Students in this lesson will identify, understand and be able to explain how Winston Churchill, through his speeches in 1940-1941, contributed to the formation of a collective British resolve to continue fighting during the Blitz, a critical time period when Britain was alone in fighting Germany.

By an in-depth analysis of primary and secondary sources, students in this lesson will understand the basic facts behind the Blitz and how it affected the citizens of London, why Hitler decided to use the Luftwaffe against London and how a simple photograph served as a symbol around which the British people rallied during the dark early days of WWII.

Through an in-depth analysis of primary and secondary sources, students in this lesson will identify, understand and be able to explain the basic facts behind the Norman Invasion, the role William the Conqueror played in transforming Britain by combining Anglo-Saxon and Norse culture and institutions, how and why the landscape of the island was transformed by the building of castles (including the Tower of London – built as a symbol of royal power along the River Thames) after the Norman conquest, why items such as the Domesday Book and the Bayeux Tapestry are critical primary sources from the period, and why the conquest is seen today by many historians and teachers as a watershed year in world and European history.

Through an in-depth analysis of various primary and secondary sources, students in this lesson will identify, understand and be able to explain the stories behind King Arthur and the Arthurian legends, theorizing and taking a position as to whether the sources support the contention that Arthur actually existed.

By an in-depth analysis of primary and secondary sources, students in this lesson will identify, understand and be able to explain England’s role in driving the continent towards war in 1914 (including Parliament’s foreign policy decisions that drove the UK away from Germany and towards France), the British reaction to the crisis in the Balkans that fateful summer and what Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey meant when he uttered the now famous statement about the “lamps going out all over Europe.”

Students in this lesson will identify, understand and be able to explain the basic facts behind what happened in London and in Flanders in the last days of the Great War, the British public’s reaction to the war, and the story behind Remembrance Day (Armistice Day) in England and around the world, not only in 1918 but also today.

Through an analysis of primary and secondary sources, including a reading of Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem The White Man’s Burden (1899), students in this lesson will identify, understand and be able to explain why the poem was written, what Kipling meant by the “burden”, and how the work came to symbolize the Age of European Imperialism in the decades before the Great War.