Christmas Reading - 1. China (A-level students)

Some books you might be interested in reading over the Christmas holidays are detailed below. Others can be identified in the carousel above, where clicking on any of the titles takes you straight to the relevant amazon page.

1. "The Private Life of Chairman Mao" is a slightly different look at Mao's life from his former physician - a little salacious at times, has proved popular with previous students.



2. The best single volume narrative history of this period - which in facts starts quite a bit earlier - is Jonathan Spence's excellent "Search for Modern China".



Rana Mitter's book "A Bitter Revolution" is of course linked above, and in earlier posts.

3. Jonathan Spence has also written a balanced short biography of Mao, which you may wish to use alongside Jung Chang's better known but very antagonistic book (see post below, and links above).



4. Quite an expensive book, but this one is an interesting and lively attempt to counter the anti-Mao bias of recent books; includes a chapter attacking Jung Chang's biography!



Don't forget to use the school library which has a number of relevant China books for loan as well, including Jonathan Fenby's general history, and a biography of Chiang Kai-Shek (more relevant for L6th stduents).

Imperial War Museum Visit for Year 10

For Year 10 students (and the sixth form supervisors), the following details apply for Friday's visit:

Meet at rear school gates straight after period 5 - 1252.

We will be walking to Sutton station to catch the next train to Elephant and Castle (there is one at 1306, but I suspect we will have to aim for the 1336)

On arrival at Elephant and Castle, we will be walking to the Imperial War Museum. Year 10 students will be placed in muster groups supervised by a sixth former.

At the IWM, the glories of this wonderful museum will be open to us to explore, marvel at and learn from.

GM and SS groups - you are advised to take notes and any photographs that could be useful for your later group presentations on the Home Front during World War 2. Some of the sixth form may also be able to advise on the best way to achieve eye-catching photos for use in presentations! Things to look for are - examples of propaganda, Home Defence, rationing, women at war, evacuation.

Although the focus is on World War 2, there will be time to see the Cold War gallery as well.

RETURN TIMES:
We will finish at the War Museum around 4pm, and aim to catch the 1630 train from Elephant and Castle, which gets in to Sutton at 1702. This train goes on Wimbledon, arriving there at 1719.

The Mao Conference, and a Discussion about Jung Chang.

There were varied reactions to the conference from attendant students. Rana Mitter received generally positive reviews for his two lectures in the morning - both of them clear, informative and well communicated despite the microphone difficulties and a couple of best avoided jokes. The afternoon's speakers were less uniformly appreciated, with the first one - also a lecturer from Oxford - speaking too fast and too unvariedly from a set of notes that seemed remarkably disorganised and unstructured. The final speaker, from Bristol University (a sure sign of quality) gave what I thought was an interesting presentation on the Cultural Revolution accompanied by a rich range of visual material, but he seemed not to have grabbed the attention of most of the student audience. Perhaps a combination of his being the last of four meaty lectures, it being after what was clearly a good lunch for some attendees, and the fact that the play station generation doesn't like to sit and listen for a whole day were the reasons for the impression I got that he was merely providing background noise to the more personal conversations of attendant students.

I did ask Mitter, after his lectures, about the Jung Chang biography of Mao. His initial response was "utter crap". "So you don't like it then?" I perceptively summised. He went on to explain that he had no argument with her intention of showing Mao in a negative light. "Although I hope I'm objective in these sort of lectures I actually think Mao was a monstrous figure". The problem, as he saw it, is that it is such bad history - it gives the impression of using a huge range of sources which subsequently prove well nigh impossible to follow up. Mitter - or Rana as I now felt I could call him - referred me to an article in the London Review of Books by Andrew Nathan that he felt summed up the main problems with Chang's approach to history. It is, in fact, an article I have read and copied for students before, by way of providing a useful balance to reading Chang's book, so I was pleased to see we at SGS are not completely in the academic desert. The online version - together with links to the published correspondence between Nathan and Chang about his review - is here, and well worth reading.

Rana Mitter, whose own books (see posts below) are excellent as a way of getting in to China in the 20th. century - recommended, as a preferable biography of Mao, one by Philip Short, which is harsh on the dictator but more rigorously researched and noted. I was unable to find the book in Blackwells in Oxford, where I happened to be on Saturday, but a quick search on Amazon indicated that there is one copy available of this now out of print paperback, for the reasonable price of £69.34.

And so how to approach Jung Chang? Mitter hates it - as do most academics - but I was struck, as were some of the students at the conference, by the fact that much of what she writes is very tenable. She is not as far out as her writing style sometimes suggests; the story she tells matches the story we hear from others. And it is an accessible, readable, exciting story. She pulls no punches, and allows the need to settle a personal score to jaundice her conclusions too much, but read in the knowledge of where she's coming from, and with due note taken of the comments about her sourcing, it should still provide a good basis for trying to understand Mao. The chapters on the Long March, for example, are detailed and chilling, giving a great account of this extraordinary event. If the main rival to this book is an out of print £64 paperback, I think we can see some life yet in continuing to read Jung Chang!

I will try and publish some short summaries of key points from the lectures on this blog soon.

Mao Conference for A-level students

You will know if you are currently on the Mao Conference list.

This conference takes place on Friday, at the City Temple on Holborn Viaduct. The instructions for the conference are linked here.

All students should meet at sutton station at 9.20. The train we are catching comes from Wimbledon and Wimbledon Chase I think - please check train timetables and advise me if you intend to meet us on the train.

Please remember to bring notebooks and pen - the lectures should provide a lot of good information and analysis from these top academics. Rana Mitter, of course, is giving the first two lectures - his books are recommended below in previous posts.

GM

Recommended Read

Lower Sixth students should certainly buy and read the book 'Modern China: A Very Short Introduction' by Rana Mitter. More ambitious students could try Mitter's 'A Bitter Revolution' next - both are linked to their respective Amazon pages below.

Mitter, of course, is giving two of the Mao lectures in London later in the month.

China in Revolution - Parts 1 and 2

Her are the two parts of the 'China in Revolution' video that both groups have seen in lessons, taken from Youtube. Part 2 is the first one below, dealing with the period from Sun's death to Chiang's triumph as leader of the GMD and ruler of China. The first part, below it, looks at the 1911 revolution. Some of the first hand recollections in the second video are particularly interesting in conveying the ideological tensions between the GMD and the CCP, and in showing ordinary people's attitudes towards the joint revolutionary movement.

Part 2:


Part 1:

Eastern Europe After the Ottomans

A2 students in particular would benefit from reading this article in the London Review of Books, which provides a consideration of the development of Eastern Europe, and in particular the impact of its geographical nearness to the old Ottoman empire, modern day Turkey.

China Maps

Students wishing to review the series of China maps, showing its changing boundaries over the centuries, can do so by accessing the 'China' folder on the school's P-drive.

New Term, New Users

For all those starting GCSE's or A-levels this year, welcome to the History Blog. This is intended as a resource for further studies, using the links opposite, and as an information site. Mr. Shergold and I will try and post on here to keep students updated about work assignments, or to add useful links for further research. We might occasionally indulge in some historically mediative peregrinations as well, so keep checking.

For the L6th., use the links opposite (under 'China') to help put material together for your Chinese Overview task. Meanwhile, under the YouTube links section, I have put the link to the first video in a series on China - this one introduces the 1911 Revolution, our starting point in the course.

Vietnam - the Gulf of Tonkin

This is the fascinating documentary extract dealing with the Gulf of Tonkin, taken I think from 'The Fog of War'. The tapes make for fascinating listening, particularly about Johnson's motives with regards to Vietnam, and McNamara provides an honest assessment of the difficulties of the decisions.

Related videos are in the new 'History on You Tube' link in the sidebar.

The Great Leap Forward

Good youtube video here about the Great Leap, including footage of Mao's bizarre sparrow cull. Narrated by Tom Baker, it is a pretty sound account.

Eastern Europe Revision - A-level students

The 'History Today' articles used in the revision session, together with some others, have now been added to the A-level Presentations page (see link opposite). You can access them directly here.

Do use the comments facility to ask for any further clarification, or if you want to request a further revision session on China. I will add further China links to the blog as I find them.

Finally, for A2 students, the British course you are studying is the subject of one of the 'Grade-Buster Guides' on 'history-ontheweb'; you have to go to the Study Centre to find it. You need to use the user name and password given in class to access it, but it is a very comprehensive coverage, and well worth using.

Presentations Updated

New revision presentations have been added to the GCSE and A-level pages. Click on the links opposite ('From the Lessons') for Mr. Shergold's Year 11 Cold War powerpoint, and - for AS-level students - for his 1905 and Era of Reaction powerpoints.

Revision - A2

Just to confirm that there will be a revision session on Eastern Europe at school from 10am tomorrow (Tuesday); will be followed after break (1130) by a short China revision session.

Links Update

The links have been added to and tidied up opposite. Power-point presentations from the lessons can be found in the top section.

Re-activating the Blog

I have decided to reactivate this blog for the exam period, in order to update links that might be helpful for revision and to advise on revision sessions in school. Current Sessions are detailed below.

YEAR 11

Wednesday 14th. May

0930 - 1200: Paper 1, Section A

Thursday 15th. May

1015 - 1200: Paper 1, Section B

Meet Room 66


LOWER SIXTH

Tuesday 13th. May

Period 1 - Alexander II's Reforms (Rm 66)

THERE IS NOW NO WEDNESDAY AFTER SCHOOL SESSION - WE ARE RETAINING THE FRIDAY SESSION

Thursday 15th. May

Period 7 - The Era of Reaction (Alex II and Alex III) with SS

Friday 16th. May

Periods 1 and 2 - The Duma Period with GM (Rm 66)
Period 3 - The 1905 Revolution with SS (Rm 46)

Wednesday 21st. May

Periods 2 and 3 - the Fall of Tsarism (1914-1917) up to Kerensky with GM, Rm 66
Periods 4 and 5 - The Fall of the Provisional Govt. and Bolshevik seizure with SS, Rm 46