Continuing our efforts to share really good resources being provided free for teachers and their students, this post is to draw your attention to historiana.eu  EUROCLIO, the European Network of History Educators of which the Historical Association is a member, is making available resources on World War One, the Versailles Treaty, the inter-war years, World War Two and the Cold War. These should be really useful to UK teachers in a variety of ways.

1. The resources are transnational and multi-perspective. Some examples of how that could be helpful are:

• because it means that images are provided to set the Western Front in the context of warfare on the other fronts 1914-18.
• the WW1 propaganda images go well beyond British and a few German examples that we often find in UK textbooks.
• the German Depression of the 1930s and crucial international reactions to Germany’s plight can be more easily explained using the material about the state of other major economies, including Britain’s in these years.
• the Soviet take-over of eastern Europe can be better understood in the context of what was going on in the whole continent and by understanding what life was like for the people of Europe.

2. There are some really nice multi-stranded timelines that show what was happening in all parts of the world, for example comparing the theatres of war in World War One and World War Two. For example: War Fronts of WW2

3. This is a great place to get your own teacher knowledge up to scratch as there is both depth and breadth. It will be a help to any teacher feeling they need to get a better overall level of knowledge themselves in order to be able to make sense of a topic for their students. For example, in the Cold War module a longer-view of US-Soviet relations is taken by taking the date back to 1917. You can find that here: How did allies become enemies?

4. There are some super source collections including images that are new even to teachers with more years of service. For example WW1: the war on land and Hitler in propaganda

5. There is material to teach about western Europe in the Cold War period. It is an odd there that in schools in England there tends to be teaching of the Cold War which is about the superpower’s actions and sometimes life in eastern Europe under the Cold War, but rarely anything about western Europe.

Everything can be used on line or downloaded in PPT and Word format to be adapted for specific classroom use. Some of the contents is already accompanied by activity ideas.

If you develop a learning activity based on any of these resources, please do consider sharing it with EUROCLIO for editing and posting on Historiana and the blog too. You can send any ideas via www.history.org and follow further developments via @histassoc and/or via the Historical Association Facebook page.