Migrants: The Story of Us All

Product Information

The Taino people, whom Columbus encountered on Hispaniola in 1492, believed they emerged from two caves on the island. The UK’s biggest exam board Pearson Edexcel launched a new Migrants in Britain GCSE History topic at the Migration Museum on 6 October 2021, attended by teachers and educators from across the country. A perfect book to help teach children about refugees and migration, with humanity, inclusivity and empathy. The story brings this danger to the table with an incredible aesthetic—colour over a very high-pitched black.

After the Second World War, as many as 12 million ethnic Germans were expelled from their historic homes in Poland, the Soviet Union, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia. Working with communities and individuals, we are exploring the nature and importance of personal keepsakes in telling migration stories.Miller singles out the Vandals, a migrant people from central Europe who found themselves ruling a chunk of Africa as the Roman empire imploded. At some points it feels as if Miller, the highly-travelled former BBC journalist, is romanticising the idea of migration as an innate sense of curiosity based on his own experiences as a self-proclaimed “nomad”. Packed with emotion and reminding us of things once known and half-remembered, they resemble frames from a film whose complex whole we cannot see. He challenges the premise that having a permanent home and a lifelong nationality are considered normal, as if they were part of the human condition. Every page is somber and dark, which reinforces the seriousness of the animals’ predicament, but also throws their colorful feathers and fur into sharp relief…The amount of detail is astounding and the quality of the artwork is very high.

The images are somber and expressive; the refugees are grief-stricken and dignified in their struggle. This series of animated video stories aim to amplify the stories of migrants and their families, of the communities that welcome them and the conversations they have along the way. Children will empathise quickly with the elegantly illustrated animal characters, each of whom have their own identity with details like clothing, colour choices and expressions. Every day, thousands of people undertake a perilous journey to seek refuge and protection in a country other than their own.

For this International Migrants Day, we focus on unlocking the power of migration as one of the solutions to global challenges, such as adapting to the impacts of climate change or providing better economic opportunities for communities. Alone of the peoples of the ancient Aegean, wrote Plato, the children of Athens could claim to be autochthonous, earth-born, living always in one place, ‘truly dwelling in the land’. this is one of those amazingly simple yet powerful children’s books that adults and children alike can appreciate.

Most of the historic episodes covered are Euro- or Americo-centric: it is pejorative western narratives about migration that he is most keen to confront.And so, over the last 10 years, while this project has been in gestation, I have lived (for at least 3 months, and sometimes a lot longer) in India, Tanzania, Nigeria, Tunisia, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Ethiopia, and Indonesia – with several short spells back in the UK, usually in the London house in which I was born. Athenians suppressed this awareness; they were the first Western people to take pride in being, in Herodotus’s words, “the only Greeks who never migrated.

From Neanderthals, to the Ancient Greeks, to the African slave trade, to modern migrants, Migration shows us that it is only by understanding how migration and migrants have been viewed in the past, that we can re-set the terms of the modern-day debate about migration. This video tells the story of the competition, featuring interviews with the six shortlisted teams and footage of the finals event.It’s a rare feat: a wordless picture book in which the absence of text intensifies the stories it tells.