This section, dominated by the Cold War focuses mainly on teaching its origins, its main crises and the reason why it came to an end. With the recent ‘strengthening’ of GCSE specifications many schools who had hitherto taught Inter-war International Relations alongside Germany 1918-39, now find themselves having to teach the post-45 period at short notice. For that reason, we were busy we have added new smart tasks on the Marshall Plan, and ‘Who started the Korean War?
In addition to the lessons and tasks were are also offering below some links and articles you may find useful.
Resources
The Berlin crisis: The BBC archive on Berlin is now available online. There’s plenty of great stuff here, ranging from lengthy Panorama documentaries (more for you, probably) on the one hand, to short highly usable interviews. I liked the 4 minute interviews with two refugees from the Russian zone in 1953. They give very graphic accounts of life under Communist control touching on spying, surveillance, contempt for the Soviet controlled press.
Really helpful BBC site on mapping the fall of Communism, 20 years on: Particularly useful for GCSE questions is Brian Hanrahan’s analysis of Gorbachev’s role in the fall
