Telling Stories at A-Level: Chekhov, the Cholera, and the Contempt

Stories, it seems, are in vogue in the History classroom.

And for good reason. Telling a gripping tale, as Christine Counsell has recently advocated, can grip students’ imagination, revealing through memorable examples key parts of the bigger picture in a way which can inspire and enthuse.

Yet, as Claire Holliss and Jim Carroll (2025) have also noted, the use and purpose of story telling does require some careful thought, and can – despite our best intentions – lead to some surprising and frustrating outcomes.

I hadn’t been aware of Claire and Jim’s work on story telling at KS5 until this past summer, when Claire presented it at a brilliant session of the Schools History Project (SHP) conference. But by that point, I and colleagues had also been starting to think about how and why to tell stories at KS5 to students.

The Soviet Union at War: Contested Chronologies of World War Two

Dates of events might be considered objective facts, open to neither debate nor contestation.

Yet periodisation – that is, setting the start and end dates of a particular time period in history – is very much a matter of interpretation. Indeed, where the historian (or history teacher) chooses to begin or end a historical period can determine not just the length of the period in question, but also its meaning and significance.

This is made clear in the case of the Soviet Union’s Second World War by Mark Edele’s excellent 2021 overview, Stalinism at War.

The Baron’s Cloak: A Study in Dynamic Continuity?

In my previous post, I made the case for a more dynamic understanding of historical continuity. Having tried to illustrate what this might look like in practice, I now want to turn to one story in particular. That story is told in Willard Sunderland’s The Baron’s Cloak.

This brilliant book details the extraordinary and troubling life of Baron Roman Feodorovich von Ungern-Sternberg, an eccentric mystic, reactionary nationalist, and ruthlessly violent Russian nobleman of Germanic origins. It follows Ungern’s life, from his birth in Graz to his family’s settling in Estland (modern-day Estonia) via Georgia, through his stuttering induction into the Russian army before the Great War to his career as a military commander in the anti-Bolshevik White movement during the Russian Civil War.

The book can be read in a several different ways: as a riveting story in its own right, as a tale of competing nationalism and radicalisms, as an exploration of huge upheaval and change. In Sunderland’s own words, it is “a study of the Russian Empire told through Ungern’s life” (p. 5), especially in its final years, as it collapsed and was then (partially) reconstituted by a new Soviet state.

However, reading this book, I found it to provide a highly stimulating narrative of dynamic historical continuity.

Here, using several short excerpts, I’ll retell key parts of the narrative in order to draw out some of the examples of continuity it seems to reveal. As I go, I’ll return to the diagrams of historical “paths” which I provided in my previous post, illustrating how I think the excerpts illustrate these.

What happens when “nothing happens”? Rethinking continuity as a dynamic process

 

Claire Holliss was kind enough to offer her thoughts and critique on an earlier draft of this and the subsequent post, which were significantly improved by her generous and insightful comments.

A decade ago, I was given the recommendation to read Willard Sunderland’s newly published book, The Baron’s Cloak. I should have set aside the time to read it then. Better late than never, though. A decade later, I’ve finally gotten round to doing so.

Subtitled A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution, the book is a masterclass in microhistory, telling through the life and experiences of one man the story of the Russian empire as it lurched into the Russo-Japanese War, 1905 Revolution, First World War, Revolution of 1917, and Civil War. That man is Baron Roman Feodorovich von Ungern-Sternberg.

Baron Ungern-Sternberg, shortly before his execution in September 1921. Credit: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Responding to SHP 2025: Part 2, Claire Holliss on Stories at A-Level

The 2025 Schools History Project (SHP) conference was, as ever, a highlight of the teaching year and a stimulus for all sorts of thoughts.

Inevitably, the best workshops at such an event are those that leave you with more (interesting) questions than answers.

In these two posts (including my last one, on Arthur Chapman’s presentation on stories and narratives), I’m going to try to formulate some coherent thoughts in relation to two really excellent sessions in particular, both of which sent me away with a number of very interesting questions. The second post, here, discusses Claire Holliss’ workshop on stories at KS5.

 

Sometimes, new directions in pedagogy develop their own momentum and give rise to new orthodoxies and (near-)universally accepted wisdom. When this happens, it’s important to take a step back and evaluate the evidence to establish how sound that wisdom actually is.

This is what I understood Claire Holliss’ fantastic SHP 2025 workshop to be honing in on.

In her very clear-minded, critical, but open discussion of using stories at KS5, Claire gave a well-deserved nod towards some very interesting and valuable work done on integrating stories into classroom teaching. She then asked how far doing so would actually benefit teaching History at KS5.

Claire’s work links to an ongoing research project, involving the selection and use of specific stories in her own teaching. This was also of interest to me, as our department has also been starting to develop stories in our own KS5 teaching of Russian and Soviet History (I’ll explore this a bit below).