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Found 844 results matching 'brief history' within Secondary > Curriculum Support > Periods and Themes > Periods   (Clear filter)

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  • Polychronicon 148: The Wars of the Roses

      Teaching History feature
    There are few periods in our history from which we turn with such weariness and disgust as from the Wars of the Roses. Their savage battles, their ruthless executions, their shameless treasons seem all the more terrible from the pure selfishness of the ends for which men fought, the utter...
    Polychronicon 148: The Wars of the Roses

  • From road map to thought map: helping students theorise the nature of change

      Teaching History article
    Warren Valentine was dissatisfied with his Year 7 students’ accounts of change across the Tudor period. Fixated with Henry VIII’s wives, they failed to reflect on or analyse the bigger picture of the whole Tudor narrative. In order to overcome this problem, his department created a ‘thought-map’ exercise in which...
    From road map to thought map: helping students theorise the nature of change

  • Inverting the telescope: investigating sources from a different perspective

      Teaching History article
    As historians, we are dependent on evidence, which comes in many varieties. Rosalind Stirzaker here introduces a project which she ran two years ago to encourage her students to think about artefacts in a different way. They have examined randomly preserved artefacts such as those of Pompeii, and sets of...
    Inverting the telescope: investigating sources from a different perspective

  • Polychronicon 167: The strange career of Richard Nixon

      Teaching History feature
    If you know just one thing about the career of the 37th President of the United States, it is likely to be this: Watergate. Nixon’s resignation in August 1974 was caused by his decision to cover up a burglary at the Democratic Party’s campaign headquarters for the 1972 election, which...
    Polychronicon 167: The strange career of Richard Nixon

  • Engaging Year 9 with Victorian debates about 'progress'

      Teaching History article
    Jonathan White wanted to fill a gap in his students' knowledge of the history of ideas. Despite the appearance of Marx, Smith, Darwin and Malthus in the department's workscheme for Year 9, his Year 13 students appeared to lack any meaningful grasp of these nineteenth-century intellectual reference points. White therefore...
    Engaging Year 9 with Victorian debates about 'progress'

  • Louis XIV

      Classic Pamphlet
    Louis XIV was born on 5 September 1638 and became King on May 14 1643 at the age of four years and eight months on the death of his father Louis XIII. He attended the Conseil d'en haut from 1649 when he was eleven years old. He announced his coming...
    Louis XIV

  • Alexander II

      Classic Pamphlet
    The ‘great reforms' of Tsar Alexander II (1855-81) are generally recognised as the most significant events in modern Russian history between the reign of Peter the Great and the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. The most important of Alexander's reforms, the emancipation of he serfs in 1861, has been described...
    Alexander II

  • Francis I and Absolute Monarchy

      Classic Pamphlet
    Francis I of France reign lasted for more than thirty years and coincided with movements as significant as the Renaissance and the Reformation. Text-books are apt to gloss over the domestic history of France before the outbreak of the Wars of Religion and convey the impression that Francis was more...
    Francis I and Absolute Monarchy

  • Arnold Wilkins: Pioneer of British Radar

      Historian 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...
    Arnold Wilkins: Pioneer of British Radar

  • Scots Abroad in the Fifteenth Century

      Classic Pamphlet
    (Historical Association Pamphlet, No. 124, 1942) Dunlop's research into the occupations and attitudes of Scots abroad during the 15th century uncovers some surprising revelations about all members of the Scottish ex-pat society. She particularly notes the ‘scurrilous' opinions of the French regarding Scotsmen's behaviour. While Scottish diplomatists and envoys tended...
    Scots Abroad in the Fifteenth Century

  • Polychronicon 165: The 1917 revolutions in 2017: 100 years on

      Teaching History feature
    The interpretive and empirical frameworks utilised by scholars in their quest to understand the Russian revolutions have evolved and transformed over 100 years. The opening of archives after the collapse of the Soviet Union enabled access to a swathe of new primary sources, some of which have had a transformative...
    Polychronicon 165: The 1917 revolutions in 2017: 100 years on

  • Polychronicon 163: Europe: the longest debate

      Teaching History feature
    On 23 June, electors in the United Kingdom will vote on whether they wish to remain part of the European Union. The passionate debate around the question has seen the spectre of Hitler and the example of Churchill invoked, with varying  plausibility, by both sides. It has also drawn on the...
    Polychronicon 163: Europe: the longest debate

  • The Personal Rule of Charles I 1629-40

      Classic Pamphlet
    Historians are often accused of viewing the past with hindsight, or of being wise after the event. Not being prophets or soothsayers, we have to look backwards in time because we cannot look forwards. The real question is from what vantage point or perspective we view a particular part of...
    The Personal Rule of Charles I 1629-40

  • Cunning Plan 161: Magna Carta's legacy

      Teaching History feature
    Both Dawson and Hayes have recently written Cunning Plans that show how exciting Magna Carta is. So why not stop there? Bring the barons to life with a flare of Dawson and send Magna Carta flying across the continent with just a hint of Hayes. Hey, from the same edition,...
    Cunning Plan 161: Magna Carta's legacy

  • Podcast Series: Britain's Changing Population

      Podcasted history
    In Part 3 of our series on Social and Political Change in the UK we look at diversity in the UK and examine African and Caribbean UK History, South Asian UK History and British Chinese History.  The first set of podcasts feature Dr Hakim Adi, Marika Sherwood, Dr Sumita Mukherjee & Dr...
    Podcast Series: Britain's Changing Population

  • Culture Shock: The Arrival of the Conquistadores in Aztec Mexico

      Historian article
    When the Spanish Conquistadores arrived in Mexico during the early sixteenth century there were many repercussions for the indigenous people. Their conversion to Christianity and the sacking of their temples are two of the most well known examples.  However, it is often forgotten that the Aztecs had only a pictorial...
    Culture Shock: The Arrival of the Conquistadores in Aztec Mexico

  • Year 8 and interpretations of the First World War

      Teaching History article
    Dan Smith was concerned that his pupils were drawing on over-simplified generalisations about different periods of the past when they were considering why interpretations change over time. This led him to consider how pupils’ contextual knowledge and chronological fluency might be used more explicitly in order to avoid weak generalisations...
    Year 8 and interpretations of the First World War

  • Polychronicon 162: Reinterpreting the May 1968 events in France

      Teaching History feature
    As Kristin Ross has persuasively argued, by the 1980s interpretations of the French events of May 1968 had shrunk to a narrow set of received ideas around student protest, labelled by Chris Reynolds a ‘doxa’. Media discourse is dominated by a narrow range of former participants labelled ‘memory barons’ –...
    Polychronicon 162: Reinterpreting the May 1968 events in France

  • Polychronicon 161: John Lilburne

      Teaching History feature
    John Lilburne might have been destined for obscurity in less interesting times. He was the second son of a minor gentry family, apprenticed to a London woollen merchant in 1632. It was his master’s connections that drew him into religious opposition to Charles I and the illegal book trade, resulting...
    Polychronicon 161: John Lilburne

  • The Origins of Parliament

      Classic Pamphlet
    He who would seek the origins of parliament cannot proceed without knowing that this is, and this has been, a matter much controverted. English politics have very often been conducted in terms of what has passed for history, not least because they have so frequently revolved around the rights and...
    The Origins of Parliament

  • The Power of Context: using a visual source

      Teaching History article
    Drawing on her wealth of experience and expertise in using visual sources in the classroom, in this article Jane Card explores how a single painting, a portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay and her cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray, might form the basis for a sequence of lessons. Arguing that although highly...
    The Power of Context: using a visual source

  • The Harkness Method: achieving higher-order thinking with sixth-form

      Teaching History article
    Hark the herald tables sing! Achieving higher-order thinking with a chorus of sixth-form pupils On 9 April 1930, a philanthropist called Edward Harkness donated millions of dollars to the Phillips Exeter Academy in the USA. He hoped that his donation could be used to find a new way for students to sit around a table...
    The Harkness Method: achieving higher-order thinking with sixth-form

  • Cunning Plan 159: Was King John unlucky with his Barons?

      Teaching History feature
    Typical teaching of King John and Magna Carta focuses either on the weakness of John or the importance (as Whig historians would see it) of Magna Carta. The first question is a bit boring and the second discussion unhistorical. This enquiry sequence is designed for students aged 11 to 13. It...
    Cunning Plan 159: Was King John unlucky with his Barons?

  • Engaging Year 9 students in party politics

      Teaching History article
    Sarah Black wanted to remedy Year 9's lack of knowledge about nineteenth-century politics. With just five lessons to work with, she decided to devise a sequence on Gladstone and Disraeli, shaping the sequence with an enquiry question that invited argument about change and continuity. Black analyses the status and function of different layers of knowledge within her sequence, evaluates the interaction...
    Engaging Year 9 students in party politics

  • Enabling Year 7 to write essays on Magna Carta

      Teaching History article
    Setting out to teach Magna Carta to the full attainment range in Year 7, Mark King decided to choose a question that reflected real scholarly debates and also to ensure that pupils held enough knowledge in long-term memory to be able to think about that question meaningfully. As he gradually prepared his pupils to produce their own causation arguments in response to that question, King was startled by...
    Enabling Year 7 to write essays on Magna Carta