History

In the Lower School we begin by studying the growth of the British Empire and its colonies in America. We consider the importance of slavery in the growth of this empire and the foundation of the United States. This work culminates in a project, based on extensive individual work. In the final part of the year, we begin the IGCSE course, studying the ‘Causes and Course of the First World War’. For this, we first ask how it was possible for such a titanic conflict to emerge from such seemingly inconsequential causes and we spend some time looking at how the fighting on the Western and Eastern Fronts developed over the course of the conflict. We assess to what extent the War can be said to have been well-led, and to what extent soldiers and commanders were merely victims of circumstance. To accompany the teaching of this vitally important period, we run a trip to the Somme battlefield over Easter.

Our IGCSE course then sees us study Germany from 1918 to 1945, investigating how and why the new Weimar Republic was able to weather the terrible circumstances of its foundation, reach some level of prosperity and stability in the 1920s, and then succumb to radical politics and the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s. This leads us to a study of Nazi Germany until 1945, where we look at how the Nazis affected day-to-day life for all Germans, and how life in Germany changed as a result of the Second World War. We put a particular focus on the persecution and eventual murder of the Jews and other minorities in this period.

Our focus then shifts to international history, where we study the development of the Cold War in an atmosphere of post-war tension. We look in detail at some of the Cold War’s major flash-points – the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Berlin Crisis, for example – and ask how it was that the world came seemingly so close to destruction on so many occasions. Our final IGCSE topic is China in the 20th Century, where we examine the truly extraordinary story of how this country emerged from total chaos to develop, first, into a dictatorial regime, and then into something approaching a modern superpower.

We take the AQA A-level course. There are three main topics we study across both years of the Sixth Form:

1. Britain, 1906-57 (40% of the final mark)
2. Russia, 1855-1964 (40%)
3. The United States, 1764-1865 (20%; this is a coursework essay)

The Britain paper examines how this country underwent radical change and adapted to the unprecedented challenge of fighting two world wars in the first half of the twentieth century. We look at how a series of reforming governments responded to popular pressure to combat the crippling poverty endemic to British cities around 1900, and went on to create the welfare state in a form that is recognizable to us today. We study the sometimes tense relationship between protest groups (such as the suffragists and suffragettes) and political leaders, and look at how British society changed sometimes fundamentally in the light of rapid economic change and the seemingly unstoppable expansion of government power. By the end of the course, students will be able to understand why, as Macmillan famously claimed, Britons by 1957 had “never had it so good.”

The Russia paper covers some of the most dramatic and consequential events in world history – the First World War, the Russian Revolutions of 1917, the Second World War, and the opening stages of the Cold War. We look at how Europe’s most backward and inefficient economy in the nineteenth century managed to launch the world’s first artificial satellite by 1957; we examine how the tsars and then the Communists managed to keep some element of control over one of the biggest and most culturally diverse countries on earth; and we try to understand how the Revolution went so swiftly from a harbinger of the dawn of a new era in world history to the horror of Stalin’s gulags. On the way through this, we look closely at a variety of political leaders and insurgents, from Lenin to Nicholas II to Khrushchev, who unwaveringly thought they knew how to save Russia – and whose plans, to some extent or another, all ended in disaster.

Our coursework (non-exam assessment) is centred on the challenges facing the new United States as it, first, established itself as a viable entity, and then managed – at first successfully, and then by turns increasingly badly – the process of territorial expansion and internal consolidation. In this study, which is in large part student-led, students complete a 4,000 word essay looking at one aspect of the trouble that led to the outbreak of the first really ‘modern’ war – the Civil War of 1861-65.