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What Have Historians Been Arguing About... migration and empire
A Polychronicon of the past
In autumn 2019, Kara Walker’s monumental sculpture, Fons Americanus, went on display in the Tate Modern, offering a poignant, troubling challenge to national commemoration. Walker depicts not the lingering vestiges of imperial glory, but sharks, tears, and haunted memories. She brings history into conversation with its contemporary legacies and engages...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About... migration and empire
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Unravelling the complexity of the causes of British abolition with Year 8
Teaching History article
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...
Unravelling the complexity of the causes of British abolition with Year 8
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Using historical discourse to find narrative coherence in the GCSE period study
Teaching History article
When planning a GCSE period study on the American West, Alex Ford wrestled with reconciling the content demands of the examination specifications with the need to provide his students with a memorable narrative. In this article, Ford shows how he drew on the latest academic scholarship to construct a rigorous,...
Using historical discourse to find narrative coherence in the GCSE period study
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Triumphs Show 176: Using material culture as a means to generate an enquiry on the British Empire
Teaching History feature
Triumphs Show is a regular feature which offers a quick way for teachers to celebrate their successes and share inspirational ideas with one another. While the ideas are always explained in sufficient depth for others to be able to take them forward in their own practice, the simple format allows...
Triumphs Show 176: Using material culture as a means to generate an enquiry on the British Empire
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Using an anthology of substantial sources at GCSE
Teaching History article
Struck by his GCSE students’ bewildered expressions when studying source extracts, Liam McDonnell decided to adopt a new approach to source analysis. Inspired by the work of other history teachers, McDonnell decided to use an anthology of substantial sources when studying nineteenth-century Whitechapel in London. By revisiting the sources at...
Using an anthology of substantial sources at GCSE
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Polychronicon 174: Votes for Women
Teaching History feature
The beginnings of the nationally organised campaign for women’s suffrage began with suffragists’ orchestration of the petition to Parliament in favour of female suffrage in 1866. The petition contained almost 1,500 names from across the country and was presented to parliament by the Liberal MP John Stuart Mill; it was...
Polychronicon 174: Votes for Women
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Cunning Plan 139: Victorian debates about progress
Teaching History feature
How can we interest students in the world of ideas? How can we help them to see how important ideas were in shaping and reflecting the world of the Victorians? Working with the overarching enquiry question, ‘Why did some Victorians believe in progress in the nineteenth century and others did not?’ I devised...
Cunning Plan 139: Victorian debates about progress
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Polychronicon 173: From American Indians to Native Americans
Teaching History journal feature
Few sub-fields of American history have undergone as many changes over time as the study of Native Americans/American Indians. While nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians portrayed Native Americans as savage barbarians or ignored them entirely, late twentieth-century historians portrayed them as victims of circumstance and aggressive European conquest. Today, modern...
Polychronicon 173: From American Indians to Native Americans
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The Effect of Prior Knowledge on Teaching International History
IJHLTR Article
International Journal of Historical Learning, Teaching and Research [IJHLTR], Volume 15, Number 1 – Autumn/Winter 2017ISSN: 14472-9474
Abstract
The students’ prior knowledge is considered to be a factor of paramount importance to the learning process, particularly when teaching history in a diverse and multicultural learning environment. This paper explores the issue...
The Effect of Prior Knowledge on Teaching International History
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Cunning Plan 167: teaching the industrial revolution
Teaching History article
‘Disastrous and terrible.’ For Arnold Toynbee, the historian who gave us the phrase ‘industrial revolution’, these three words sum up the period of dramatic technological change that took place in Britain across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We may not habitually use Toynbee’s description in the classroom, but it is...
Cunning Plan 167: teaching the industrial revolution
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The Flight to Varennes
Historian article
On the night of 20 June 1791 a portly middle-aged man, dressed inconspicuously in brown, with a dark green overcoat and his hair covered by a grey wig, walked out of the Tuileries palace past the guards. For the past 12 nights the Chevalier de Coigny, dressed in a similar...
The Flight to Varennes
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Why are you wearing a watch? Complicating narratives of economic and social progress
Teaching History article
Frustrated by the traditional narrative of the industrial revolution as a steady march of progress, and disappointed by her students’ dull and deterministic statements about historical change, Hannah Sibona decided to complicate the tidy narrative of continual improvement.
Inspired by an article by E.P. Thompson, Sibona reflected that introducing her...
Why are you wearing a watch? Complicating narratives of economic and social progress
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Podcast Series: The Age of Revolutions
Multipage Article
This podcast series was commissioned as part of the HA’s education programme on the Age of Revolutions period, funded by the Age of Revolution legacy project. They were recorded with leading academic historians and are intended to shed light on a variety of perspectives on the period.
These podcasts were...
Podcast Series: The Age of Revolutions
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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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Polychronicon 160: Interpreting 'The Birth of a Nation'
Teaching History feature
Controversial from the first year of its release in 1915, 'The Birth of a Nation' has been hailed as both the greatest film ever made and the most racist. On 8 February 1915, it premiered in Los Angeles as 'The Clansman', the name of the novel and play upon which...
Polychronicon 160: Interpreting 'The Birth of a Nation'
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Using databases to explore the real depth in the data
Teaching History article
Is it a good thing to have a lot of evidence? Surely the historian would answer that yes, it is: the more evidence that can be used, the better. The problem with this approach, though, is that too much data can be overwhelming for the history student - and, in...
Using databases to explore the real depth in the data
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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
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The Victorian Age
Classic Pamphlet
This Classic Pamphlet was published in 1937 (the centenary of the accession of Queen Victoria, who succeeded to the throne on June 20, 1837).
Synopsis of contents:
1. Is the Victorian Age a distinct 'period' of history?
Landmarks establishing its beginning: the Reform Bill, railways, other inventions, new leaders in...
The Victorian Age
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The Battle of Waterloo: Sunday 18 June 1815
Historian article
John Morewood explores the events of 18 June 1815 in detail and asks just how accurate is our view of what happened on the field of Waterloo.
Summary
Waterloo is the most famous battle in a four-battle campaign fought from 15 June to 19 June 1815. On one side were...
The Battle of Waterloo: Sunday 18 June 1815
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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
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Podcast: Re-imagining Democracy
Podcast
This podcast feature Professor Mark Philp of the University of Warwick discussing how people's perceptions of democracy changed between 1750 and 1850 and is based on the findings of the Re-imagining democracy project, begun in 2005 by Joanna Innes and Mark Philp.
Re-imagining Democracy: 1750-1850
1. Introduction. Democracy from negative...
Podcast: Re-imagining Democracy
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Podcast Series: The French Revolution to the Fall of Napoleon
The French Revolution
In this set of podcasts we look at the origins and the development of the French Revolution, the rise and fall of Napoleon, the Peninsular War and the Battle of Waterloo.
These podcasts feature: Professor David Andress, Emeritus Professor Malcom Crook, Emertius Professor William Doyle, Emeritus Professor Alan Forrest &...
Podcast Series: The French Revolution to the Fall of Napoleon
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Interpretations of the French Revolution
Classic Pamphlet
The French Revolution raises many questions not least: What sort of Revolution was it - one of "poverty" or "prosperity" ? a bourgeois revolution that overthrew feudalism? A national struggle for liberty, democracy, or "eternal Justice" ? or, again, a criminal conspiracy against the old social order? What did it...
Interpretations of the French Revolution
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Polychronicon 158: Reinterpreting Napoleon
Teaching History feature
On 18 June 2015, the two-hundredth anniversary of the great battle of Waterloo will be commemorated in Britain and on the continent (though not in France). It will represent the climax of the Napoleonic bicentenary, which has been in full flow since the turn of the twenty-first century. Fresh biographies...
Polychronicon 158: Reinterpreting Napoleon
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Podcast Series: Canadian Confederation
Multipage Article
In this podcast Professor Edward MacDonald of the University of Prince Edward Island discusses the origins of the Charlottetown Conference of 1864, Canadian Confederation and the development of Canada over the 20th Century.
Podcast Series: Canadian Confederation
