Congratulations to four students from Newport Girls' High School – Daniah, Romaisa, Hetavi and Saira – who created the winning poster for our Suffrage competition. The poster had a modern message while demonstrating research and inspiration from a local suffragist from the past. The judges at the HA were very...

For the past ten years, the Historical Association (HA) has worked with the University of Oxford and Reading University to carry out in-depth research on the state of history teaching in schools. These reports have informed decision-makers at the highest level, notably government, Ofsted and examination boards. The reports also...

Recent events in the UK and the USA have once more raised the issue of racism to the top of the news agenda, providing us all with an opportunity to reflect on the type of society we want to live in and that we want to create. Racism has deep...

Every child should have the chance to enjoy museums and galleries as places of learning, inspiration, fun and exchange. Over the next school year Art Fund want to work with teachers to research and shape programmes of support for using museums and galleries in their teaching. If you teach at...

Access Teaching History 169 here (Free to HA Secondary members) Editorial: A Time and a Place The relationship between history and geography in schools is often rather ambivalent. Recent curriculum changes in England have prompted the reconstruction of strong subject boundaries, although many history teachers continue to work alongside their geography...

Access Teaching History 170 (Free to HA Secondary Members) Editorial: Historians When we do history we are not alone. Even sitting in the most obscure corner of the top floor of the library, surrounded only by books, we are in the presence of other historians. We locate our arguments among theirs,...

Access Teaching History 171 here (Free to HA Secondary members) Editorial: Knowledge In recent years, lively debates about the role of knowledge and especially about pedagogies for ensuring its secure acquisition have raged across England’s educational landscape. Much of this has arisen from a new interest, by teachers, in the...

Access Teaching History 172 here (free to HA Secondary Members) Editorial: Cause and consequence While we suspect that few history teachers would accept EH Carr’s famous dictum that ‘the study of history is a study of causes’, causality is such a mainstay of school history that it seems surprising that...

Access Teaching History 173 here (free to HA Secondary Members) Opening Doors The theme for this edition of Teaching History draws part of its inspiration from calls for the school curriculum to give young people access to genuinely ‘powerful knowledge’: knowledge that will take them beyond the confines of their own...

Structure pervades our professional lives. From timetables to exam specs; from paragraph cohesion to causal mind maps; from boxing-match debates to formal moots, we spend a lot of time organising ourselves or our students into useful patterns. Even our lessons which exist on the edge of chaos require a lot...

Read Teaching History 176 Widening Vistas "History is like a palimpsest, a medieval parchment in which, as the ink of one set of writing faded, another document was written on top of it, until over the years several layers of writing accumulated, one on top of the other…" In this...

Somewhere on a battlefield in Belgium in February a rebel group comb the countryside, gather intelligence (knowledge), share expertise and plot their future actions. Who are they? What are they really doing? WHAT ARE THEIR INTENTIONS?! Actually it turns out they are with the Historical Association, and they are a...

The Berlin Wall was one of the most important symbols of the political and ideological divisions in Europe during the Cold War. The physical presence of a wall that quite literally cut a city, a country and Europe into two sides was a constant reminder of how separate East and...

In this podcast, Katy Cubitt, Professor of Medieval History at the University of East Anglia, discusses the ways the church developed and changed in 10th and 11th century England. This period involved the rise of the local parish and the emergence of religious leaders who would attempt to ‘restore and purify' the religious...

Saturday 6 May 2023 will see the first coronation of a British monarch for 70 years. Only those now in their 70s or above will remember the last one. The coronation ceremony has its roots in traditions over a thousand years old.  Whether you are a Royalist or a Republican or...

This month (April 2022) is the 40th anniversary of the start of the Falklands Conflict. On 2 April 1982 an Argentinian Force of 3,000 men invaded the Falkland Islands taking the Islanders and the 80 Royal Marines stationed there by surprise. Despite pressure from the United Nations to withdraw the Argentinians attempted...

Last month the Georgian Papers Programme released a new virtual exhibition available online. Exploring the myth and reality of the alleged ‘madness of King George III’, the exhibition is an interesting step in examining the past and exploring its relevance for contemporary discourses. Entitled ‘George III: the Eighteenth Century’s Most...

When Professor Asa Briggs died in 2016, the Historical Association lost a very dear and loyal friend. As a result the decision was made to publish a special edition of The Historian to celebrate the life of Lord Briggs. The intention was to focus on his work and achievements as an...

Regular readers of The Historian will have noticed that our Editorial Board have been, over many years, identifying significant historical anniversaries which we feel are important to recognise. In this edition you will find three articles which deliberately identify the fiftieth anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act (1967) as a...

For this edition of The Historian, we decided to move away from a subject theme and instead to pay tribute to the HA's branches. These provide an opportunity for anyone with a love of history to get together, to learn and to discuss a very wide range of fascinating topics,...