Change in the Modern World: China

Option B of the Change in the Modern World module for HSC Modern History offers teachers and students a chance to engage with the volatile and intense recent history of China's Cultural Revolution, as well as the Tiananmen Square incident that threatened to change the lives of more than a billion people.

In the materials below, teachers are shown an overview of how this module can be taught. Each of the resources and ideas will help our Year 12 students to engage with Red China at its height. This new module and option gives us the chance to wrestle with an exciting period of modern history where huge ideas had a very real impact on the lives of both those at the top and the everyday people influenced by them.

Change in the Modern World: Option B overview - PowerPoint Presentation from the HTA NSW Conference 2017

Resources

Political and Social Conditions in China - cause and effect, background dot points.
Building the Field: China 1966-1969 - useful subject-specific vocabulary and historical terminology.
Sino-Soviet Split and Anti-Revisionism in the 1950s and 1960s - cause and effect, ideology, background dot points.
Significant Figures: China 1966-1989 - historical significance, overview of historical figures.
Deng and Mao: Changing Political Standing - significance and timelines in relation to dot points.
Getting to Grips with the Cultural Revolution - cause and effect, research scaffold.
Evaluating the Cultural Revolution - source analysis, historiography, perspectives.
Tiananmen Square: Ideology and Evaluation - source analysis, historiography, perspectives.
Impact of the Tiananmen Square Incident - guided comprehension of historical reading


Additional material can also be found in HTA's Teaching History journal, 2017.

Tiananmen Square: Ideology and Evaluation

Picking apart the myriad reasons for what happened at Tiananmen Square in 1989 can be quite a big ask, especially in light of the conflicting information in the historical record. At the time of writing it has now been nearly 30 years since the incident occurred, however, the establishment of a national history in keeping with China's ongoing political ideology means that some degree of historiographical analysis will be required from students looking to get an overall picture of this multidimensional event. 

In other words: the official and the unofficial histories of the Tiananmen Square incident are quite different from one another. 

Before engaging with the opinions of a wide range of historians, students should examine the various causes of the event itself. 

This can be looked at in three main ways:

1. The reasons for Deng Xiaoping's opposition to the protests.
2. The reasons for the protestors' opposition to Deng Xiaoping.
3. The reasons for why the protests could ultimately be interpreted as a failure.  

Here's a sheet with 14 causes that can be sorted into the three above categories. Students can colour-code, cut-and-paste, or copy into a table. Click the link below to download.

Resource: Clash of Ideologies

Following this, students can then begin looking at a variety of evaluations regarding the incident, and consider how each historian has grappled with the above three categories of reasoning. These have been gleamed from various books about 20th Century Chinese history, all of which I would recommend. They are as follows:

Alexander V. Pantsov, author of Deng Xiaoping, 2016

Despite numerous pleas to return home, the rebellious youths did not want to abandon their protests, so the leaders of the nation had to choose between employing force and making concessions. And they made their choice, turning the streets leading to Tiananmen red with blood.

Deng Xiaoping retained his firm conviction about the necessity for dictatorship in the form of the unchallengable rule of the Chinese Communist Party. When confronted by a vision of democracy, he could only see the spectre of chaos. He dug in his heels and would go no further.

Many in the Party saw the market forces of economic reforms to blame, that the modernisation of the economy had opened China up to the 'rotten West' and that this was how bourgeois liberalisation contaminated the minds of the youth. The CCP, now with a new upcoming leader in Jiang, now condemned Deng's planned reforms of the future.

Immanuel C. Y. Hsu, author of China Without Mao, 1990

Elders who enjoyed privileges in the Party wanted to hold onto these privileges at all costs, and felt the need to defend the socialist order that had made their elitism possible. Killing protestors was not a concern as they were 'anti-party counterrevolutionaries' who deserved to be eliminated. Loss of tourism and credit was of small concern compared to the survival of the Communist leadership. Deng declared that he did not fear foreign opinion for this reason.

Accurate figures of the massacre are impossible - Western sources estimated 3000 dead and 10 000 wounded. One report from the New York Times said 400-800. A Chinese government spokesman told an NBC anchorman that there were no casualties - certainly no bloodbath. The Chinese government later admitted to 23 students dying accidentally, and that 150 brave soldiers had died, with a further 5000 wounded.

 Frank Dikotter, author of The Cultural Revolution, 2016

The leaders lived in fear of their own people, constantly having to suppress their political aspirations. Deng personally ordered a military crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing, as tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square. The massacre was a display of brutal force and steely resolve, designed to send a signal that still pulsates to this day: do not query the monopoly of the one-party state.

Ezra F. Vogel, author of Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, 2011

It's estimated that 100 000 protestors were in Tiananmen Square when the army moved in around midnight. Only several thousand were left waiting at 2 AM when the army reached the square. It's estimated that 300-2600 demonstrators were killed. Figures from Beijing hospitals show at least 478 dead and 920 wounded. Nearly 600 vehicles, including PLA trucks and armoured carriers, were damaged.

Maurice Meisner, author of Mao's China and After, 1999

Deng Xiaoping congratulated the police and the army who had crushed the 'counterrevolutionary rebellion'. And he offered condolences to the families of government soldiers who had died. He labelled the civilians as 'the dregs of society'. The government later released a figure of 300 civilian deaths which was mocked by eyewitnesses. It is estimated that 2000-7000 civilian deaths occurred. A nationwide wave of arrests occurred after the event, resulting in the incarceration of at least 1000, and the executions of 100s.

Resource: Assessment of the Tiananmen Square incident by Historians

Evaluating the Cultural Revolution

After students engage with some of the terrifying history of this period it will be necessary to guide them towards offering their own evaluation of events. This can be modelled through source analysis of what historians say about the Cultural Revolution. Students should read over the following opinions; assess them for their content, and usefulness and reliability, and then arrange them into an order of personal agreement.

Craig Dietrich, author of People's China, 1986

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution took the whole world by surprise. Suddenly, China was at war with itself... Nobody could quite understand what was going on or why, partly because systematic reporting was impossible. Millions of students were on the march; entire cities were festooned with wall posters; mighty leaders were wearing dunce caps; thousands of victims were dying in pitched battles; foreign embassies were being mobbed, even burned to the ground. And always words, a Niagara of rhetoric, slogans, accusations, denials, directives, and, above all, Mao Zedong Thought. Clearly, it was a power struggle... Mao Zedong occupied the centre of this maelstrom. It was declared to be his personal revolution. Only gradually did it become clear that he had a rational purpose, albeit an audacious one.

 Richard M. Pfeffer, author of China in Ferment, 1971

The Cultural Revolution was really three things in one: an enigmatic multiple power struggle, wrapped in a crusade, and superimposed on a scattering of more or less spontaneous, more or less politicised student riots, strikes, peasant uprisings, mutinies, and palace coups.

Anne Thurston, author of Enemies of the People, 1987

The Cultural Revolution was an extreme situation characterised by loss - loss of culture, loss of spiritual values and religion, loss of status and honour, loss of career, loss of dignity, and loss of trust.

Maurice Meisner, author of Mao's China and After, 1999

Unity was to prove an elusive goal, and the nature of the victory was hard to define. The Cultural Revolution had begun with a wholesale attack on the Communist Party; it had ended with the resurrection of the Party in its orthodox Leninist form, albeit shorn of Mao's more prominent opponents. In 1966-67 a massive popular movement had flourished on the basis of the principle that 'the masses must liberate themselves'; by 1969 the mass movement had disintegrated, and selected remnants of it had been absorbed by old bureaucratic apparatuses. Much blood had been shed, but what had changed? The Cultural Revolution not only failed to produce permanent institutions of popular self-government but also failed to resolve the more immediate problems of political succession. One of the original aims of the Cultural Revolution was to 'train revolutionary successors'.

Alexander V. Pantsov, author of Deng Xiaoping, 2015

Strange to say, the nightmare that was the Cultural Revolution at least had the positive effect of restraining the potential for self-indulgence of the Chinese ruling elite.

Immanuel C. Y. Hsu, author of China Without Mao, 1990

Mao sought ideological purity through intensified class struggle and the purge of high party and government leaders and intellectuals.

Frank Dikotter, authorof The Cultural Revolution, 2016

The Cultural Revolution was about an old man settling persona scores at the end of his life. Mao had a great capacity for malice and revenge, and had little regard for loss of human life. Mao's ego meant that he saw little distinction between himself and the revolution - he was the revolution. If someone wronged him, they wronged China. Any dissatisfaction with his authority was a direct threat to the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Most of the above information can be found on the downloadable sheet below. As mentioned earlier, students should analyse and engage with the opinions by comparing and contrasting their differences and similarities, and acknowledging possible reasons for bias. It would also be useful to link the content of the sources with the identified causes for the Cultural Revolution. For example, Dikotter's opinion just above links quite neatly with the idea that Mao's personality was a primary factor behind the Cultural Revolution.

Resource: Evaluations of the Cultural Revolution

I would recommend all of the above texts are great teacher resources for anyone looking to read up on the Cultural Revolution in support of the new Modern History Stage 6 syllabus.

Getting to Grips with the Cultural Revolution

If I'm honest, History really only comes alive for me when it's challenging. The teaching of History should be a subject area that forces the student (and teacher) to take a long hard look at the 'facts' and question the accepted version of events. If you take a look at the new Stage 6 Modern History NSW Syllabus you'll see that the outcomes are very much geared towards facilitating this kind of historical thinking - the curriculum wants us to analyse sources so that we can better ascertain the nature of bias, the curriculum wants us to contest the 'official' narrative and engage with competing versions of events so that we can make our judgements, the curriculum wants us to gather up as much information as we can so that we can offer individualistic evaluations in response to essay questions.

Modern History isn't dry, it's something that should be passionately argued with.

The Cultural Revolution is one of two key focal points for the Change in the Modern World China option (Option B) and, as such, it's perfect fodder in regards to the aforementioned mutable nature of the syllabus outcomes. The Cultural Revolution is a notoriously tricky area of historical debate and therefore forces the student (and teacher) to create their own historical narrative in response to the available (and unavailable) information.

The first port of call is 'building the field', where students increase their knowledge of the historical period through increased engagement with appropriate vocabulary and, also, gathering an impression of the causes that could be attributed to the Cultural Revolution. Potential causes could be best summarised as the following:

• The Sino-Soviet split: a clash of ideologies leading to China's increasing independence.
• Tensions arising from Party Politics: Party members removing all references to Maoism from constitution in order to diminish Mao Zedong's power. Mao's role as 'honorary' Chairman led to ambiguity over leadership.
• The Great Leap Forward: failure of this attempt to modernise China in one quick go had disastrous consequences for Chinese society, leading to widespread death, famine and corruption.
• Permanent Revolution: the ongoing nature of class struggle in a Marxist society meant that elitism and revisionism needed to be prevented.
• Mao's Personality: Mao sought to maintain the Cult of Personality that kept him in power, and would often test the loyalty of his comrades. Different factions arose in the Party in response to desires to be identified as Mao's potential successor.
• Educational Reform: Mao saw the importance in harnessing the next generation as the future of Chinese communism, and aimed to control this through education and ideology.

The next step in teaching the Cultural Revolution is in getting students to dive headfirst into the narrative of events. This is incredibly difficult with the Cultural Revolution for a number of reasons:

1. It's near impossible to know exactly why Mao started the Revolution.
2. The Cultural Revolution happened on a huge scale, with millions of students ('Red Guards') spearheading the revolution in hundreds of independent movements that did not co-ordinate with one another.
3. The Party fractured in ways that are hard to understand - those who feared ideological attack from Mao sought to influence the Red Guards to act in a certain way, deflecting blame towards their enemies. This resulted in civil disputes between different groups of Red Guards acting under the influence of different Party members.
4. Mao remained largely aloof from the Revolution - once he had set the chain of events in motion he stepped back from direct involvement. It could be argued that he was keeping his own hands clean of any wrongdoing, however, the very nature of socialist revolution also demanded action from the proletariat (the students and workers) so it would not have made sense for Mao to have directly led them as this ran contrary to Marxist ideology.
5. In the simplest of terms, China was plunged into chaos between 1966 and 1976.

It is therefore best to have students shape their own understanding by gathering information through independent research. The depth and breadth of information on the Cultural Revolution is so multitudinous, so contradictory, and so endlessly fascinating, that it would be a great disservice to prescribe a single narrative for students to follow.

The solution is to set students up with scaffolded research. Here is a guide that will assist students with assembling some key information alongside their own research.

Resource: Research Scaffold - The Red Guards and the Cultural Revolution

Just for your awareness, here are some things that may come up in student research (or key words that you may find useful in directing them):

Bian Zhongyun: The first death of the Cultural Revolution. Bian was a vice principal of a school where the Red Guards rose up. Her mouth was filled with soil and her face splashed with black ink, and she was paraded around while wearing a dunce's cap before being beaten to death with nail-spiked clubs, and dumped into a garbage cart.

Other Teachers: Many authority figures in schools were the first targets for the new revolutionaries. The principal at the Third Girls Middle School was beaten to death, and the Dean there hung herself before she could face a similar fate. A Biology teacher at Beijing Teacher's School was dragged along the ground until she died, and then other teachers were forced to beat her dead body if they did not want to face a similar fate. Party member Liu Shaoqi set a quota (of 1%) for Red Guards in their targeting of teachers, which equated to 300 000 victims.

The Little Red Book: The level of fanaticism amongst the Red Guards was so intense that Mao's quotations (originally published in the Liberation Army Daily) were assembled as a little red book for all citizens to carry.

Massacres: In regional areas such as Daxing, local leaders (those that Mao had initially intended to target) murdered all the landlords and their families. 300 in total were killed in a co-ordinated night-time attack that utilised methods of stabbing, strangling, and electrocution to prevent what the leaders claimed was a chance of 'bourgeois uprising'. Even the children were included to ensure that no revenge could be taken in the future.

Rallies: There were huge gatherings in Tiananmen Square where Red Guards could catch a glimpse of Chairman Mao. The last of these took place in November 1966, and saw two and a half million teenagers gather in one day to see their great helmsman.

Destruction of the Four Olds: Many graveyards and temples were defaced and destroyed, especially in regional areas such as Tibet. Bodies of dead women were dug up in Confucian cemeteries and hung from trees, and over 10 000 graves in Shanghai alone were desecrated. In Zhengdang, ancient monuments were destroyed. Entire libraries, such as one in Zikawai, were also burned down as symbols of bourgeois culture, leading to the loss of thousands of 19th century books.

Shanghai: As one of China's most modern cities, Shanghai saw the eruption of some strange displays of Maoist outrage. At least 30 flower shops were destroyed as flowers were considered a waste of farmland. Cats were also targeted as they were considered symbols of Western decadence. Furthermore, many Red Guards saw the Revolution as an opportunity for looting, and some 30 000 'bad families' were forced to hand over property deeds - leaving nearly half a million people homeless. 704 people in Shanghai committed suicide in September 1966 alone.

The Vietnam War: The in-fighting between separate factions of Red Guards got so bad that weapons China meant to send to the Viet Cong were seized by various Chinese groups. The People's Liberation Army had to be mobilised away from the Chinese-Vietnamese border in order to help restore order in some provinces of China.

Guangxi Province: Rival Party members Lin Biao and Zhou Enlai waged war against each other in Guangxi in 1968 through the use of proxy forces of Red Guards. At least 80 000 were killed in several massacres.

Cannibalism: Rebels in Wuxuan began to practice cannibalism as a strange fusion of ritual and Marxist ideology, with at least 70 'capitalist' landlords publicly butchered and eaten alive. Mao ordered an end to this practice once he got word of it but, instead of punishing the cannibals, he sent a new statue of himself as a congratulatory present for those who had assisted with the Cultural Revolution.

Impact on the Arts: Intellectuals were the most badly scarred by the Cultural Revolution. Mao disliked intellectualism and saw it as useless in contrast to the practicality of his own view of socialism, which meant that artists and philosophers and the like were targeted by Red Guards. 1966-1976 became 'ten lost years' with no art, no music, no painting, no writing, no academic or scientific journals in China. It was a huge waste of an entire decade's worth of talent.

Ethnic Minorities: Also amongst the most persecuted were those who did not ethnically conform with the socialist Chinese majority. 800 000 Mongolians in the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia were tortured - there was widespread sexual abuse of women, removal of tongues and teeth, and many burned alive. Only 10% of the population in Inner Mongolia were actually Mongol, yet 75% of those persecuted in the area were of this ethnicity, which made it look like genocide. Mao ordered a stop to this persecution but did not punish those responsible.

The End of the Red Guard: Unable to manage the independent actions of the Red Guard groups who had radically changed China's urban society, Mao ordered for all those who had driven the Cultural Revolution to be sent to the countryside for re-education through labour. Between 1969 and 1972 some 17 million of these youths were sent to live in villages, leading to mass suicide, poverty, and depression.

Sino-Soviet Split and Anti-Revisionism in the 1950s and 1960s

Mao Zedong and Nikita Khrushchev, 1958

In order to gain a full understanding of how Mao Zedong developed his own distinct brand of communism, otherwise known as 'Maoism' or 'Mao Zedong Thought', it will be useful for students to see what led to the split between the world's two largest communist nations. This historical narrative of cause and effect can be traced back to the 1920s, when Lenin consolidated the Bolshevik governance of Russia and established the world's first socialist state. 

A good place to start with orientating students in regards to this is to have them look over the following text and create a mindmap of reasons for the Sino-Soviet split.

Sino-Soviet Split and Anti-Revisionism

From its formation in 1921, the Chinese Communist Party had relied on Soviet political and financial support. Both countries aimed for 'permanent revolution' - an ongoing class struggle that would eventually transform the world into a single, unified communist society without national borders.

The first cracks in the Sino-Soviet alliance began to show in the Chinese Civil War of 1945-1949 when the CCP were battling the Nationalists (the Kuomintang) for control of China. Stalin advised the CCP to stop after taking the north of China as he did not have faith in the their ability to transform all of China into a communist state, and he held back any real support from the CCP during this time because he preferred China to be divided and weakened; a less-threatening neighbour for the USSR to deal with. He even condescendingly referred to the Chinese as 'cabbage communists', viewing them as incapable of true Marxism in comparison to the Soviet Union.

China and the Soviet Union also disputed access and ownership of the Xinjiang region that sat between them, with both wanting its rich mineral resources. Mongolia was similarly disputed, with China only able to claim 'Inner Mongolia'. The rest of Mongolia became a satellite republic under the influence of the Soviet Union. During WWII, when Japan invaded China, the Soviet Union only offered China assistance very late in the war, and even plundered northern Chinese factories for their own gain. 

Towards the end of the 1950s, the Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev gave a speech in which he outlined his wish for a peaceful coexistence between the East and the West. Mao was unimpressed as he saw this as contradicting the theory of permanent revolution, and China had been treated badly by the West in the recent past. Khrushchev's criticism of the previous Soviet leader, Stalin, also threatened Mao's own image (as he had styled himself as a similar kind of leader - worshipped by the masses). In 1957, Mao visited Moscow and encouraged the Soviet Union to assist other countries in their own revolutions, which the Russians ignored. He outlined his own plan to 'liberate' Taiwan, which frightened Khrushchev, who thought such warmongering would lead to worldwide nuclear warfare. The Chinese saw this fear as weakness and a betrayal of the permanent revolution.

In 1958, China began to attack Taiwanese forces. Khrushchev travelled to Beijing to try to intervene, and offered to place Soviet missiles on Chinese soil as a compromise (but would not share atomic technology). Mao refused, offended by the Soviet Union's attempts to dictate what China should do. When Khrushchev visited Russia's Cold War enemy (the United States of America) in 1959, Mao saw it as a further weakening of Soviet supremacy, and began to question Khrushchev's understanding of Marxism. Mao was angered further when Russia sided against Mao over China border disputes with India. 

In 1960, Russia withdrew all diplomats from China and cancelled 300 industrial and economic contracts. The Soviets offered economic aid to India, and China began to characterise the USSR and USA (enemies of each other in the Cold War) as one and the same: hypocrite revisionists and capitalist enemies. Things dropped to an all-time low in 1968, when China and Russia clashed over control of an island in the Ussari River near their border, with up to 200 soldiers killed. Around this time, Mao began to label enemies of the Chinese state as 'revisionists' and 'Chinese Khrushchevs'.

Chinese soldier photographed during the Ussuri River conflict, 1969. This incident lasted for 7 months and is most commonly known as the 'Sino-Soviet border conflict' or, in China, as the Zenbao Island Incident.

Reasons/Evidence
Students should be able to pull the following causes out of the above text:

1. Stalin discouraged Mao from taking all of China during the Chinese Civil War.
2. Stalin did not lend any real financial or military support to the Chinese communists during the Civil War.
3. Both the USSR and China were in dispute over control of the Xinjiang region for its minerals/resources.
4. The USSR kept hold of Mongolia as a 'buffer zone' between themselves and China.
5. The USSR lent very little assistance to China when Japan invaded in 1937.
6. The USSR used WWII as an excuse to plunder Chinese factories in the north.
7. Nikita Khrushchev criticised Stalin and his 'cult of personality', which did not sit well with Mao, who had his own cult of personality.
8. Khrushchev also began to build a relationship with the West, which Mao saw as a contradiction of Marxist ideals.
9. The Soviet Union was disinterested in assisting other smaller nations with their own Marxist revolutions.
10. The USSR discouraged China from pursuing war with Taiwan, and would not lend atomic technology to Mao.
11. Khrushchev feared that Mao would provoke nuclear war and tried to directly intervene by visiting Beijing.
12. Mao saw Khrushchev's visit to the USA as a sign of weakness.
13. The Soviet Union sent assistance to India when China and India entered into a border dispute.
14. The USSR withdrew all diplomats and contractors from China in 1960.
15. The USSR and China battled each other for control of an island in the Ussari River.

Extension/Consolidation:

Tie the above understanding to the ideology dot points in the syllabus by asking students to consider the following essay-style question. Students are encouraged to use the above to establish some apparent key differences in Soviet Marxism and Maoist Marxism.

To what extent is the Sino-Soviet split a result of competing versions of Marxism?

Why Germany Lost WWI

Although credited with the strategy that kicked off Germany's invasion of France, Alfred von Schlieffen died at the age of 79 one year before the outbreak of WWI.

About a year and a half ago I was fortunate enough to see Richard Evans speak at the University of Sydney. The focus of his talk was on the rise of Germany's Weimar Republic in the 1930s and how it was able to last so long. Flipping the usual historical approach in which Modern Teachers ask the driving question, "Why did it fail?", Evans posited the approach of "Why did the Weimar Republic last as long as it did?" It was a fascinating talk and it reminds me of another talk I saw, a bit later, given by Dr Bruce Dennett about Germany and WWI, this time asking the question "Why did Germany lose the war?" 

It's a different way of looking at the turning points of WWI, shifting the narrative focus from the entry of America and withdrawal of Russia to a collection of cumulative factors that contributed to Germany's eventual collapse in 1918. This approach encourages students to think of the bigger picture when it comes to WWI; about which events were most significant, why people might contest the significance of certain events as contributing factors to German failure, and how the chain of cause and effect can be interpreted.

Here's a resource that summarises this approach.

The main reasons given include:

• The failure of the Schlieffen Plan. This was a strategy that was dependent on France and England being beaten within 40 days. That didn't happen, partially due to General von Moltke making changes to the plan, and the fact that the plan required already demoralised soldiers to march an unreasonable distance.
• The Germans were fighting a war on two fronts - France and Russia. The fighting on the eastern front prevented the Germans from sending enough troops to win in the west.
• The nature of trench warfare meant that the defending side always had the advantage. Neither side had the weapons or numbers to punch their way through to victory. 
• The British naval blockade of the Germans meant that shortages on the German homefront were exacerbated further.
• German generals could not break free of the 'war of attrition' mindset that had them believe the only way of winning was to overwhelm the enemy with superior numbers of foot soldiers. Germany's strategy relied on the Allied armies running out of men before them, something that became increasingly unlikely as the war dragged on.
• Germany unwittingly encouraged U.S. entry into the war through their ordering of unrestricted U-boat attacks on neutral ships.
• The German homefront faced so much hardship that war weariness had set in by 1917-1918, something that would almost lead to German socialist revolution.
• Germany's allies (Turkey, Bulgaria, and Austria-Hungary) were weakening, and required German resources and troops to 'prop them up' on the southern front.

Students can read through the resource and then answer the following questions, which involve them engaging with the material in a variety of ways, such as describing, evaluating, and analysing - hitting the History Continuum in terms of Significance, Contestability, and Cause and Effect:

1. Outline the reasons historians most commonly give for Germany losing the war.
2. Rate these reasons in order of your agreement with them in terms of their significance.
3. Why is your top reason the correct one?
4. List the ways in which the Germany army's moral was breaking down.
5. Why did General Ludendorff decide to ask for an armistice?
6. Make explicit reference to Source C to describe the events leading up to the armistice of 11 November.

Turning Points of WWI

 

As I'm sure I've mentioned on this blog before, the sheer abundance of content that needs to be taught in Modern History can be a tad overwhelming. One of the challenges of the mandatory First World War topic is that we need to teach the skill of source analysis alongside the dot points outlined in the syllabus, all whilst selecting information from the wealth of sources on WWI out there. 

Usually by the time I get to teaching the 'turning points' section of the HSC Modern History syllabus I've already explicitly covered trench warfare, the home fronts, and a fair deal of source analysis. This means that I often feel like it's time for a more student-directed or project-based approach. But bfore I get to that, it's still necessary to ensure that students have a strong base knowledge of the three major turning points of the war:

1. The withdrawal of the Russians from the war.
2. The entry of the U.S. into the war.
3. Ludendorff's Spring Offensive.

While doing this, it's hard not to feel like one is getting bogged down in delivering the content to the students in the same way, over and over again. I get very conscious that I'm boring the Year 12s, so I try very hard to introduce a variety of ways in which they can interact with the information, summarise it, re-contextualise it, and show their comprehension of it.

Without belabouring my thinking too much in this blog, here's the resource itself: Turning Points of WWI. It's a booklet that covers each of the three turning points (the second of which is accompanied by a PPT: The USA and WWI) and ends with four project options that students must choose from to show that they've understood what's come beforehand. 

Further explanation of the booklet:

1. The section on Russia's withdrawal from the war features a cause-and-effect graphic representation that students must re-interpret into a timeline. After that, they can then make a judgement call about which factor they think was the biggest influence on Russia's decision.
2. The U.S.A. section requires students to take notes from the PowerPoint, sorting the information into three columns: USA before the war, Reasons for USA's entry into the war, and Impact of USA on the war. 
3. Ludendorff's Spring Offensive is covered in a more straightforward fashion, with students reading notes and observing the map before answering two questions about Ludendorff's intentions and the overall effectiveness of the plan.
4. The final page features the four project options
1. Create an A3 timeline of all the Turning Points that incorporates symbols and images to show understanding.
2. Write an essay addressing the question, To what extent was the entry of the U.S. into the First World War the deciding factor for Allied Victory?
3. Design a full colour 1917 propaganda poster that deals with one of these ideas:
1. German point of view: Why the U.S. should not be involved in the war.
2. U.S. point of view: Why the U.S. should be involved in the war.
3. Russian point of view: Why Russia should not be involved in the war.
4. Create a PPT presentation to show the rest of the class. This presentation should outline each of the major turning points plus include your opinion about which turning point was the most significant/important.

Teaching History Concepts: Cause and Effect

A cartoon depicting the European nations discussing the future of Africa at the Berlin Conference of 1884

I guess the first thing I should point out before I get stuck into this is that, at present, there is no History Continuum of Concepts and Skills for Stage 6.

That aside, the Continuum is still highly relevant when it comes to Year 11 and 12 students, so I tend to program for Preliminary and HSC Modern History with the top end of these concepts and skills in mind. In an ideal world, the more capable students in Year 11 Modern History would already have a solid grasp of the Stage 5 Concepts, but, as my fellow History teachers should know, this isn't always the case.

These are the concepts from the Continuum just in case you wanted to see them and didn't feel like googling it:

• Continuity and Change
• Cause and Effect
• Perspectives
• Empathetic Understanding
• Significance
• Contestability 

And the skills:

• Comprehension of chronology, terms and concepts
• Analysis and use of sources
• Perspectives and Interpretations
• Empathetic Understanding
• Research
• Explanation and Communication

As you can see, there's a bit of crossover because some of these are things that need to be understood and applied. I don't want to try and deconstruct or explain the whole continuum, instead, I thought I could use this as an opportunity to talk about just one concept and a way that I try to teach it to Preliminary students.

Cause and Effect in Modern Europe

A perfect example of where Cause and Effect can be taught is the mandatory Preliminary Modern History Core Study: The World at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century. During this topic students look at (among other things) the short and long term causes of World War I. Two such long term causes are Nationalism and Imperialism (I like to capitalise them in the hope that I impress upon my students how important these concepts are in understanding the subject).

These aren't exactly easy concepts to teach to 16 year-olds. One of the hoarier parts of understanding history is getting your head around the ideas that propel the big changes, and 19th Century Europe is absolutely gorged full of such 'big' ideas. Marxism, Nationalism, Imperialism, the Enlightenment, Egalitarianism, Industrialisation, Darwinism, Anarchism... these are the things that make Modern History so interesting and important. A student with a truly solid understanding of where these things come from will, mark my words, become a much more politically rounded and awakened adult. This is why History matters so much!

Ahem. Sorry, I'll get off that soapbox now.

The activity is relatively simple. Students are shown a timeline of European events between 1000 and 1914 (the resource can be found at the bottom of this page). This timeline is fairly broad and aims to draw multiple lines of cause and effect leading up to the outbreak of World War I. The thing with History is that 'cause and effect' is arguably quite subjective. This is why we continue to contest the major causes of World War I. So what I wanted to do with this activity is have students come up with their own causal relationships between events. Anyway, these are the events:

A. 1000-1790: Europe ruled over by monarchies.

B. 1600-1830: Europe uses slave labour to build colonies overseas.

C. 1790: The French Revolution

D. 1800s: French Republic

E. 1830-1850: Slavery outlawed.

F. 1850: Revolutions throughout Europe.

G. 1871: Various smaller European states form into the nation of Germany.

H. 1860-1900: Austro-Hungarian Empire struggles with smaller ethnic groups within Empire.

I. 1870-1914: The major European countries reach various levels of industrialisation.

J. 1884: The Berlin Conference

K 1885-1900: The Scramble for Africa.

L. 1900-1914: European Empires stretch out across the world.

By this point in the core topic, students will already have been taught most of these things. Their goal now is to join them up to each other.

The question that accompanies this timeline is: How do each of these events/eras connect to each other? Write an explanation of how each dot point connects or changes into another.

Theoretically, students could connect any of these dots to any of the others (within reason). One example given on the sheet is the 1790 entry.

EG. 1790: French Revolution - The French become the first European nation to reject their aristocracy, leading to the execution of the French royal family (this links to Event A)

Other examples, not included on the sheet, could be:

• Linking K to J. 
• Linking the revolutions of c. 1850 (oft-called the 'Springtime of the Peoples') to the success of C or D.
• Drawing parallels between the self-determination of ethnic groups in H with the birth of French nationalism in C.
• The rules of the Berlin Conference (J) and their relationship with the outlawing of slavery (E)
• The outlawing of slavery (E) resulting from the charter created by the French people in C.
• Linking L to I.

And so on. There are a lot of other opportunities for connections to be made, and I was surprised at some of the ideas that my students were able to identify in the timeline. The main point was that the students were able to come up with their own 'cause and effect' relationships, which demonstrates the subjective nature of History when it comes to this kind of stuff. It's very historiographical too, which should help set some students up nicely for Extension History in Year 12.

Click to Save/Download - Resource: Cause and Effect