January: Anniversaries for 2019 and history in the news
Friday 11 January 2019
Happy New Year! See below for site updates, plans for 2019, forthcoming Anniversaries and some other interesting articles.
Site update
Many thanks for all of your responses to our New Year message and your positive comments about the site. It has been very helpful to get an overview of which topics you are all using and also to know which topics you still want to see.
This month we have uploaded another section for Paper 3, Latin America, Topic 14.
Liberation Theology in Latin America
This page examines Liberation Theology, a radical movement that developed in Latin America as a response to the poverty and the ill-treatment of ordinary people.
ATL on Cold War historiography have been added:
1.1 Theme 1 - Rivalry, Mistrust and Accord (ATL)
Here are some different activities that you can do for this theme within the topic of the Cold War.
And we are currently working on:
Paper 3, Asia, Topic 10: Nationalism and independence in India (1919–1964)
Paper 3, Middle East, Topic 17: Post-war developments in the Middle East (1945–2000)
We will add pages as we complete them for these topics.
Anniversaries
This is a good time to point out upcoming anniversaries for this year:
Ten Anniversaries to Note in 2019 (Council on Foreign Relations)
Anniversaries recall our triumphs, honor our losses, and mark our tragedies.
Top 10 Anniversaries for 2019 | English Heritage (English Heritage)
The births of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, the first moon landing, D-Day, and the last public performance of the Beatles are amongst 10 important historical anniversaries in 2019.
Some of these are very relevant to our courses: 100th anniversary of the Treaty of Versailles, 25th Anniverary of Nelson Mandela becoming President, 75th Anniversary of the D-Day Landings, 60th Anniversary of the moon landings and 25th Anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide for example.
We will come back to these anniversaries throughout the year with suggestions of resources that you might be able to use should you want to commemorate these dates in assemblies or with displays.
History in the news
As ever, “If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday.” (Pearl Buck) and so the current tension over Taiwan has led to many articles looking at the history of the conflict
What's behind the China-Taiwan divide? (BBC News)
China sees Taiwan as a breakaway province that will eventually be part of the country again, but many Taiwanese want a separate nation.
Though interestingly, ‘It is a paradox that the less the past is understood and appreciated in its complexity, the more it is being used’….This quote comes from an article entitled ‘The uses of history in international society: from the Paris peace conference to the present’ and it is published this month in International Affairs Magazine. The authors are historian Margaret Macmillan and politics lecturer, Patrick Quinton-Brown.
There is plenty of food for thought in this article and it could be useful for TOK students!
The death of key people who have influenced history can also lead to interesting obituaries. George W Bush died in December and his role in ending the Cold War and role in the First Gulf War has been much discussed in the news.
This obituary of Zura Karuhimbi reveals a personal story of the horrific events in Rwanda and would be interesting to students covering Rwanda for Paper One.
The 'witch' who protected a village from genocide (BBC News)
Zura Karuhimbi had only her wits to protect the people she hid during the Rwandan genocide.