Summary

The A Level History course offers a variety of modern European topics about events which have shaped the world we live in today.
Topics include:

• Germany and West Germany, 1918-89 deals with a turbulent period of German history across much of the Twentieth Century
• The Rise and Fall of Fascism in Italy, 1911-46 is a linked unit which deals with a similar theme: The change from democracy to fascist dictatorship in Italy in the 1920s and 1930s
• The British Experience of Warfare, 1790-1918 is an in-depth investigation into the wide and varied experiences of British people shaped by a series of wars across this lengthy period
• The historical controversy of why the First World War broke out in 1914. This is an in-depth look at the crisis in international relations in the years leading up to 1914 and also a study of the changes in historiography in relation to this issue.

Successful students have a natural interest in understanding historical events and are able to look at key events from different perspectives. At A Level you will be looking at source material of a quite complex nature and you need to be able to engage with the arguments contained within primary and secondary documents, and you will need to be able to explain and synthesise these within your essay writing.

This course helps to explain our present and collective past as a story, or a series of stories, whose content shifts according to the storyteller. As George Santayana said, "A country without a memory is a country of madmen."

History can be taken with any other subjects but many students combine it with ones that also involve a lot of reading and essay writing, such as English, Politics and Philosophy and Ethics.