World 1901-present

Some of the most profound and influential changes in world history take place from 1901 to today and covered here are many of the important and well known ones as well as some of the smaller stories. In terms of reach this section covers huge themes on diplomacy, post imperialism and economics. The articles cover the time period right up into recent events such as the State of the Union address by the US President Barrack Obama.

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  • The Olympics - politics, impact and legacy - its not just about the sport

    Article

    2024 is an Olympic Games year. Held every four years (with the exception of during the World Wars and Covid-19 restrictions), the modern Olympics is the largest international sporting event in the world. However, historically it has not always been just the sports that are played and the athletes’ performances...

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  • Lengthening Year 9’s narrative of the American civil rights movement

    Article

    Inspired by reading the work of Stephen Tuck, Ellie Osborne set out to design a new sequence of lessons that would help her students adopt a longer lens on the American civil rights movement. At the same time, Osborne wanted to put more emphasis on the agency and campaigns of activists,...

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  • Come together: putting popular music at the heart of historical enquiry

    Article

    Drawing on a wide range of history teachers’ existing published work and presenting diverse examples of his own practice, David Ingledew builds a thorough curricular and pedagogic rationale for using popular music in history teaching. He shows how lyrics and music can be used as stimulus for various kinds of analysis and...

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  • Recorded webinar series: Commemorating the 75th anniversary of the UN Convention on Genocide

    Multipage Article

    9 December 2023 was the 75th anniversary of the passing of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (known as the UN Convention on Genocide). The convention was a clear statement by the international community that crimes of that nature should never happen...

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  • How representing women can convey a more complex narrative of the Russian Revolution to Year 9

    Article

    Barbara Trapani was troubled by the oversimplified judgements her students were making about the Russian Revolution. Could the women of the revolution help her students overcome their tendency to focus on success and failure? Trapani revised her enquiry, selecting stories of women who could ‘illuminate’ a longer, more complex history of...

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  • Recorded Webinar: India and the Second World War

    Article

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  • Recorded Webinar: ‘Drawing the Line’: the 1947 Partition of India

    Article

    August 2022 marks 75 years since British India was divided at independence into two separate states: India and Pakistan (the latter including today’s Bangladesh). As with the 70th commemoration in 2017, this anniversary will trigger a great deal of collective remembering in Britain just as in South Asia itself. Freedom from...

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  • Recorded Webinar: Resisting Reagan

    Article

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  • Film: Rethinking the origins of the Cold War

    Article

    In this HA Virtual Branch talk Professor Richard Toye explores Churchill’s response to the USSR and how his actions during the early Cold War years intersected with his views of traditional Anglo-Russian tensions and the legacy of the ‘Great Game’. Richard Toye is Professor of Modern History at the University...

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  • Telling difficult stories about the creation of Bangladesh

    Article

    Nathanael Davies recognised that previous efforts to diversify the history taught at his school by weaving new stories into the curriculum had made little impression on his students’ assumptions about what really counted as history. Planning a new enquiry on the creation of Bangladesh was intended both to bridge a...

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  • Reimagining the ‘Aba Riots’

    Article

    As an Early Career Teacher, Eleri Hedley-Carter set out to make the history she teaches in school more reflective of her undergraduate study of history – a discipline that strives to uncover a diverse past through various lenses and historical methods. In addition to expanding her school’s curriculum to include an...

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  • What Have Historians Been Arguing About... Chinese history?

    Article

    Teaching Chinese history in the UK runs up against some immediate obstacles. It lacks the familiar staging posts of European history: Chairman Mao is among the few well-known names, and terms such as Cultural Revolution and Opium War may attract recognition, but are often not understood in detail. The situation...

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  • Helping Year 9 to engage effectively with ‘other genocides’

    Article

    In this article, Andy Lawrence returns to arguments made in Teaching History 153 about the importance of teaching young people about other modern genocides in addition to the Holocaust. Building on those arguments with his own rationale, Lawrence also acknowledges the constraints on curriculum time that compel all departments to...

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  • Navigating the ‘imperial history wars’

    Article

    Concerned by the growing tendency of politicians and press to revive the moral balance-sheet approach to British imperial history and by some evidence of its resurgence in schools, Alex Benger set about devising a framework which would keep pupils’ analysis rigorously historical, rather than moral and politicised. In this article,...

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  • Teaching about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and events happening there

    Article

    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...

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  • Film: Why does the massacre of the Armenians in the First World War still get overlooked?

    Article

    Why is the term 'Armenian Genocide' controversial, with many countries still not acknowledging a genocide at all? What do we know about the event of 1915 and the plight of the Armenian community in Turkey? How can we grapple with a history that many people want to forget? In this...

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  • Recorded webinar: History, Politics and Journalism

    Article

    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...

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  • What Have Historians Been Arguing About... the impact of the British Empire on Britain?

    Article

    The murder of George Floyd during the summer of 2020 and the ongoing ‘culture war’ in Britain over the legacy of the British Empire have reignited interest in imperial history. This focuses, in particular, on the question of the empire’s impact on Britain itself: on how the act of conquering...

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  • Decolonise, don’t diversify: enabling a paradigm shift in the KS3 history curriculum

    Article

    In this article, Dan Lyndon-Cohen makes the case that history departments should move from diversifying the curriculum to decolonising it. After reflecting on some examples of how he made the content of his lessons more representative, he explores how the influence of writers such as Michel-Rolph Trouillot and Emma Dabiri...

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  • Film: China's Good War

    Article

    In this lecture Professor Mitter uses film and other propaganda works to explore how key events of global history are being represented in China to develop a different understanding of its own past. The talk addresses a number of the factors for this change in how China is reflecting on...

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