The Politics of History Textbooks

Available for over a year

Jonathan Freedland examines the current anxieties surrounding the teaching of history through the prism of history textbooks from around a century ago with his guests in front of an audience at the Chalke Valley History Festival. What is the balance to be struck between dry facts and flamboyant descriptions? Should British history imbue children with a sense of patriotism and chronology? We hear about the "fierce" English warriors chasing wild boar and buffalo before drinking "huge bowls of a sort of beer" in Cassell's Historical Course for Schools in 1884, the wives of the "wicked" Henry VIIIth in H. E. Marshall's Our Island Story in 1905 and examine C.R.L. Fletcher and Rudyard Kipling's A History of England in 1911 with its portrait of "the dark continent of Africa". Jonathan's guests include writer and historian William Dalrymple, Dr Katharine Burn of Oxford University who was a teacher and leads the PGCE history course, historian Dr Peter Yeandle from Manchester University who is an expert on history textbooks at the turn of the last century and history textbook author and examiner Ben Walsh. Producer: Clare Walker.