History is something that has always fascinated me but we rarely studied it at my primary school because it was not a core subject that we could get tested on. As a result, following my first lesson on that subject at Mary Webb, I became very eager to learn more, having just had my first glimpse of what it was like to study it properly. So, that January, once we had completely settled in, I sent a research piece to Mr Bird and, since then, we have worked on a vast variety of different topics: medieval England and the Peasants’ Revolt, the Suffragettes, the First World War and various forms of propaganda, as well as my personal favourite: medicine through time. I have always loved making connections between different events like, just before the lockdown in March, I had linked the SOE to the Suffragettes to compare how each type of ungentlemanly, and unladylike, warfare was received by the public, for instance. Last year, I also began to study some events with Miss Weston, which involved researching the topics we learned about in class in more detail or from a different viewpoint, and this work, alongside the work I did with Mr Bird, continued throughout lockdown and it offered a surprising amount of stability and kept my interest in history alive even when we could not go to school to learn about it in a classroom.

Until now, the majority of this research has been based loosely around what we do in class but, during the lockdown, I began to learn about new ideas and events, some of which I had never even heard of before! With Miss Weston’s help, I began to research the Russian Revolution and I’m finding it really interesting because it is not necessarily something that I would have chosen to look at, but the similarities between it and the French Revolution, Peterloo Massacre and, basically, any other example of a civil rights movement that attempts to get their ideas heard are actually quite intense, so I like it from that perspective too. Lots of the work I had done before was relatively textbook-based too and this is not really too much of an exception: reading forms the foundations of most of the work I do on the Russian Revolution so that I can get a bit more clarity over certain events and specific people. Interestingly, none of the books that I have at the moment on the Revolution are mine: most of them were tracked down through the school library network and one of them I’m borrowing from Miss Weston but they each have different pieces of information so it is great to have so many sources that I can base my own thoughts around.

In English during Year 9, we study dystopian worlds as our initial unit of work and this includes totalitarian and Orwellian dystopias that lead on to the work we do on ‘Animal Farm’. Having read that particular book, along with ‘1984’ in Year 7, I have been able to fixate upon some of the parallels between the tale of Animal Farm and that of the birth of the USSR so, although we do not learn about it in class currently, this topic has assisted me so far in English too because, hopefully, it enables me to question the symbolism and character traits in a little more detail.

However, the work I have done thus far with Mr Bird has, similarly, been built around reading and questioning but, unlike some of the other topics I had done before, this one was something I had literally never heard of! After stumbling across a term that I had not really understood during lockdown, I decided to ask Mr Bird about it and, curiously, it was a type of history that he had studied at University called ‘subjective history’ or, to give it its proper title, ‘Historiology’. This can be defined as the different interpretations of historical events, which are then connected to form a chain of fact and fiction, often linked by alterations and purifications that have been made by authorities such as the British Government during World War Two. The actual events, or series of events, that we have looked at include the Blitz, Arnhem, the Battle of Britain and the evacuation of Dunkirk. Much of what I have learned about in this overall topic is from a book called ‘Myth of the Blitz’ by Angus Calder, which I found to be an incredible source, that is simply packed full of ideas and points, once you get past the rant-stage of course! Despite the book primarily being on the Blitz, lots of these notions are applicable to the other events we have studied, especially to Dunkirk and Arnhem because those are the two that we have spent the most time on over the course of this term.

Now that the holidays are approaching, some of these topics are drawing to a close for now but that is not to say that I will ever forget them. With that in mind, I am currently working on a final essay on the portrayal of Dunkirk through film (How does the 1958 version compare with the 2017 version?), which is a task that has been made slightly more challenging by the limitation on its length standing at a mere eight pages, following a compromise… Also, with regards to the Russian Revolution, I will endeavour to answer some of the more pressing questions surrounding it before seeing where that takes me after Christmas, although I have already put in a request to study Hitler’s rise to power so we’ll have to see what happens!

Ultimately, there is something for everyone with regards to history but it is up to you as to whether or not you want to look for it or react to what somebody else has found. That is just personal choice yet the fact remains that there will be a time or an idea that has been embedded within our past which will seize your attention. Whether it is the evolution of mankind or the myth surrounding the Christmas Truce and that famous football game in 1914, there will be something for you in history, and that is one the aspects of it that I love because, in a world where we are not allowed to and can not connect physically to each other by standing too close or by sharing a smile that gets lost beneath a mask, we can still be connected to our predecessors and that also links us all together too.