August Blog: Lessons from history
Thursday 22 August 2024
An image from the BBC programe Atomic People.
The books reviewed below, along with this BBC programme, focus on harrowing events in the past which can provide warnings to the present.
Back to School
We hope that those of you returning to school in August after the long vacation have had a restful time!
If you are teaching first year IB History students, don't forget that we have an an introductory section for students who are new to the IB programme (Getting started: Students). This gives them an overview of the kinds of skills they will need for the IB History course and advice on how to develop key study (and revision) skills.
(You can get full access on this site for your students as part of your subscription - see this page for how to do this).
Suggestions for activities that you might consider doing with new classes to introduce them to this subject can be found here:
Several of the themes under our TOK pages would also work well as an introduction to the study of history. These pages reflect on how current issues are linked to historical themes and questions - something which is also covered in the book reviews below:
Another possible starting point is to consider key anniversaries for this month and use these as a jumping off point for discussion re the significance of these events:
80 years ago this August:
Aug 1944 – Anne Frank and family arrested and sent to Bergen Belsen
Aug 1944 – Warsaw Uprising
70 years ago this August:
Aug 1954 – Gulf of Tonkin – and war in Vietnam
50 years ago this August:
1974 – Richard Nixon resigns as president re Watergate
New History Curriculum: first teaching August 2026
A reminder that the 3rd Curriculum Review can be found on MyIB.
This gives an overview of the format for the new history curriculum, including the skills focus and assessment structure for each paper.
The Review also contains the crucial information that the final guide will be published in February 2026, with first teaching from August of that year and first exams in May 2028.
We aim to have our site ready with new materials and guidance for your teaching of the new course by August 2026.
Site update
We are continuing to develop our site to enable you and your students to find what you need faster, and to further enrich the range of activities and content.
Our latest update is for Paper 3: The Americas, Topic 8:
Books and TV: Can we learn lessons from the past?
In August's blog, we mentioned the new series on Netflix on Hitler, Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial
On the same theme, Richard Evans, the leading Cambridge historian of modern Germany history, has just published a new book: Hitler's People: The Faces of the Third Reich where he asks: Were they [the Nazis] criminals? Psychopaths? Ordinary Germans? How did seemingly respectable citizens go from rejecting the democracy of the Weimar Republic to countenancing genocide?
Evans says that he has been led into this biographical approach by the availability of new documents, as well as the “emergence in our own time of a class of unscrupulous populist politicians,” and the result, says the review in the New York Times 'is a fascinating exploration of individual agency that never loses sight of the larger context.'
Linking to the present, Evans tells the reader: “Strongmen and would-be dictators are emerging, often with considerable popular support, to undermine democracy, muzzle the media, control the judiciary, stifle opposition and undermine basic human rights.”
As Ethan Croft in The Sandard writes, 'He asks us to consider the most pessimistic and chilling possibility of all, that the Nazis were people like us.'
Also published this month is Kent State: An American Tragedy by Brian VanDeMark which focuses on explaining the tragedy and stories of those involved in the Kent State shootings of 1970 in which four students died during an antiwar protest. It also looks at the state of the country at the time - the anger and the deep divisions that existed.
Thus there are also echoes with the America of today and the question of whether such an event could ever happen again...
A meticulous, pain-filled history of the senseless slaughter at Kent State (Los Angeles Times)
Historian Brian VanDeMark seeks the truth behind the May 4, 1970, campus massacre, as experienced by students, National Guard, officials and the families of those who died
August 6th is the anniversary of the dropping of the first Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima in 1945. If you can access BBC, Atomic People is a 'must watch' programme focuses on the testimony of some of the last ‘Hibakusha’ - survivors of the two atomic bombs. A last chance to hear the voices of those who actually experienced these moments of horror.
It combines footage from the time with the testimony of the survivors.
BBC Two - Atomic People (BBC)
A film that explores the human cost of atomic bombs used in wartime.
The programme provides yet another warning to the present. As the Dan Einav in the FT writes 'By confronting us with the horrors of what they experiened the hibakusha provide us with the most urgent unflinching and unequivocal warning possible about where nuclear escalation may lead'