Remembering the First World War: Using a battlefield tour of the Western Front to help pupils take a more critical approach to what they encounter The first year of the government's First World War Centenary Battlefield Tours Programme is now under way, allowing increasing numbers of students from across Britain...

This year the Historical Association's Medlicott medal for services to history went to Professor Sir Richard Evans. Richard Evans is the Regius Professor of History at Cambridge and President of Wolfson College, Cambridge. He has written numerous highly respected and internationally best-selling books. Evans is bests known for his works on...

The question of how to prepare students to succeed in the examination while also ensuring that they are taught rigorous history remains as relevant as ever. Faced with preparing students to answer a question that seemingly precluded argument, Rachel Foster and Kath Goudie demonstrate how they used historical scholarship both to...

Stalin's remarkable career raises quite fundamental questions for anyone interested in history. Marxists, whose philosophy should cause them to downgrade the role of ‘great men' as an explanation of great events, have problems in fitting Stalin into the materialist interpretation of history: did not this man ride rough-shod over the...

We hope you enjoyed reading Exploring and Teaching Twentieth-Century History. To help you explore the topic further we’ve put together a selection of just a few additional 20th-century history and teaching resources below. All these resources are available free to HA Secondary Members – find out more about Secondary Membership. 20th-century history podcast series We have recorded...

The events of the last few days appear to have come out of nowhere to many people, especially children. While tensions have existed in the region for some time Russia’s decision to attack Ukraine was without provocation. To have war return in such a way to the edges of Europe...

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...

On Saturday 28th of June it will be 100 years since the Arch Duke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated with his wife Sophie in Sarajevo. As everyone knows or will know after this summer that assassination led to the start of the First World War. The young man who fired the...

I. The Legacy of VersaillesThe Outbreak of a second world war on 1 September 1939 might have been expected to produce in due course a great controversy on ‘war guilt'. But there has been nothing comparable with the debate which took place during the 1920s on the 1914 issues. The angel...

Like other revolutions the German revolution of November 1918 was a product of different causes, some of which formed part of the events immediately preceding it, while other belonged to the less recent past. The revolution began as the improvised revolt of an exhausted and disillusioned population against an authoritarian...

It is common to see the failure of the League of Nations in its inability to stand up to the crises of the inter-war years.Peter Raffo shows that the League was flawed from the start. Never more than a voluntary association of sovereign states hoping to create ‘an atmosphere capable...

The First World War broke out suddenly and unexpectedly in midsummer 1914, following the murder of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Hapsburg, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, at Sarajevo, in Bosnia, on 28 June. Since no war involving the European great powers had occurred since 1871, the possibility of...

This pamphlet provides a detailed account of  the events leading up to the outbreak of war in 1939, covering the various factors that played a role in the outbreak of war such as tension over Poland and the Spanish Civil War, as well as the nature and effect of diplomatic...

International Journal of Historical Learning, Teaching and Research [IJHLTR], Volume 15, Number 1 – Autumn/Winter 2017ISSN: 14472-9474 Abstract This is an analysis of 97 written questionnaires given to university students’, prospective teachers’. Students were asked first to narrate the Greek state’s history, second to make predictions about the future. It took...

The spring of 2013 was unusually significant for devotees of the Romanov dynasty. Though there was little international recognition of the fact, the season marked the 400th anniversary of the accession of Russia's first Romanov tsar. Historically, the story was a most dramatic one, for Mikhail Fedorovich had not seized...

The defeat of the revolution of 1905 afforded the absolutist Tsarist monarchy an opportunity to reform the administration and to seek a new basis of support in place of the declining gentry class. Historians have been divided ever since over the constitutional system's chances of success. Had Tsardom advanced far...

On 5 September 1939 the German Führer, Adolf Hitler, paid a surprise visit to the corps which was in the forefront of his army's ferocious assault upon Poland. As they passed the remains of a smashed Polish artillery regiment, the corps commander, General Guderian, astonished Hitler by telling him that...

Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. Much has been said and written about different learning styles in recent years. Some people have responded with evangelical enthusiasm, others exercise a more cautious approach, whilst a few disregard it completely. Certainly, there are...

This classic pamphlet takes you through the Paris Peace Conference and the 'German Question', Peacemaking and the Treaty of Versailles, Europe and the German question after Versailles.

Focusing on students’ attempts to explain the relative significance of different factors in Hitler’s rise to power, Catherine McCrory explores the vexed question of why students who seem able to express necessary historical knowledge on one occasion cannot effectively reproduce it on another. Drawing on a detailed analysis of what...