March blog: Russia and Ukraine
Wednesday 2 March 2022
“In order to be an informed citizen, one needs to be globally literate. One needs to understand why the world matters, how it works, how foreign policy affects the world,”
Richard Haass, Council of Foreign Relations
https://www.ft.com/content/b403898a-0dfb-41b3-a8c6-a53866ff0859
There has never been a more important time to understand global events and the history that has got us to the current situation regarding the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
As we all struggle to come to terms with events in Ukraine and the implications for the world order, your students will need help understanding what is going on and why.
We hope the links below will prove useful in such explanations:
The article below reviews the history of Ukraine under the Soviet Union – and historian Ronald Suny from Michigan University challenges Putin’s assertions regarding Ukraine's history.
A historian clears up some mistruths and half-truths about the history of Ukraine and Russia (Scroll.in)
Kremlin claims that the Donbass region is historically and rightfully part of Russia. What does history tell us?
Bringing the history of Ukraine right up to the present time this article creates a timeline which goes through the recent events that led to where we are now.
Here, historian Margaret Macmillan, discusses the parallels with the start of the Second World War and the implications of Putin’s actions
Opinion: Putin’s war on Ukraine has brought the past to the present, and made the future very uncertain (The Globe and Mail)
Putin has never come to terms with the end of the Soviet Union in 1991
Your Cold War students may be interested to see this article by George Kennan – architect of the US Cold War containment policy – predicting, back in 1997, that NATO expansion was a mistake in terms of its impact on Russia:
Opinion | A Fateful Error (Published 1997) (www.nytimes.com)
George F Kennan Op-Ed article contends that expanding NATO would be 'most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era;' maintains that such decision would inflame nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion and have adverse effect on development of Russian democracy (M)
Many useful articles can also be found on the excellent Council of Foreign Relations site:
What is new on the site?
We have now completed the module on The Mexican Revolution for Paper 3 ,The Americas, Topic 11
And we have also uploaded it in Spanish:
We have also now nearly completed The Ottomans - Topic 12 for Paper 3, Africa and the Middle East
There is a new exemplar essay for The American Civil War, Paper 3, Europe, Topic 8
US Civil War: Graded student exemplars
See below for graded student essays on this topic. Evaluate the effectiveness of methods of Southern resistance to Reconstruction between 1865 and 1876.
And we have started a revision activities section - creating specific revision resources to help students in the lead up to the May examinations. We will continue to add to this section over the next couple of months
History books
A new book published this month take a new look at the modern history of Africa and would be a very useful resource for Paper 3, Topic 5, The Americas.
A recasting of the history of the modern world that places Africa and Africans at the centre of the story. French argues that the rise of the west to global dominance was made possible by the exploration and exploitation of Africa-and, above all, by the slave trade. He recounts the destruction of complex African societies and the scale and brutality of slavery. At the time of Black Lives Matter this is an intensely political message. But French's book is no work of propaganda and has been hailed as a "masterpiece" by Peter Frankopan, professor of global history at Oxford." -- Financial Times
For those of you teaching the French Revolution, you and your students might enjoy this book which was published last year. It is, as the Financial Times writes: An incisively argued and thrilling moment-by-moment examination of one of the French Revolution’s most dramatic days.