable students to construct his perspective on the war, and to gain an insight into the nature of the conflict more...
Lesson sequence: The First World War - taster lesson
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Lesson sequence: The First World War
Article
The first lesson of this sequence is available free to all secondary members here.
This enquiry explores the experience of Theo Reid, a soldier in the First World War. It uses his letters from across four years of service in multiple arenas to enable students to construct his perspective on the war,...
Lesson sequence: The First World War
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Recorded webinar: Ordinary people - Holocaust Memorial Day 2023
Recorded webinar
To choose to act, to have no choice to be who you are, to live an ordinary life in extraordinary times? These are all questions that the Holocaust raises. Millions of people became victims of the Nazis, millions more choose not to act to stop the events around them, felt...
Recorded webinar: Ordinary people - Holocaust Memorial Day 2023
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Using metaphor to highlight causal processes with Year 13
Article
Alarmed by his students’ random use of causal language in their essays, James Edward Carroll resolved to help his students improve their understanding of causal processes. Carroll decided to introduce his students to the metaphors that historians use to describe causation in the historiography of the Salem witch trials. By modelling...
Using metaphor to highlight causal processes with Year 13
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Virtual Branch recording: Why has Monarchy survived in Europe?
Virtual Branch
In the lead-up to the Queen's Platinum Jubilee, Dr Bob Morris joined the HA Virtual Branch in March 2022 to consider why the monarchy has survived in Europe.
Dr R. M. (Bob) Morris is a Senior Honorary Research Associate at the Constitution Unit, University College London. He was formerly a...
Virtual Branch recording: Why has Monarchy survived in Europe?
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Film: Life and Death in Occupied France
Silent Village
Robert Pike joined the HA Virtual Branch to discuss the research for his latest book Silent Village: Life and Death in Occupied France. This work explores life in the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane before, during and after the infamous massacre and destruction by Nazi Germany that took place on 10 June...
Film: Life and Death in Occupied France
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Lesson sequence: Eighteenth-century politics – taster lesson
Article
This series of lessons has been designed to enable students to learn about power and political change in Britain in the period 1688–1783. Through the unfolding narrative, students learn about key concepts, including monarchy, government and Parliament, identify causal factors and develop a sense of period. Finally, they assess how power...
Lesson sequence: Eighteenth-century politics – taster lesson
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Lesson sequence: Eighteenth-century politics
Lesson sequence
The first lesson of this sequence is available free to all secondary members here.
This series of lessons has been designed to enable students to learn about power and political change in Britain in the period 1688–1783. Through the unfolding narrative, students learn about key concepts, including monarchy, government and Parliament, identify causal...
Lesson sequence: Eighteenth-century politics
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Film: 'Mayflower Lives: building a New Jerusalem in the New World'
Article
Historian and author Martyn Whittock recently gave a lecture for the HA Virtual Branch on 'Mayflower Lives: building a New Jerusalem in the New World'. In 1620, 102 ill-prepared asylum seekers landed two months later than planned, in the wrong place on the eastern coast of North America. By the next summer, half of...
Film: 'Mayflower Lives: building a New Jerusalem in the New World'
