Anniversaries this month

Those of your students who are studying World War Two for their Depth Study may be interested in discussing the following anniversary with your students. Operation Market Garden saw the Allies launching a daring airborne operation to secure the River Rhine crossings and advance into northern Germany. It was a costly failure, but still remains a remarkable military feat due to the determination and courage shown by Allied airborne troops and the units that tried to reach them. It also led to the liberation of a large part of the Netherlands at a time when many Dutch people were close to starvation.

Student Access

With the term well underway now, don't forget that you can give your students access to the History InThinking site as part of your subscription. This allows you to:

• Give students direct access to some - but not all - pages on the site.
• Create various types of tasks for your classes or for individual students.
• Give online feedback, monitor student progress, and view grades in the online grade book.

Details on how to set this up is on the left-hand side of the home page under the heading Student Access.

Site update

As we explained in the August blog, we are currently adding the topics for Core Option A of this IGCSE course.

We have both taught this 19th Century option for IGCSE and we found it a great way of broadening out student knowledge beyond 20th Century topics - particularly for those students who then go on to do mainly 20th Century history for IB or A level. It is also more thematic  (rather than chronological) in approach covering a range of issues and continents - civil War in America, liberalism and nationalism in Europe, imperialism in Asia and Africa. This makes it an interesting course to teach and also to study. The themes of nationalism and imperialism in Europe come together in the final topic on the causes of the First World War.

Hopefully, some of you may be inspired to consider this option!

Books to read in September

Those of you teaching the First World War may be interested in reading this new book which examines the significance of the fighting on the Eastern Front. We often cover this with students as more of a side show to the horrors of the Western Front, but as Margaret MacMillan points out in her review of this book in the Financial Times entitled 'The Eastern Front by Nick Lloyd — truth bombs', the fighting on the Eastern Front was significant not only for the horrors of human loss, but also for the legacy of this fighting:

'We are used to the casualty figures in the west: 900,000 dead from the British empire; more from Germany or France. The number of those who died in the east may be even larger if civilians are included. Some two million Russian soldiers alone died there and 1.2mn from Austria-Hungary. Serbia started its war with Austria-Hungary with an army of 420,000; by 1915 it had 140,000 left. At the end it had lost more men in proportion to its population than France.'