Tuesday 27 October 2009

a film about my cat (not quite)

This is Manufacturing Consent, it's about Noam Chomsky, one of the great minds of the 20th Century, he discusses thought control in a democratic society. As a scientist he creates a very compelling model of how the individual in a democracy is manipulated and influenced. If you as students want to explore the deeper themes of 20th Century history and look beyond simple definitions, watch this.

Monday 26 October 2009

A veritable goldmine of ideas but for serious history students only!

This is a series of brilliant interviews with politicians, diplomats, political thinkers, historians and journalists on videocast from the University of California, look up Robert Fisk if you can.

Thursday 22 October 2009

The Anti War Movement

This is just a trailer (can't seem to get the whole film, though it's worth watching if you can) for The USA VS John Lennon. In 1969 John Lennon began to become increasingly involved with the anti war movement in the USA. He was judged by the Nixon administration as being a dangerous radical and eventually threatened with deportation. The documentary shows the extent of radicalism at the time and the fact that the Vietnam War had become a cause for the radical and hippy movements in the US

Wednesday 21 October 2009

Worth a look

A US view of the Vietnam War, remember our source material work here guys, take it with a pinch of salt....

Tuesday 20 October 2009

Berlin Wall PT3

This is the third installment of the Berlin Wall documentary

The Volga Famine

The Volga Famine of 1892
Last Chances for the Romanovs
For many who were undecided as to where they stood on the future of the Empire the Volga famine of 1891-2 clarified the issue, millions of waverers chose active or passive resistance to the Romanov dynasty. Statistics on the number of deaths range from 200 to 400,000, and the occasional survey placing it at nearly a million. Perhaps the full extent of the deaths will never be known, and certainly at the time, the more important ideas being disseminated were the likely causes. The government was blamed for excessively taxing the peasants, thus depleting their supplies of grain and foodstuffs to see them through hard times, Robert Service, however, in his biography of Lenin disputes that the issue of taxation was really where the regime was at fault.
The Volga provinces had endured several poor harvests, short summers, early frosts and typhus epidemics, all of which combined added up to a catastrophic decline in grain levels by the summer of 1891. The government was still exporting grain in order to pay for Russia's industrialisation, and perhaps this is a key reason for its lack of interest in addressing peasant needs. I think that it is more likely that the nature of autocracy itself was fundamentally the issue that caused mass governmental inaction, not callousness, not even incompetence (though there may have been plenty of the latter) simply an institutional inability to react to crisis. The institution of autocracy had really been failing for a century, every major crisis it faced in the 19th Century, it failed to adequately deal with. The famine was no different, it required the action of a modern decentralised, efficiently organised state. The famine relief that emerged was very much this state, or rather a state in waiting. Leo Tolstoy Prince Georgi Lvov and the entire local administrative structure of the Zemstva heroically swung into action.
Tolstoy, famous for his paternalist attitudes to the peasants was the prefect figurehead for a campaign to save the stricken people of the Volga region. Lvov, similarly adoring of the peasants and steadfast in his belief of the worthiness of them, also worked tirelessly to save the region.
Tens of thousands of doctors, aid workers, students, nurses and volunteers descended on the region, and in a rare spirit of national unity they risked their own lives in many cases to alleviate the famine and disease that followed it.
In the same way that adversity united the British in 1940, the experience of fighting famine in the Volga forged a sense of national community in Russia that would have been weak, if none existent beforehand. This was the kind of 'patrie' that the Czars of Russia could not comprehend or see, and it was lethal to them. A middle class had risen to the challenge of a crisis where the autocracy had been largely blind to it and they had triumphed. Prince Lvov, who later headed the Provisional Government had managed to pull off a humanitarian feat worthy of a Nobel Prize and he and his class emerged from the crisis confident, aware of their own capabilities and painfully aware of the shortcomings of the Autocracy. Middle Russia had grown up and come of age.
An illuminating footnote to the entire affair was the behaviour of one Vladimir Ulyanov, who was present at the time of the famine, witnessing peasant death all around him. Unmoved by the suffering, he argued that there should be no interference in the crisis, that Marx's predictions about capitalism were coming true and that any attempt to alleviate the suffering of the peasants would affect the chances of the coming revolution. Based on these attitudes, his later treatment of peasants is somewhat unsurprising.

Monday 19 October 2009

Berlin Wall PT2

Here is the next Berlin Wall video

Berlin Wall

Hi guys, here's a video from the Guardian Website on the Berlin Wall. It is now 20 years since it was dismantled (I was there when it was being pulled down, I have a piece of it somewhere) but its significance in the Cold War should not be underestimated, it was a physical representation of the world divided and it symbolised the whole conflict.

Thursday 15 October 2009

That Stalin Bloke

Ok Katya, here you are, the one, the only Comrade Stalin

A new take on Lenin and Trotsky

Noam Chomsky speaks hereon his opinions (pretty damning) on the Bolsheviks and their treatment of the Russian workers

Tuesday 13 October 2009

A handy BBC page

Check this page out, it's very useful for 'nutshell' histories of lots of different eras.

Sunday 11 October 2009

Useful Sources For Revision

Anyone wanting to add to their knowledge, look at GCSEPod it's a good way to learn

The Most Important Resource Posted Yet!

Guys I genuinely couldn't believe my luck when I found this site on Twitter, it's FREE podcasts and videos by the biggest selling UK historians, on practically every topic you're likely to study with me! There's no catch and what you can gain from this site is huge, new perspectives, ideas, arguments and understandings. It's a MUST for anyone who seriously wants to do well at GCSE!

Wednesday 7 October 2009

American Hard Times 1929 or 2009?

This is a fascinating article. California 2009 is broke and is, by all accounts on the verge of some major economic and social collapse (the rest of America based its economy and social structure on California and so, oops, did Britain...) Read it here and see if there are any similarities with the stuff we have recently done on the great depression. Also, if you can find out, look at the causes of the current economic crisis and see if they are similar to the causes of the previous one or if there are differences.

The Nazis: A Warning From History

This documentary covers most of what we learned last year, it is probably the best series of its kind on Nazi Germany. It is important that everyone watches this because it will be a very useful addition to your revision and ongoing historical knowledge.

Slavery and Emancipation

The radical historian Howard Zinn writes here about the American Civil War, fought, ostensibly, to free the slaves. Histories writted since 1865 have portrayed Abraham Lincoln as a heroic saviour. The truth, as always, is more ambiguous. Read this essay and make your own minds up.

Thursday 1 October 2009

Our very own forum!

Hurrah! With but a moment's internet tinkering, I've set up the Kings Monkton history forum for everyone to use and enjoy. Here is the link and I expect at least half a dozen responses to the questions I have posted.

http://kings-monkton-history.socialgo.com/home.html

Discussion Topic

Ok I''m hoping to make this site a little bit more interactive at some point by linking it to a forum, but I suspect that creating a forum might be prohibitively expensive, so in the absence of that I'd like to start off the first of hopefully many discussion topics, I really do want as many people to contribute as possible and to argue passionately either for or against this idea.

'Far from being too harsh of Germany, the Treaty of Versailles was too lenient.'