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THE STUDY GUIDE

EABJM TERMINALE: HISTORY REVISION

ESSAYS: PAST EXAMPLES AND MODELS

Origins of the Cold War

When preparing the Cold War topic, don't........

1) Talk about long term and short term causes
the result would be to take you back to 1917 at the beginning of your talk with the danger that you will get to the Truman Doctrine only half way through it. It's important to say at some stage that the roots go back a long way, of course. Probably best in the section on ideological origins..."For many , the Cold War was an ideological conflict and the origins of this go back to 1917...." 
2) Prepare to give a narrative based talk
3) Get bogged down describing individual events
4) Go too far into the Cold War itself. The term was used in the early 1950s (at least) to describe what had emerged in the late 1940s
5) Introduce orthodox view, revisionist view, post revisionist...... and then fail to discuss them properly
When preparing the Cold War topic, don't forget:

Agreements/Disagreements during WWII
Yalta
Potsdam
Communist takeovers in E Europe
Iron Curtain
Truman Doctrine
Marshall Plan
Cominform
Comecon
Berlin
NATO
Bomb       

Western personalities:
Roosevelt
Truman
Marshall
Kennan
Churchill

Soviet personalities:
Stalin
Molotov
Zhdanov

© Nicholas Bunch 2007