History

Overview

Introduction

Westfield’s History Department aims to fire students' curiosity and imagination, moving and inspiring them with the dilemmas, choices and beliefs of people in the past and evaluating why they acted as they did. Our students study a range of people, events and situations from local, national and international history. History helps pupils develop their own identities through an understanding of history at personal, local, national and international levels. It helps them to ask and answer questions of the present by engaging with the past.

Course leader

Mrs J Hunter

Curriculum

Topics

Chronology, evidence and 'doing history'.
How do we learn about the past before written evidence?
Why was England a contested kingdom in 1066?
Was medieval England full of misery, mayhem and death?
Church versus crown.
Why does history remember the Tudors?
What was reborn during the renaissance?
How did life change in industrial Britain?
Empire and slavery.
Enslavement and emancipation.
The civil rights movement in the USA.
Migrants to Britain.
Power and protest, the fight for rights.
'Hell cannot be more terrible.': the experience of the first world war.
How far did the resolution of world war one help cause the second?
The interwar years and the rise of the dictators.
Life in Nazi Germany.
How could the Holocaust have happened?
Was the use of the atomic bomb justified?
The progress of the second world war and the post war world.

Skills and requirements

Skills developed

As they develop their understanding of the nature of historical study, students ask and answer important questions, evaluate evidence, identify and analyse different interpretations of the past, and learn to substantiate any arguments and judgements they make. They appreciate why they are learning what they are learning and can debate its significance.