History

Course summary

History is not all about ‘great’ men; it is not all about power and those who seek to exercise it; it is not all about politics and the lives of the privileged; it is not all about analysing masses of data or statistics; it is not all about what the Vikings put in their porridge; but it can be about any or all of those things. Perhaps history’s greatest strength as an intellectual discipline is its diversity: the study of the past can be on as narrow or as broad a scale as the subject matter demands; a historical enquiry can be based on biography, sociology, archaeology, anthropology, codicology, or any number of other disciplines, often at the same time. We aim to capture this diversity in our IB History course. The range of subjects studied is broad; however, all topics are linked by the shared theme of the interaction between power and identity. The Historical Investigation (completed in the Lower Sixth) offers a unique opportunity to research and write on a historical topic of your choosing, led by the extensive experience of the History Department. Recent topics have been as diverse as the Congolese civil war, the politics of Leonard Bernstein, Sweden in World War Two, the Stonewall Riots of 1969, and the democracy movement in South Korea.