EF History in English

If you love English and you love History, this is the course for you!

For the next two years, we will focus on the history of the English-speaking world and in the process, we’ll find out why Henry VIII had so many wives, why Queen Boudicca is still revered in England, why Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary were at odds with each other. But we will also find out why movies set in the Second World War are cool to watch but maybe not always historically accurate, what Martin Luther King’s stance on the Vietnam War was and what problems former colonies face today.

If this all seems like something you could get on board with for two years, then sign up for this course. You need to be fond of English and ready to read and speak in English (even if at one point it can get tricky!) and you need to like history (if you don’t, then this is really not the place for you).

In addition to that, you need to be ready to take on projects and really immerse yourself in a historical topic.

To give you an idea of what we will look at, here’s a list of some of the things we will talk about:

• How Britain came to be: we will go far back in history here and look at the Celts, the Romans…and the legendary King Arthur.
• All the Kings called Henry and the things they did to put England on the map.
• How things changed greatly when the North American Colonies were acquired, what role Queen Elizabeth played in that and what life was like in the colonies (not very fun, but you already guessed that).
• The Victorian Age and the American Frontier, when lots of things were happening in lots of places and nothing was the same as before, as railways came to be, lavish dinners and balls in New York City defined the Gilded Age, the laborers were suffering from horrible work conditions, colonies were taken without asking the people living there and life changed greatly everywhere.
• The First World War and the Irish Troubles and the Second World War and the Cold War and the Civil Rights Movement and Decolonization – the 20^th Century was full of history happening quickly!

The way we work changes from topic to topic. Sometimes you will immerse yourself in original sources, sometimes we will watch movies and documentaries, sometimes you will work on your own and produce a dossier to be handed in, sometimes you will prepare a presentation, sometimes we will have a “traditional” history class and sometimes it will be a combination of all of this and more.

I hope to see you soon when we start the EF. If you want more information or have questions, don’t hesitate to contact me either in school or at sarah.staehelin@edubs.ch.