History revision

onethreefive

Hi,

I'm doing the LC this year and I chose History as one of my subjects. It's just

the teacher I have tends to talk a lot about what we are doing but not give us

essays that often. Could anyone suggest a good revision plan for History that

will make my goal of getting at least a C1 in it attainable?

Thank you!

HansHolzel

Here's a definite question for you on a plate, for a start.

Stalin and Stalinism in the period 1901-45

Without Lenin, there would have been no Stalin. In 1901, in his book, What is to be done, Lenin expressed his key ideas that the working class, by itself, only looked for the reform of society and that a ‘vanguard’ party – small, compact, highly disciplined and totally dedicated – was what was needed to achieve revolution.

This organizational principle was termed democratic centralism. It meant that the emancipation of the working class was no longer seen as the task of that class itself. Nevertheless, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had repeatedly used the term “the dictatorship of the proletariat”, so Lenin planned to make the Bolsheviks the embodiment of that dictatorship. To this end he needed an organization that was run like a religious sect. His Bolshevik faction would later be renamed the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1918.

Though he later became Lenin’s right-hand man in the October Revolution (1917) and Red Army commander in the Russian Civil War (1918-21), it is ironic that Trotsky was very critical of Lenin’s ideas at the time they emerged. “Lenin’s methods,” wrote Trotsky, “lead to this: the party organization at first substitutes itself for the party as a whole; then the Central Committee substitutes itself for the organization; and finally a single dictator substitutes himself for the Central Committee.”

So, how would this dictatorship come into being and who would be in the best position to take over? As early as 1904 the Polish socialist Rosa Luxemburg pointed out that the party central committee, according to Lenin’s policy, was authorized to organize all sub-committees and hence determine the membership of every local organization of the Party. The most important figure in this process would later prove to be the party’s general secretary, an administrative post created and given to Stalin in 1922. In the following years he transformed the office into that of party leader and thereby sidelined his rivals.

To get funds for the Bolsheviks prior to the Revolution, Lenin had resorted to what he called “revolutionary expropriations”. This meant bank robberies and various forms of extortion. The most effective of these operations had been organized by Stalin. Lenin didn’t mind associating with the criminal underworld, believing that a scoundrel could be useful precisely because he was a scoundrel. He also ignored votes against such tactics at more than one Party Congress.

After the Bolshevik victory in the Civil War, Lenin suffered the first of a series of strokes in 1922 and died in January 1924. In 1929, Stalin deported Trotsky from the country and removed Bukharin from the Politburo. The first Five-Year Plan (1928-33) was implemented to create a powerful industrial economy that would strengthen the communist regime. It first aimed at the collectivization of agriculture and elimination of the kulaks, defined as rich peasants even though a farmer only had to own a horse to be classed as one.

State-owned collective farms were created to make workers of the peasants and provide enough food for the urban workers employed in the rapid industrialization of the cities. That was the other aim of the Plan but strong rural opposition in the Ukraine, for instance, led to fierce state reprisals and a genocidal famine known as Holodomor (1932-33) that killed millions.

Millions more citizens were branded as traitors and counter-revolutionaries and deported to Siberia and the Arctic to work as slaves in the gulag system of prison camps but factory output soared as the Soviet Union became a leading industrial power on the back of truly terrible human suffering.

What is important to realize, however, is that what was going on was, in fact, less a matter of deliberate wickedness than one of sheer madness. Alexander Solzhenitsyn has observed that the villains in the works of writers like Shakespeare and Dickens are tame because they know they are bad, whereas, to be really evil, to kill millions, one needs a clear conscience and an ideology.

In 1931, 100,000 prisoners with only simple tools were ordered to dig a 227km canal to link the White Sea and the Baltic. Tens of thousands of these slaves died on the project only for the canal to turn out to be too narrow and shallow for shipping. In 1934, Stalin’s chief biologist, the crackpot Lysenko, ordered the sowing of flax on snow-covered fields. The seeds swelled up, turned mouldy and died. A huge area of land then lay empty for a year. In the words of Solzhenitsyn, Lysenko could not say that the snow was a kulak or that he himself was an ass.

In December 1934, the popular Leningrad party boss Sergei Kirov was assassinated, probably on Stalin’s orders, but Stalin used this event as an excuse to launch a massive purge to consolidate his power even more. Hundreds of thousands of army officers, party members, older members of the NKVD secret police and ordinary citizens were killed, often after show trials plus any combination of the twenty-six forms of torture used by the NKVD. In the end Stalin was the only original leading Bolshevik left alive. He called a halt to the purge in late 1938, after it had got to the stage where everybody was denouncing everybody else and the trials and executions were consuming even Stalin’s own henchmen.

The destruction of the officer corps of the Red Army was a particularly disastrous policy, leaving the military without experienced leadership before the Nazi invasion in June 1941. Stalin even discovered the date of that invasion from one of his spies who was based in Tokyo but he insanely refused to believe that Hitler would break the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact that had led to the carve-up of Poland and he therefore refused to prepare properly in advance of the attack.

Indeed, Stalin as leader of the Comintern* had contributed greatly to the rise of Hitler by preventing the German communists siding with the Social Democrats against the Nazis, whom they outnumbered if put together. In the last free German election the Nazis got 190 seats, the Communists 100 and the Social Democrats 120 but, like at home, Bolshevik policy was to try to destroy other left-wing groups that competed for the support of the workers. In pursuing this policy, Stalin copied Lenin who had helped Mussolini gain power by doing the same thing with the Italian communists in the early 1920s.

At any rate, when the other members of the Politburo went to Stalin’s country house to inform him of the German invasion and the early collapse of Soviet forces, Stalin shrank back, expecting to be shot. It was what he would have done to someone who had failed so obviously in his position but they instead told him he was the only leader they had and so therefore he had to assume command.

Stalin composed himself and stayed in Moscow, even when the Germans were threatening the city, and, unlike Hitler, learned to give his generals a free hand in operations. The command economy he had created worked best when it ran on patriotism and it ended up producing three tanks for every one the Germans produced, which was indicative of the turning tide of the war from 1943 onward.

*Comintern is short for Communist International: an international communist organization founded by Lenin in 1919 and dissolved in 1943.

onethreefive

Thank You!

I've been really freaking out about how bad my knowledge of History has gotten in comparison to other subjects.

I'm currently trying to study the treaty but I'm not sure what exactly I should be studying for it and how!

HansHolzel

At grinds right now, will get back to you later.

oncex

Hi fellow history comrade, well I did history last year and got a B something, last year I used to write an essay on every chapter that we were doing and also do plans on how questions could come up. These plans included an intro, and about 6/7 points depending on the question. When you're doing essays all you need to do is include a sentence or 2 in each paragraph referring back to the question. As long as you have all your information, and refer back to the question there is no reason for you not to do well.

However, I used to learn all my essays off by heart last year. I'm repeating this year, hoping for an A1 and I'm learning it by paragraph so that if a crazy question comes up I can deal with it.

So basically do a plan for every chapter, look over questions that have been asked on that topic. I would really recommend actually doing the essay for those topics though as essay writing is the basis of the whole course.

I used to learn an essay on a Sunday night and write it out without help the following evening and although it was tedious, it really helped in the long run.

onethreefive

Thanks for the reply!

How did you know what to write about from each chapter? Were the essays summaries of the chapters?

I wish I did this earlier but there should still be enough time left.

HansHolzel

onethreefive wrote: »

Thank You!

I've been really freaking out about how bad my knowledge of History has gotten in comparison to other subjects.

I'm currently trying to study the treaty but I'm not sure what exactly I should be studying for it and how!

Study the past papers for the most likely topics to come up. It's predictable stuff so you should be able to curtail your workload e.g. here is why I gave you that Stalin essay

Exams:

2013: How did Stalin transform the Soviet economy and/or use show trials to consolidate his power?

2012: What were the main characteristics of Stalin’s rule in Russia?

2011: To what extent did Lenin and/or Stalin bring about social and economic change?

2010: How effective were the internal and external policies of Josef Stalin?

2008: What did Lenin and Stalin contribute to communism in Russia?

2006: To what extent did Stalin transform the society and economy of the Soviet Union?

HansHolzel

Another banker question is the Irish State 1923-49 e.g.

The Irish State 1923-49 exam questions:

2013: During the period 1922-1939, how successful were Irish governments in
responding to the economic challenges they faced?

2013: How did Anglo-Irish relations develop under Éamon de Valera, 1932-1945?

2012: How did Anglo-Irish relations develop during the period 1923-1949?

2011: How did the Irish government contribute to the consolidation of democracy, 1922-1932?

2011: What were the strengths and weaknesses of Éamon de Valera as a political leader?

2010: Who handled Anglo-Irish relations better, W. T. Cosgrave or Éamon de Valera?
Argue your case, referring to both.

2009: During the period 1932-1945, which did Éamon de Valera manage better, the
economy or Anglo-Irish relations? Argue your case, referring to both.

2008: What steps did Irish governments take to consolidate democracy, 1923-1945?

2007: How did Anglo-Irish relations develop during the period 1923 – 1949?

2006: Between 1922 and 1932, what steps did the Cosgrave governments take to establish the Irish Free State on firm foundations?

ESSAY

Cosgrave, De Valera and the Irish State 1923-49

The English writer V.S. Pritchett came to Ireland as a young reporter during the Civil War. His observations are recorded in his memoir Midnight Oil.

“One was observing a revolution: a country set free, a new young state, the first modern defeat of colonialism. Sitting in the Press gallery of the Dáil day after day, listening to the laughing, fighting voice of Cosgrave, the irony of Kevin O’Higgins or the tirades of the old defeated Redmond was like being at school taking a course in the foundation of states.”

The segment of Sinn Féin that accepted the Treaty met in January 1923 and formed Cumann na nGaedheal, which became Fine Gael ten years later. Led by W. T. Cosgrave, the party, already in power, contested the Free State general election of 1923. It won 63 seats, with 39% of the votes cast. Until 1932, Cumann na nGaedheal continued to form the government of the Irish Free State, with Cosgrave as President of the Executive Council, or prime minister.

While in government, the party established many of the institutions on which the Irish state is built but its conservatism and lack of imagination in economic policy proved a large part of its downfall, as did its understandable obsession with law and order. Nonetheless, Home Affairs Minister Kevin O’Higgins established an unarmed police force, An Garda Síochána, which was a great achievement in its context.

The ESB was also founded (1927), as was the Agricultural Credit Corporation (ACC), but the latter had little effect at the time. Policies favoured the well-off and the only farm product developed was sugar beet, through the growth of the Carlow sugar beet factory. The government also started the Shannon scheme at Ardnacrusha but used the building of the power station to drive down local wages by up to 30%, provoking a nine-month-long strike in Limerick that involved hundreds of workers.

The collapse of the Boundary Commission in 1925 that left the Border in the same position was symptomatic of a government becoming intensely unpopular because of its economic policies, high unemployment and extra repressive measures introduced by O’Higgins. Emigration averaged 33,000 per year during the party’s rule.

The party then gradually lost ground to Eamon de Valera’s new party Fianna Fáil after the latter’s foundation in 1926. Cosgrave’s Cumann na nGaedheal became solely identified with protecting the Treaty and defending the new state against subversives. Economically the party favoured balanced budgets and free trade at a time when its opponents advocated protectionism. It didn’t believe in promoting native industry and income tax was actually cut from 25% to 15% between 1924 and 1926.

Furthermore, in 1926 the “Ultimate Financial Settlement” was signed in great secrecy by Ernest Blythe and Winston Churchill. It decided the payment of the land annuities, which had not been collected for some years due to the Troubles. The deal for £5m per year was widely regarded in Ireland as punitive and shameful.

In 1923 O’Higgins, as Minister for External Affairs, had nonetheless registered the Treaty as an international agreement and joined the League of Nations. In 1927 O’Higgins was assassinated by IRA men on a Dublin street. In response, the government introduced a Public Safety Act, which brought in the death penalty. This too was widely unpopular but the Electoral Amendment Act forced all elected TDs to take the Oath of Allegiance to the king of England.

A few years after his first stay, V. S. Pritchett had returned to a different Dublin.

“Yeats had left for England. Soon O’Casey went. One could smell the coming reaction and the dullness of growing religious obduracy.”

The Knights of Columbanus had been founded in 1922 but it was only one of many pressure groups seeking more and more Catholic repression. The Censorship of Publications Act 1929 set up the Censorship Board in 1930 and every Irish and international writer of note was banned for the slightest reference to sex. This was often a display of repressed sexuality by many sick people masquerading as religious maniacs.

The weak economy of the Free State then suffered greatly during the Depression. Before the 1932 general election, Cumann na nGaedheal put its faith in businessmen, professionals, big farmers, most of the press, the clergy and its old reliable: law-and-order scaremongering.

Nonetheless the party was defeated, winning only 57 seats to Fianna Fáil’s 72. Labour supported FF for government, as it was thoroughly fed up with Cumann na nGaedheal’s refusal to implement any of the social legislation that had been outlined in the Democratic Programme of the first Dáil in 1919.

Six months after the foundation of Cumann na nGaedheal, 150 people had met in the Mansion House to restart Sinn Féin according to its original ideals. When De Valera came out of hiding to speak in Ennis he was arrested and spent the next eleven months in jail. Most Republican deputies, candidates and organizers were among the 12,000 people interned without trial.

Despite these difficulties, Sinn Féin managed to win 44 out of 153 seats in that year’s election, even though they had no intention of taking their seats in the new Dáil. Nonetheless this policy of abstentionism meant that by 1925 there was a steady decline in party funds and membership. Fianna Fáil was therefore founded in Dublin in April 1926 and Dev set about creating an electoral machine that would be the best in the country.

Dan Breen took the oath of allegiance in January 1927 and immediately tried to introduce a bill to abolish it. In June 1927 Fianna Fáil won 44 seats but then O’Higgins was assassinated so Cosgrave passed a law that stated that elected members of the Dáil would lose their seats after two months if they didn’t participate. Therefore De Valera led Fianna Fáil into Leinster House and signed the oath book in August 1927, ironically dismissing it as an “empty formula” after so many had died over it in the Civil War.

Dev decided the party needed its own daily newspaper so money was raised at home and in America to start the Irish Press in 1931. Control of the paper was retained by the De Valera family. On the eve of the 1932 general election Ernest Blythe ensured the government committed suicide when he took a shilling off the old age pension in a panicky pre-election budget. Fianna Fáil managed to form a minority government and Cumann na nGaedheal democratically handed over power without protest.

Despite having received IRA support in the election campaign, Dev had no intention of pandering too much to his Civil War comrades once in power. He nonetheless first got rid of the oath and the governor general but stopping the payment of the land annuities was a more serious matter. The British retaliated by taxing Irish imports, which especially affected agricultural produce. Fianna Fáil replied with similar tariffs on imports from Britain and the Economic War (1932-38) had begun.

Cumann na nGaedheal supported Britain on the terms of the Treaty and it was backed by the Army Comrades Association. This organization, soon to be known as the Blueshirts, was formed in response to IRA attacks on Cumann na nGaedheal public meetings. In January 1933 Dev called another election and won an overall majority on a wave of patriotic support. He then sacked Garda Commissioner Eoin O’Duffy, who was a former Free State general. By the end of 1932 the Blueshirts had attracted 100,000 members and adopted a fascist uniform and salute.

O’Duffy wanted to stage a huge march in Dublin in August 1933 but the government banned it and the Blueshirt leader backed down. After that it was only a matter of time before the alcoholic O’Duffy wrecked the Blueshirt movement and forever tainted Fine Gael with the nickname.

The IRA proved a more resilient violent threat to the state but Fianna Fáil used military tribunals, firing squads, hangings, internment and Special Branch torturers to try and stamp out the organization. In 1936 the IRA was declared an illegal organization, which it remains to this day.

The Economic War affected large cattle producers most and angered most farmers but Fianna Fáil maintained its grip on the electorate by populist measures: free meat was given to people on the dole; thousands of council houses were built; and 50,000 extra industrial jobs were created due to the protectionist economic policy Dev favoured.

In terms of social policy, though, De Valera’s 1937 Constitution was written in consultation with the future Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, and, by way of providing social services, it simply handed the Catholic Church control over areas like health, education and the family.

To end the Economic War, negotiations with British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain were concluded in April 1938. The annuities bill was settled, at a mild nominal discount to the Irish, but more importantly the British navy left the Treaty ports. This meant the Irish state was able to stay out of the coming war. In the June 1938 election, Fianna Fáil triumphed with 52% of the vote.

When war came in 1939 every Dáil deputy bar one (Fine Gael’s James Dillon) voted for neutrality. With imports practically cut off, we had to be self-sufficient. This experience served as a reminder that the Irish state, in a process started by Cumann na nGaedheal, was the greatest example of state ownership of the economy in Europe, outside of the Soviet Union.

Apart from the land, almost everything else of economic value was run by the state, in a country where socialism was ironically a dirty word. There was no ideology involved. The state had had to develop its economic infrastructure for practical reasons because the colonial power had left the country so underdeveloped.

Nonetheless the war shortages meant a hard time for the people and a new nationalist party, Clann na Poblachta, was formed in 1946. Its energy resembled that of Fianna Fáil back in 1932. The patriotism that had solidified FF support was turning into post-war disillusion and weariness in a stagnant, closed economy suffering constant emigration. In 1948 a coalition that included Clann na Poblachta, Labour and Fine Gael defeated FF for the first time in sixteen years.

Clann na Poblachta would not accept Fine Gael leader Richard Mulcahy because of his Civil War record so FG nominated John A Costello for the post instead. It was he who declared the Irish state a republic while on a visit to Ottawa in 1949. It was also he who was so much of a moral coward that he sat in his state car at the funeral of ex-President Douglas Hyde, rather than be seen entering a Protestant cathedral for Hyde’s funeral service.

onethreefive

Thanks a million!

I don't know what it is with History but I can never understand what it is I need to learn for it.

Is that essay a good answer for all of them questions? I'm currently writing an essay about the treaty which appears to be turning into a summary of the chapter!

Those essays will really help with revising thanks again!

HansHolzel

You can answer all the above questions with that 1923-49 essay but you'd need to add a few trimmings/extra details yourself from your textbook etc., depending on the wording of the question.

The Treaty is the kind of topic that can keep you writing until your hand seizes up. Try to avoid such stuff in the exam. Some topics are just too vast.

Let's look at another exam banker: Parnell (i.e. in connection with Home Rule and/or the Land War). A bit of Isaac Butt from your textbook will get you started, if it's Home Rule, and I'll give you a one (A4) page summary of "Land Reform" later.

Questions first:

2013: How did the Home Rule movement develop during the period 1870-1886?

2012: What were Parnell’s strengths and weaknesses as a political leader?

2010: What did Charles Stewart Parnell contribute to land reform and to the development of the Home Rule movement?

2009: Who was the more effective leader of the Home Rule movement, Butt or Parnell? Argue your case, referring to both.

ESSAY

Charles Stewart Parnell

An Ascendancy landlord from Wicklow, Parnell entered Parliament after a Meath by-election in 1875. In London he joined Irish obstructionists like Joseph Biggar who interrupted the business of the House of Commons with filibusters, talking at great length on topics that really had nothing to do with them. These men remained a minority within the Home Rule MPs but their defiance won increasing popular support both in Ireland and among the Irish in Britain.

His intense ambition, tactical resourcefulness and fighting spirit, plus the poor judgement of his rivals, won Parnell the leadership of the Home Rulers within five years. He had the ability to figure out what would unite and rouse the country to action and what was the maximum concession that could be extracted from the British government. The Irishtown mass meeting of 20 April 1879 that marked the start of tenant resistance finally convinced him that victory in the land question would lead on to Home Rule. Still, he hesitated over the goal of peasant ownership of the land partly because he feared the lawmakers at Westminster would be less inclined to favour self-government for a people who had got rid of their landlords.

Just after getting the “New Departure” support of the Fenian leader John Devoy of Clan na Gael, Parnell gave a masterly performance at a key meeting at Westport on 8 June 1879. There he preached conciliation with the landlords while urging tenants to keep a firm hold on their lands and homes. For the rest of 1879 he acted as a restraining influence on Michael Davitt, who really did care personally about the plight of the peasantry. Davitt founded the Land League of Mayo on 16 August 1879 but, when he proceeded to form a national league, Parnell then intervened, reducing the radicalism of the message to the goal of rent reductions. In November he arrived in Balla and stopped some evictions, gaining great publicity that masked his essential moderation.

Parnell’s triumphant American tour in the spring of 1880 raised a lot of money for the tenant cause but his hold over the Home Rule party was not yet secure. Hardships like potato failure and cholera in Connacht only strengthened Irish resistance to evictions and Parnell and his followers were ejected from the Commons in February 1881 for protesting at Davitt’s arrest under Gladstone’s new coercion legislation.

Coercion proved merely the prelude to a major Land Act that conceded the three Fs (fair rent, free sale and fixity of tenure). Parnell’s private view was that the Act did not abolish landlordism but would make landlordism intolerable for the landlords. Nonetheless he denounced it publicly and was imprisoned in Kilmainham in October 1881. Pushed by colleagues, he issued the No Rent manifesto from jail, directing the tenants to go on a rent strike. The Land League was immediately suppressed and the strike failed, as Parnell had anticipated, because the Act divided tenants into two groups. Those not in arrears got an average reduction of twenty per cent but no reductions applied to the rest, nor to 100,000 leaseholders.

Nonetheless the surge in agrarian violence convinced both Gladstone and Parnell that a deal had to be done. Parnell was released in May 1882 under the Kilmainham Treaty, which dropped coercion and cancelled all rent arrears via the Arrears Act. The Phoenix Park murders only distracted from the fact that Parnell had got a very good deal.

A relative lull in his public activity occurred between 1882 and the first Home Rule bill in 1886 but his party was transformed in that time. In 1880, Parnell could only rely on the definite support of 24 out of 59 Home Rule MPs. In 1885, 86 loyal Home Rulers were returned, including one in Liverpool. 75 of these were Catholic and all were paid a salary out of Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) funds. Local party organizations usually accepted candidate nominations from IPP headquarters, which restricted the influence of local clergy on the selection process.

The third Reform Act (1884) had increased the electorate from 230,000 to over 700,000. The Redistribution Act (1885) got rid of the electoral boroughs, by which 2% of the electorate had returned 15% of the MPs. Once Parnell was sure Gladstone would not reduce Irish representation in London, even with a declining population, he supported these electoral reforms.

Parnell nonetheless helped put Gladstone out of office in June 1885 and he directed the Irish in Britain to vote Tory in the general election that November. Gladstone’s son then announced his father’s conversion to Home Rule after the election had left the IPP holding the balance of power. This conversion left the Tories able to play the orange card when the Liberals formed a government. Parnell unwisely neglected to court British public opinion on the issue and the defection of the left wing of the Liberals under Joseph Chamberlain meant the first Home Rule bill (1886) was defeated in the Commons, 341-311. The government fell and the Tories under Salisbury gained a large majority. Nonetheless over 200 British MPs had supported a proposal that had got just one English vote when Daniel O’Connell raised it as an MP in 1834.

The Home Rulers were now tied to the Liberals, though, which was to prove most significant in the long run. In the meantime, nationalist interest went back to the land issue due to falling agricultural prices. This was the period of the Plan of Campaign, which ended with mixed results. Nevertheless the exposure of the Pigott forgeries in February 1889, which the Times had published in an attempt to implicate Parnell in the Phoenix Park murders, only further increased his stature in Ireland and England.

In November 1890 the judgement came in the divorce case involving Captain and Mrs O’Shea. Parnell was named as co-respondent but his party initially supported him. His fall really only started when Gladstone let it be known that he could not bring the Nonconformists among the Liberals with him if Parnell remained as IPP leader. As the Liberals seemed certain to win the next election, the issue thus appeared to have become a choice between Parnell and Home Rule.

He lost a vote of his MPs in December but refused to back down on the question of his leadership, even temporarily, arguing that the “dictation” of Gladstone should not be followed. His opponents claimed he was selfishly putting himself before the cause. In five viciously fought by-elections his supporters lost all but one (Redmond won in Waterford). A brave man, if not an unselfish one, Parnell died, worn-out, in October 1891. He was therefore spared the humiliation of seeing only nine of his supporters returned among 80 Home Rule MPs in the election of 1892. It should be remembered that both party and people had stood by Parnell in November 1890 and the Catholic Church stayed out of it as long as private morality was the only issue at stake.

HansHolzel

LAND REFORM summary

Irish Land Reform (1870-1903)

The Famine not only greatly reduced the size of Ireland’s population but it also changed its social structure. By 1870, starvation and migration had dramatically reduced the numbers and significance of the dirt-poor labourers and cottiers who had formed the largest group in pre-Famine Irish society. One major consequence of this was the agitation for land reform. The British PM William Gladstone’s 1870 Landlord and Tenant Act was the first (unsuccessful) attempt to use legislation to resolve long-standing hostility between those who owned land and those who occupied and worked it. The economic pressure of failed harvests in the late 1870s increased tension between landlords and tenants. This led to the foundation of the Land League by Michael Davitt in Mayo in 1879. It soon became a national organization with Charles Stewart Parnell as its president.

There followed three years of evictions, rural violence, rent strikes and mass internment of suspects in the ‘Land War’ of 1879-82. The Land War also gave the English language the word “boycott” after Captain Charles Boycott was shunned and forced to leave for England. The struggle led to Gladstone’s Second Land Act (1881) which sought to provide security for tenants by giving them legal rights based on the “Three Fs”: Fair Rent, Freedom of Sale and Fixity of Tenure. This Act allowed the fixing of rents for fifteen years by Land Courts and was a radical solution to the land question as it removed the landlords’ right to decide the rents.

The Land League was still not happy that it did not deal with the issue of rent arrears and many of its leaders, including Parnell and Davitt, were imprisoned for continuing to protest. A solution was reached in the so-called “Kilmainham Treaty” of May 1882, when Gladstone agreed to cancel two million pounds of rent debt and Parnell promised to work to stop the violence in the countryside.

Agricultural unrest appeared again during the next slump in the middle of the 1880s, when demands were again made for rent reductions, especially after poor harvests. The 1887 Land Act gave the courts the authority to reconsider rents every three years and to adjust them in line with shifts in agricultural prices. This legislation gave Irish tenants almost complete protection and put them in a far stronger position than their English or Scottish equivalents. However, it failed to end the demands for land reform. The “Plan of Campaign” (1886-91), devised by Tim Healy, focused on 203 estates, with mixed results, until it petered out after the Parnell divorce case.

The Irish focus nonetheless now changed from protecting the tenant to gaining ownership of the land. Only 74,000 tenants out of 545,000 made use of the land reforms to purchase their farms before 1903. When rents were fixed by the courts, buying the land made little sense to tenants who were, in any case, unwilling or unable to afford the prices demanded by landowners. In 1903 the Wyndham Act ensured that the landowner got a good price for the land he sold while the tenant took a twenty-year mortgage from the British state to pay for it. The tenant also paid a figure that was less than the previous fixed rent. By 1908 46% of farmers had already become owners. Thus the demand for land reform was ended but not, as the British government had hoped, the demand for Home Rule.

onethreefive

Thank you so much!

I'm going to learn all of these! I wish my History teacher was this good!

HansHolzel

Something I'd consider a 50-50 chance (re the North) is Sunningdale. I wouldn't bother studying anything else in that section (1949-1993) because the rest of it is too unpredictable.

Sunningdale Agreement and Power-Sharing Executive 1973-1974

BACKGROUND

In March 1972, the Northern Troubles were in their worst year, with nearly 500 deaths. It was then that the Conservative British government under Edward Heath abolished the Unionist-dominated Stormont parliament. Stormont had denied Catholics civil rights since the 1920s but the British government had foolishly allowed it to dictate security policy, especially after the Conservatives took power in June 1970. London had let it tell the British army what to do (i.e. torment the Catholics) after its peacekeeping introduction in August 1969, especially during the Falls Road Curfew of July 1970, and had also let Stormont introduce internment in August 1971.

William Whitelaw, the Northern Ireland Secretary, then produced a White Paper that has 4 key components:

1) Northern Ireland Assembly
2) Executive (power-sharing between Protestant and Catholic ministers)
3) Council of Ireland (a joint parliamentary body between North and South)
4) Guarantee that NI remained part of UK as long as a majority wanted this.

A split resulted among the Unionists. Brian Faulkner, the last Unionist Party prime minister of Northern Ireland, agreed with the White Paper. Those who pledged their support to him were called “Pledged” Unionists. Those Unionists against him consisted of Ian Paisley and his Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), William Craig and his Vanguard party, the Orange Order and the “Unpledged” Unionists led by Harry West of Faulkner’s party.

The nationalist SDLP gave cautious support to the plan but the IRA rejected it, saying it reinforced Partition. Election results showed 64% of the six-county population in favour of power-sharing, with 36% against. Of the Unionist results in the election, 26 seats were won by anti-White Paper candidates and 24 by pro-White Paper candidates. Faulkner was therefore in a difficult position, leading a minority of Unionist representatives.

THE AGREEMENT

~ Faulkner wanted a Unionist majority in the Executive
~ A Council of Ireland was agreed on. It would have influence over policing and would contain representatives from the Dáil.
~ SDLP agreed to end the Catholic rent and rates strike against internment
~ Whitelaw was called back to London and replaced by Francis Pym (who had no experience)
~ On 6th December 1973 a conference opened in Sunningdale, Berkshire
~ Liam Cosgrave (Taoiseach) along with Irish ministers Garret Fitzgerald and Conor Cruise O’Brien attended
~ John Hume of the SDLP got real power for the Council of Ireland
~ Prime Minister Heath chaired the meeting and quickly got impatient with Unionists
~ Irish Government agreed to give a verbal agreement on Northern Ireland remaining part of the UK as long as the majority wanted that.

THE POWER-SHARING EXECUTIVE

~ On 1st January 1974, with Faulkner as Chief Minister and Gerry Fitt (SDLP) as his Deputy, power-sharing began:
~ The Orange Order, DUP, Vanguard and “Unpledged” Unionists united to form the United Ulster Unionist Council (UUUC), which was created to resist power-sharing and the Council of Ireland.
~ Faulkner resigned as leader of the Unionist Party after a motion on the Council of Ireland failed to pass at a meeting. He was replaced by Harry West.
~ Faulkner set up the Unionist Party of Northern Ireland.
~ IRA and Loyalist attacks continued.
~ A British general election was called by Heath, against the advice of the Executive, which said it was bad timing.
~ UUUC used the election as a referendum on Sunningdale and put forward one anti-Agreement candidate in each constituency.
~ UUUC won 11 out of 12 of the Westminster seats (Paisley, Craig and West all won).
~ Gerry Fitt was the only pro-agreement candidate to win a Westminster seat.
~ In Britain, Heath (Conservative) lost the election and Harold Wilson of Labour became PM.
~ Pym was replaced by Merlyn Rees as Northern Ireland Secretary.

THE ULSTER WORKERS’ COUNCIL (UWC)

~ Northern Ireland industries employed predominantly Protestant workers.
~ The Ulster Workers’ Council was a group of loyalist workers in shipbuilding, engineering and electricity generation.
~ On 15th May 1974, the UWC called a strike.
~ Loyalist paramilitaries became involved and workers were ‘persuaded’ not to go to work.
~ Road blockades were established and youths armed with clubs turned back lorries delivering milk, groceries and petrol.
~ Strikers managed to cut electricity output by 60% and factories were forced to close.
~ The British Army and RUC stood by and did nothing.
~ Many Protestants supported the strike.
~ The UWC did not alienate its own people and made sure supplies got through to Protestant areas.
~ Loyalists with British army collusion carried out bomb attacks in Dublin and Monaghan in May, killing 33 people.
~ The Executive was isolated and had no control over events.
~ Rees the Northern Ireland Secretary failed to stop the strike.
~ Faulkner tried to get the Dublin government to reduce the powers of the Council of Ireland but, despite agreement to hold off implementation, it was too late.
~ Hospitals were about to close and the Executive resigned.
~ The Power-Sharing Executive ended in failure.

WHY DID THE SUNNINGDALE AGREEMENT FAIL?

~ Northern Ireland Secretary Rees was unwilling to use the police and army to stop the strike.
~ The Labour Party under Wilson was not as keen as the Conservatives on the Agreement.
~ The UWC strike brought the North to a halt.
~ The Council of Ireland was greatly feared by the Unionists as they believed it would lead to a United Ireland.

HansHolzel

Carson and the Unionists is another typical topic

e.g.

2012: What was the Ulster Question and how did Unionism develop, 1870-1914?

2011: How did Unionism develop during the period 1886-1914?

2010: How successful was Edward Carson as a leader of Unionism?

2009: What developments took place in Ulster Unionism or in the industrialisation of Belfast, 1870-1914?

2008: In the period to 1914, who was the more effective leader, John Redmond or
Edward Carson? Argue your case, referring to both leaders.

ESSAY

Carson and the Ulster Unionists

Carson and the Ulster Unionists contributed to the Easter Rising by bringing the threat of violence back into Irish public life and showing that such methods were productive. Without developments in Ulster, the Irish Volunteers would probably never have been established and the Republican separatists would not have had such a paramilitary force in 1916.

Edward Carson (1854-1935) was a Protestant Dubliner, born into a professional family. Educated at Trinity College and King’s Inns, he practised law after graduation. Much of his early work involved representing tenant farmers claiming rent reductions under Gladstone’s 1881 Land Act. He was later employed on the side of the landlords when he prosecuted tenants during the Plan of Campaign.

In 1892 he was appointed Solicitor-General for Ireland. He next practised law in England where he was successful in many high-profile cases, such as in his defence of the Marquess of Queensberry in the libel suit brought by Oscar Wilde, who had been at Trinity with Carson.

In 1900 he became Solicitor-General for England. Carson had already entered politics, becoming a Unionist MP for Trinity College in 1892. He was dedicated to what he saw as the best interests of Ireland, warning British ministers against “their everlasting attempt to make peace in Ireland by giving sops to one party at the expense of the other”.

In February 1910 he became leader of the Irish Unionist MPs at Westminster, then about twenty in number. Apart from a couple of seats in the South, such as in Trinity College and South County Dublin, most Unionist MPs were in Ulster. The nine counties of the province of Ulster had a big Unionist population, descendants of English and Scottish settlers who had arrived and taken over in the seventeenth century. They numbered 900,000 in 1911 – one fifth of the total Irish population. Living mainly together in the north-east had enabled them to maintain their Protestantism, their traditions and their loyalty to the British crown.

This loyalty was not, however, always as strong. In the late eighteenth century large numbers took part in the rebellion of the United Irishmen in pursuit of an Irish republic. By the end of the nineteenth century they had a flourishing industrial economy, with the linen and ship-building industries being particularly strong.

Apart from being Unionist in outlook, the Ulster Protestants did not want to be governed by a Home Rule parliament and administration dominated by Catholics, whom they feared and despised. The slogan “Home Rule is Rome Rule” summed up their fears.

Carson’s strategy was to exploit Ulster Unionist opposition as a means of preventing Home Rule and thus maintaining the whole of Ireland within the Union with Britain, as it had been since 1800. He believed that if Ulster could not be forced into accepting Home Rule, the policy would be abandoned. He used the Unionist opposition arranged by James Craig to his advantage. He sanctioned the establishment of the Ulster Volunteer Force in 1912 and its arming in 1914. The supply of weapons to the UVF was supported by many British Conservatives and many officers in the British army.

He used the threat of violence and civil war and he was never effectively challenged by Asquith’s Liberal government in London. When it became clear in 1912, though, that Home Rule was inevitable, he concentrated on having the six Ulster counties with the biggest unionist numbers excluded. This meant abandoning the considerable numbers of Protestants (300,000) in the 26 counties and trapping two counties with Catholic majorities (Tyrone and Fermanagh) plus the Catholic city of Derry in the North.

At the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 and the temporary shelving of Home Rule, Carson enthusiastically supported the war effort, pledging the Ulster Volunteer Force for military service. In the House of Commons in 1916, he pleaded for mercy for the leaders of the Irish rebels. “Whatever is done, let it be done not in a moment of temporary excitement, but with due deliberation in regard both to the past and to the future.”

He later turned down the opportunity to become Prime Minister of Northern Ireland (James Craig got the job) because he had no personal connection to the area. He also warned the Protestants to treat the Catholics fairly, in order to help bring stability to the North, but in this he was ignored.

HansHolzel

As back-up to the Stalin essay, there are two broad foreign topics you would also do well to study (America 1945-89 and decolonization) but it's hard to predict how the cards will fall in terms of the exact questions.

Anyway here's an essay on the first (pay particular attention to Vietnam, Cuba and the Moon landings)...

America 1945-89

(1)
The post-war combination of wartime technological advances, Keynesian economic policies of state intervention and stimulus, and the availability of cheap oil, led to a long period of economic growth that lasted until the 1970s and an American “baby boom” between 1946 and 1964.

In 1949, nonetheless, the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb and Chairman Mao’s communists expelled the American-backed Kuomintang from China. The Red Scare that followed in America involved a witch-hunt of suspected communists. This period remains chiefly associated with Senator Joseph McCarthy, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the Hollywood blacklist where 300 prominent people were hounded out of the film and TV industry.

Spy cases involving Alger Hiss, Klaus Fuchs and the Rosenbergs only added fuel to the flames, as did the start of the Korean War in 1950, when communist North Korea invaded the South. In the end, though, television destroyed McCarthy in 1954 by exposing his bullying style to the nation just as he tried to extend his witch-hunt to the army. He died of alcoholism soon afterwards.

In 1956, C. Wright Mills in The Power Elite stressed the Eastern private school and Ivy League make-up of the Eisenhower Administration (1952-60) because he needed to find some plausible basis for the cohesiveness he saw in the small group of people which, he claimed, directed American society.

In the 1960 presidential election, John F. Kennedy defeated Eisenhower’s Vice-President Richard Nixon, who had once been a lawyer for HUAC and who had been nicknamed “Tricky Dick” by an opponent early in his career. Eisenhower himself in his farewell address warned of the dangers to the country of what he called “the military industrial complex” but, in fact, the traditional upper class in the United States had already been losing its dominance.

Among the forces causing this was the westward movement of population and industry. The political success of Ronald Reagan, president from 1980 to 1988, may have been the chief expression of this drift but it also showed that the role of Western business people in backing Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater for the presidency in 1964 had been no passing phenomenon. Reagan was a Hollywood actor who made his last film, The Killers, in 1964 before being elected Governor of California in 1966.

CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS

The Cuban Missile Crisis was the closest the world ever came to nuclear war. In 1962, the Soviet Union was lagging behind the United States in the arms race, even though JFK had made it a plank of his campaign that it was the US that was falling behind. Soviet missiles were only powerful enough to be launched against Europe but American missiles were capable of striking the entire Soviet Union. In April 1962, Nikita Khrushchev had the idea of putting missiles in Cuba. Kennedy had earlier sanctioned the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 to overthrow the communist government of Fidel Castro. Meanwhile, Castro was looking for a way to defend the island against another attack. He approved of Khrushchev’s plan to place missiles there. In the summer of 1962 the Soviet Union worked secretly to build its missile installations in Cuba.

For the United States, the crisis began on 15th October 1962 when aerial reconnaissance photographs revealed Soviet missile sites under construction. On 22nd October, Kennedy announced his decision to blockade the island. He also demanded that the Soviets remove all their offensive weapons. During the public phase of the Crisis, tensions began to build on both sides as more Soviet ships steamed towards Cuba. Then, on the twenty-sixth, he got a letter from Khrushchev. It proposed removing Soviet missiles and personnel if the US would guarantee not to invade the island.

The twenty-seventh of October was the worst day of the crisis. A U-2 spy plane was shot down over Cuba and a second letter from Khrushchev demanded the removal of American missiles in Turkey in exchange for the Soviet ones in Cuba. Attorney General Robert Kennedy suggested ignoring the second letter and he contacted Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin to tell him of American agreement with the first one. Tensions finally began to ease on 28th October when Khrushchev announced that he would dismantle the installations and return the missiles to the Soviet Union, expressing his trust that the United States would not invade Cuba. The US later removed its missiles from Turkey too.

(2)
Right-wing groups in America tend to see 1954 as the last year before the country’s fall into liberal, multicultural decadence, which was kicked off by figures like the rock ‘n’ roll singer Bill Haley and the black bus passenger Rosa Parks. Nonetheless many seeds of change had already sprouted. For example, President Truman had banned racial segregation in the military in 1948.

Furthermore, despite the removal of women from heavy industry after 1945, almost none of the wartime clerical female workforce had been laid off. By 1954 a quarter of American wives were again at work, even though the majority were occupied in lower clerical and shop work, cleaning, unskilled factory work, nursing and primary school teaching.

Thirdly, the first wave of mass consumerism had swept America in the late 1940s. The teen magazine Seventeen had started as early as 1944. This showed that teenagers had been identified as another consumer grouping. Frank Sinatra was already the first teen idol, screamed at and mobbed by thousands of teenage girls, known as the bobbysoxers. This was a whole new audience for popular music.

Advertising was the driving force of this consumer boom and television was the driving force of advertising. Sex was one essential area of consumption and the widespread relaxation of post-war attitudes can be linked to improvements in the quality and availability of contraception. Thus “rock ‘n’ roll” changed from being slang for having sex in a car to meaning the main form of popular music, in which Elvis Presley, chiefly, made black music acceptable to white audiences.

Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique appeared in 1963. According to Friedan, the idea that satisfaction can be found exclusively in the traditional role of wife and mother had left women, or at least suburban housewives, feeling empty and miserable and suffering from “the problem without a name”. Her cure was work outside the home. The book, however, failed to consider how difficult it would be, even for privileged women, to combine family with career unless major changes were made within as well as outside the family.

Founded in 1966, the largest of the American feminist organizations is the National Organization for Women, also known by its acronym NOW. In the public eye, ‘women’s lib’ thereafter became associated most notably with the false report of bra-burning by protestors at the Miss America contest in Atlantic City in 1968. It was actually some cosmetics that were actually set on fire in a barrel.

Around the time of the great Civil Rights march on Washington in August 1963, when Martin Luther King made his “I have a dream” speech, crucial changes relevant to women’s rights began taking place at the level of the Federal government. The first of these were the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

(3)
After the assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963, his successor Lyndon Johnson sought to implement a liberal political vision he called the “Great Society” in order to eliminate poverty and racial injustice. The Democratic landslide in the 1964 election enabled the introduction of many programmes to benefit the less well-off but money for the Great Society was then drained away by escalating American involvement in Vietnam, which Kennedy had promoted.

The American policy in the region was based on the domino theory that if the US didn’t intervene, one country after another in Southeast Asia would fall to the communists. American involvement in Korea (1950-53) had, after all, maintained the status quo in a different part of Asia.

In 1965, Johnson sent in the Marines to support the government of South Vietnam against the communist North and the Vietcong guerrillas. By 1968, 500,000 American troops were involved. Most of these were conscripts and a huge backlash resulted at home over a foreign war that would eventually cost 60,000 American lives.

The Tet Offensive by the communists in early 1968 was the turning point of the war. It was a military failure but a political success, as the American public lost faith in its leaders. The US news media, especially CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite, who was the most trusted public figure in America, told the people the war was going nowhere.

Johnson announced he would not seek re-election and the Democratic Party was in turmoil. Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King was assassinated in April, presidential candidate Robert Kennedy got shot in June and the Chicago police rioted against anti-war protesters at the Democratic Convention in August.

Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon appealed to what he called the “Silent Majority” of socially conservative Americans who were unhappy with the anti-war protests and the hippie counterculture. He and Henry Kissinger also secretly got South Vietnam to withdraw from peace negotiations that the Democrats had pinned their hopes on for ending the war before the election.

Nixon then narrowly defeated Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 presidential race, when the traditionally Democrat South gave large support to the racist Governor George Wallace of Georgia, who polled eleven million votes and won five Southern states.

American prestige got a massive boost from the Moon Landing in July 1969 and Nixon made a historic visit to China in 1972 but college campuses were still centres of protest. The National Guard even opened fire on students at Kent State in Ohio in 1970, killing four. The same year, Nixon ordered a partial invasion of Cambodia to attack Viet Cong supply lines but the real outcome of this futile and extremely violent military adventure was to boost a lunatic Cambodian rebel group called the Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot.

The Nixon Administration introduced a policy of “Vietnamization” of the war, which meant building up the army of South Vietnam. It pulled the last American troops out in 1973 but then Nixon had to resign in 1974 over the Watergate break-in scandal and cover-up. His successor Gerald Ford cut off financial support to South Vietnam and the North conquered the South in six weeks in 1975, at the same time that the Khmer Rouge toppled the American-backed government in Cambodia.

The latter event resulted in the “Killing Fields”, in which the Khmer Rouge killed at least 1.7 million Cambodians in its effort to implement a Year Zero policy of starting a communist society from scratch and erasing all traces of what had been before. Thus, for example, wearing glasses and speaking French were capital offences.

Ford lost the 1976 presidential election to a little known peanut farmer from Georgia named Jimmy Carter but the economy did not thrive under his administration, when the term stagflation was coined to describe the new combination of stagnant growth and inflation. Oil prices had continued to rise steeply since America had backed Israel against Egypt and Syria in the Yom Kippur War in October 1973. The OPEC group, dominated by other Arab nations, had used this as an excuse to get more money for their oil, starting with an oil embargo on the West that caused a worldwide recession.

A second oil crisis occurred in 1979 with the overthrow of the Shah in the Islamic Revolution in Iran and, even with the disruption to Iranian oil production, Carter only added to consumer panic by banning all Iranian imports.

(4)
Thus the New Right reaction that was so active in the 1980s under Reagan and the first President Bush was a conservative backlash based on: negative feelings generated by the Vietnam War, which had dented America’s self-image and confidence; a loss of faith in government during the long-drawn-out Watergate affair (1972-74); and an economic decline which began with the 1973 oil crisis.

Ironically, Bush had once called Reagan’s programme of deregulation, low taxes and massive military spending “voodoo economics”, at least when fighting him for the Republican presidential nomination in 1980. Despite their reactionary efforts, however, socio-economic change was relentless. For example, women’s share of the workforce rose from 27% in 1940 to 44% in 1985.

Reagan’s military build-up and his desire for a “Star Wars” anti-missile defence system only added to the financial pressure on the Soviet Union, which had invaded Afghanistan in 1980 to prop up a communist regime. The Americans also gave huge support in weapons, training and money to the mujahideen rebels there.

In 1976, a French scholar called Emmanuel Todd had predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union within fifteen to thirty years by examining Soviet statistics for things like infant mortality rates, which had started going up again after several decades of decline. Todd’s view remained a minority one, however, even though he was one of the few scholars to read the state of the USSR correctly.

At the same time, Reagan established a new détente or friendlier contacts with the reformist Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who took over in 1985. Ever since the thaw under Nikita Khrushchev (1956-64) the Soviet regime had been either unwilling or unable to maintain the slave economy of the gulag that had been the foundation of the economic growth seen under Stalin. A symptom of this in the late 1980s was its lack of response to the restive satellites in Eastern Europe that would formerly have simply been invaded, as happened in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was the culmination of the end of the Iron Curtain, a phrase coined by Winston Churchill in a speech in Fulton, Missouri in 1946, when he’d said such a barrier had descended across Europe, from Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic.

HansHolzel

Decolonization Summary

After the end of the Second World War in 1945, the next thirty years saw the break-up of the European empires, ending with the Portuguese when hundreds of thousands of settlers left Angola and Mozambique in 1975. Nonetheless the beginning of this process can be found after the First World War in 1918. The first freed colony appeared in Europe itself, with the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922. Ho Chi Minh was a waiter in Paris at the time and it was a turning point in his life when he saw that a colonial power could be defeated. Later he became leader of the national liberation movement in Vietnam.

One of the broad effects of the First World War was that all the traditional European powers became weaker. The United States rose to great power status; Britain, in particular, declined; Germany and Turkey lost their empires; and the Russian Revolution (1917) created the Soviet Union. In 1939 Britain had the largest colonial territories but, after the Depression of the 1930s, it couldn’t really afford to fight Germany. During the war, the Americans, in return for their support for Britain, put great pressure on the British over colonial resources such as oil.

America and the Soviet Union, the superpowers after 1945, were both hostile to traditional colonialism. The United States had been a group of English colonies until 1776 and Soviet communist ideology supported freedom for colonized peoples. On the European mainland, colonial powers like France, Holland and Belgium had been conquered by Germany and many of their Asian possessions had been invaded by Japan.

The first Asian country to get independence at the end of the war was India. For the British it was long seen as the “Jewel in the Crown” and, as long as Britain could exploit its resources, colonial rule had remained strong. Nevertheless the war had greatly damaged Britain’s ability to control a global empire.

The Partition of India

British rule in eastern India had been confirmed by the victory of Robert Clive over the native ruler of Bengal at the battle of Plassey in 1757. By the early nineteenth century, the British had tightened their grip over large parts of the country. The defeat of the Indian revolt of 1857-58 led to a period when all India was directly under British rule.

Communal tensions between Hindus and Muslims grew worse with the rise of Indian nationalism in the early twentieth century. The Indian National Congress, led by Mohandas Gandhi, was open to all religions but Indian Muslims were encouraged by the British to establish a separate identity. The Muslim League, led by Mohammed Ali Jinnah, was created to promote the rights and interests of the Muslims.

In early 1947 British Prime Minister Clement Attlee announced that Britain would soon leave India. The decision came after years of non-violent resistance, led by Gandhi and Nehru, plus the violent efforts of another leader, Chandra Bose. The modern states of India and Pakistan came into being at midnight on 15 August 1947. The borders were drawn by a London lawyer, Sir Cyril Radcliffe. He was only appointed head of the Boundary Commission on 3 June 1947 and he presented his map on 13 August. Pakistan was made from two separate territories, East Pakistan (today’s Bangladesh) and West Pakistan, with modern India in between them.

Millions of people found themselves on the wrong side of the borders after the British Parliament’s Indian Independence Act. An estimated 14.5 million people crossed the borders in the months after Partition. Hundreds of thousands of Hindus and Muslims were killed in communal fighting (pogroms and riots) and Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu fanatic who thought he was too soft on the Muslims.

The ruler of the autonomous Kashmir princely state had not decided which side to join by August 1947. Pakistan still believes the state should have become part of Pakistan because the majority of its population is Muslim but, at the time, the Hindu Maharaja was facing a Muslim uprising and invasion from Pakistan. He then asked for help from the British Viceroy, Lord Louis Mountbatten, who told him he would arrange help only in return for the ruler deciding to join India. This he did and Indian soldiers marched in. Kashmir became part of India in October 1947.

After India’s independence it was only a matter of time before Britain’s other colonies demanded freedom. By 1957 only two British colonies in Africa were independent (Ghana and Sudan) but the rest followed peacefully between then and 1964. The British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan reflected the mood of the time with a speech he made in South Africa in 1960. “The wind of change is blowing through this continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.”

The Belgian Congo

The Congo experienced a terrible colonial history. In the 1880s, King Leopold II of Belgium took personal control of the country. His brutal rule included widespread slavery and he ruthlessly exploited Congo’s vast natural resources, especially rubber. After an international outcry, prompted by the investigations of the journalist E. D. Morel and the diplomat Roger Casement, Leopold finally transferred control of the “Congo Free State” to the Belgian government in 1908.

The European colonial powers began to leave Africa in the late 1950s. Belgium began to lose full control over the Congo in 1959 following nationalist riots in the capital Leopoldville (now Kinshasa). In early 1960, Belgium announced that the Congo had just five months to prepare itself for independence, despite the fact that the country was clearly not ready for it.

In June 1960, Patrice Lumumba became Prime Minister and Joseph Kasavubu became President. Within two weeks there was an army mutiny against white officers. It created white panic in the country. 100,000 Belgians still lived there, mainly in or near Leopoldville. In response to the crisis, the Belgian government sent in soldiers to protect its citizens and mining interests. This was an illegal act. The government of the Congo had not invited them back in.

There were also threats to the new state from secessionist movements. Most importantly, Moise Tshombe declared the mineral-rich southern region of Katanga independent. Katanga produced copper, 60% of the world’s uranium and 80% of the world’s industrial diamonds and Tshombe was backed by the European companies there.

Lumumba then asked the United Nations for help. The Security Council created a military force to restore law and order to the country. The force numbered nearly 10,000 troops but they were not allowed to intervene in the Congo’s internal affairs. Lumumba asked the United Nations to attack Katanga but Dag Hammerskjöld, the Secretary General of the UN, refused. Lumumba then asked the Soviet Union for help. The Cold War thus increasingly played a part in the Congo’s troubles, with the United States fearing that Lumumba would allow Soviet domination of central Africa.

The Russians gave him military equipment but, with the backing of America and Belgium, President Kasavubu dismissed him in September 1960. Then Colonel Mobutu staged a coup with CIA and Belgian backing. Lumumba escaped and tried to set up a rival government in Stanleyville in the east but he was captured by Mobutu’s men in December. He was flown to Elizabethville in Katanga in January 1961. There he was shot by a firing squad led by Belgian officers.

By the summer of 1961 an all-out civil war in the Congo seemed likely. The UN Security Council gave permission for the United Nations army to use force to prevent it. In August 1961, a new government was formed in Leopoldville, led by Cyrille Adoula. Adoula asked the United Nations to support an attack on Katanga and 5,000 UN troops led an invasion.

They did not capture Tshombe. Dag Hammerskjöld flew to Rhodesia to see him but the Norwegian was killed when his plane crashed suspiciously. His successor U Thant agreed to another attack on Katanga in December 1961. As a result, Tshombe agreed to meet Adoula for negotiations. These talks lasted for nearly a year but achieved very little. In late 1962, the United Nations army in the Congo invaded Katanga again. In January 1963, the region was re-united with the rest of the country.

In 1964 President Kasavubu appointed Tshombe as Prime Minister in Leopoldville but both of them were deposed by Mobutu in 1965. Mobutu remained dictator until 1997. His rule was so corrupt that it became known as a “kleptocracy” – a country with a government whose main aim was to steal. Mobutu is estimated to have stolen at least $5 billion from his own country.

The French experience

France also decolonized after the war but the French experience was quite different. While the British saw the colonies were becoming a burden, the French believed they had to restore their national prestige after their defeat by Germany in 1940. This meant keeping control of their colonies. France fought two important wars as a result and this caused major pressure on the French economy.

The first of these wars was in Indo-China (Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos), which had been under French rule since the nineteenth century. During the war Indo-China was invaded and occupied by the Japanese who also captured the important British possession of Singapore without firing a shot. This British disaster (1942) undermined the prestige of the white man in Asia. General Percival, who raised the white flag, had been an army major in Cork in the Irish War of Independence (1919-21). He was a torturer and the people of Cork who remembered him were not surprised by his cowardice.

During the war a Vietnamese communist group called the Vietminh, led by Ho Chi Minh, fought a guerrilla war against the Japanese. In 1945 the French returned to take back Indo-China but the Vietminh declared independence. Fighting began in 1946 and continued for eight years before the French suffered a decisive military defeat in the jungle at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Soon the United States took over the war, fearing the domino effect of communism spreading in the region, and the Vietnamese, supported by the Soviet Union and China, did not kick out the last of the Americans until 1975.

France’s African empire started to break up after Dien Bien Phu. All its African colonies got their independence between 1956 and 1960, with the exception of Algeria. It was unique because it had been integrated into France, making it officially a part of France itself. At the end of the war the Arab majority in Algeria were promised equality but one million white settlers there were strongly opposed to this reform. A rebellion led by the Arab nationalist FLN began in 1954. The war threatened to cause civil war in France as some military officers threatened a coup against the Paris government if it agreed to Algerian independence. In 1958 the war hero General de Gaulle came out of retirement to end the conflict. At first French nationalists were happy but De Gaulle knew that France could not win the war. He began talks with the FLN and Algerian independence finally came in 1962.

The outcomes for the former colonies were mixed. Many were not ready for independence and suffered civil wars and many changes of government afterwards. The result for each colony depended greatly on the way in which it was decolonized. The more preparation that went into decolonization e.g. educating local elites to take over the administration of the country, the greater the chance was of a peaceful transition to freedom.

HansHolzel

I'll sign off with this last one (part of the American experience)

The Significance of the Moon Landing

The Apollo space programme is widely regarded as an inspirational triumph of the human spirit. It also contributed to science in two important ways. It improved our understanding of the origin and evolution of the solar system and it led to spin-off developments in technology.

Nevertheless the real significance of Apollo is rarely discussed. It is commonly acknowledged that the starting of Apollo by President John F. Kennedy in May 1961, with the aim of putting a man on the Moon by the end of the decade, was done primarily for reasons of national prestige. It would be a propaganda part of the ongoing geopolitical struggle with the Soviet Union. This goal of landing on the Moon was a massive technological challenge and, despite their subsequent claims to the contrary, it is now clear that in the early 1960s the Soviet Union also accepted Kennedy’s challenge.

The Soviet Union sent the first satellite, the first man and the first woman into orbit and was the first to hit the Moon with a man-made object. One of its cosmonauts, Aleksei Leonov, made the first space walk in 1965. America, stumbling at first, rapidly caught up and matched most Soviet achievements. It soon began achieving its own space firsts – the first docking in orbit and the successful flight of the giant Saturn V booster rocket.

A series of momentous events in late 1968 and early 1969 sealed the fate of the world’s first space race. In America, the successful Christmas flight of Apollo 8 into lunar orbit captured the imagination of the world. A few months later, the first Lunar Module was successfully tested in Earth orbit during the flight of Apollo 9. Putting a man on the Moon was finally achieved with the flight of Apollo 11 in July 1969.

In contrast, and largely unknown to the world until the 1990s, the Soviet Moon rocket, the gigantic N-1, a vehicle even larger than the American Saturn V, blew up twice. These disastrous failures, covered-up for 25 years, sealed the fate of the Soviet Moon programme. Without an operational booster rocket to deliver the spacecraft, no Soviet lunar mission was possible.

Although the usefulness of Apollo was debated endlessly in the Western press, which sometimes asked if a few Moon rocks were really worth $24 billion, what lessons did the Soviet Union draw? It became convinced that, technologically, America could accomplish anything. What effect did such a conclusion have on future actions? In 1983, another President, Ronald Reagan, called upon the scientific and technical community of the United States to develop a missile defence that would make America free from the fear of nuclear destruction.

This programme, the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI, or “Star Wars” to its critics) was conceived to counter the prevailing strategic doctrine of “mutually assured destruction” (MAD), in which a nation would never start a nuclear war because it would fear its own destruction by retaliatory attack. The price of peace in a MAD scenario was to live in a state of permanent fear. The promise of SDI was to eliminate that fear.

SDI was criticized by many in the West, who thought it destabilizing. Numerous scientists said it was unachievable. Nonetheless the number one foreign policy objective of the Soviet Union in the last years of its existence was to eliminate SDI. The famous Reykjavik Summit of 1986 collapsed on this point, when Reagan would not trade SDI to Gorbachev in exchange for massive cuts in ballistic missiles.

Clearly, the Soviet Union was convinced the SDI could succeed. The reason for this belief was the success of Apollo. The Russians reasoned that getting into a competition with America on SDI would similarly end in an American victory and would be a race that would bankrupt and destroy their system. The success of the Apollo programme had given America something it did not realize was so important – technical credibility.

onethreefive

Thank you very much!

This has reassured me so much that I can get a good grade in History.

HansHolzel

onethreefive wrote: »

Thank you very much!

This has reassured me so much that I can get a good grade in History.

You'll be grand. Doing the Leaving is like how Jack Black defined rock 'n' roll in School of Rock.

It's all about sticking it to the Man.

onethreefive

Hahaha!! I'm going to make Sunday evenings my History essay learning off time! Dictatorship and Democracy is my Christmas test so I'm going to learn essays off about that and surprise my teacher haha!

JDOC1996

Thank you for those essays! That one on Lenin is beautiful! Great points.

oncex

Those essays are brilliant. Thank you. And regarding summaries of the chapter, the essays were in theory a summary of the chapter combined with notes and my own input for answering the question. Ya wen if you learn one or 2 dictatorship essays every Sunday until Xmas you'll be sorted good luck with it

onethreefive

I managed to get half of the Treaty essay learned today This makes it so much easier. The book is impossible to study with.

spurious

Make sure to read the question asked.
Doesn't matter how great your learned off essay is if you do not answer the question asked. This is always commented on by the Chief Examiner.

Jolly Red Giant

onethreefive wrote: »

Hi,

I'm doing the LC this year and I chose History as one of my subjects. It's just

the teacher I have tends to talk a lot about what we are doing but not give us

essays that often. Could anyone suggest a good revision plan for History that

will make my goal of getting at least a C1 in it attainable?

Thank you!

This might help

http://leavingcerthistory.net/