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What were the causes that sparked the English Civil War?
This clever, mini enquiry provides the antidote to all of those turgid lessons about the complicated causes of the English Civil War. Your students will think deeply, develop good historical thinking about causation – and do very little writing!
This is a tried and tested way of getting your students to understand the causes of the English Civil War in an hour or two – no more.
Starting with the hugely strange image, The World Turned Upside Down, how many strikingly odd aspects can the class remember in just 8 seconds? What might this mean?
Having established that this is all about the Civil War, the enquiry question is introduced: what caused the Civil War? Next they look at a number of images and captions to establish the narrative of events 1600-42.
Next they group the reasons and soon see the interconnectedness of the causes.
Finally they are introduced to three historians with different perspectives on the causes of the Civil War – which evidence will each one choose?
Download lesson
- Lesson presentation: PowerPoint
- Lesson write-up: PDF
- Resource 1: PDF
- Resource 2: PDF
- Worksheet1: PDF
