Anniversaries

This week sees the 75^th Anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe; this will be a relatively low key celebration for many countries with key events cancelled due to Covid-19 but there are still many resources to be found online:

This article from History Today gives an excellent overview of the context for this key date, how the day was celebrated at at the time and how it is now remembered across Europe:

Embedded in this article is a a good podcast by historian Keith Lowe, author of Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II, on what Europe was like when war ended in May 1945 – focusing less on the celebrations and more on the devastation that Europe faced at this moment in time.

Site update

I’m sure, like us, you are feeling more confident now at online teaching. In the past two weeks, I’ve been using breakout rooms for the first time during zoom lessons and this has really made a huge difference – getting students to work in groups and then feed back to the whole class. I hope that the blog we did last month on breakoutrooms has been useful for hints on how to set these up and use them in teaching.

And we have added two new source Paper 1’s to PS4: Rights and Protest, one focusing on the KKK for the US civil rights section and the other focusing on the South African government’s policy of establishing Bantustans.

In the next couple of weeks we will add more Spanish language resources for Paper 2 and we are also currently adding to Paper 3, European region on the First World War.

Book review

Published this month is a book about two suffragette women who established a hospital in London during the First World War for wounded soldiers; it was staffed entirely by women. It is another one of those hidden stories about the role of women in the war and a great example for students to use on this topic.

Another fascinating book published recently is 'Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took on the West'  by Catherine Belton. This is not just about Putin’s rise to power and the current Russian attempts at undermining Western governments but also about the role of the KGB in the West during the Cold War.

The first part of this book is set in the Spanish Civil War and I’d recommend it to any students who enjoy historical fiction; it is excellent at conveying the horrors of the fighting and also the plight of the Republic refugees who fled to France at the end of the war. This last theme is one that is not often discussed but was in the news last year with the 80th anniversary of the end of the Spanish Civil war: