IB Diploma Programme History HL (first assessment 2020; current guide). This topic equips PAPER 1 — the source paper — and the PRESCRIBED SUBJECT menu it examines. Schools choose ONE prescribed subject from five (military leaders; conquest and its impact; the move to global war; rights and protest; conflict and intervention), studied through TWO case studies 案例研究 from different regions. This handout teaches the source-craft Paper 1 marks, then kits each prescribed subject with its scope, its two classic case studies and the questions it asks — so any school's choice is covered. The worked examples use "the move to global war", the most widely taught choice.

Must-know for Paper 1 and the prescribed subjects:

Paper 1 gives five primary sources 一手史料 plus a background sheet, and 60 minutes for FOUR questions. QUESTION 1 (a–b) is comprehension: read source A and answer by WHAT THE SOURCE SAYS, quoting its wording as evidence — no outside knowledge, no evaluation. Quote the source's wording as evidence 证据. QUESTION 2 asks the value and limitations of a source's CONTENT for a stated enquiry: value lies in what it reliably shows (a memo written at the time records the writer's real intentions), limitations in what it cannot show (one observer's view, a court painter's flattery). QUESTION 3 asks purpose: the intended effect on an audience — to persuade, warn, legitimise, reassure — inferred from the source's form and moment, and the classic error is confusing purpose (an intended effect) with content. QUESTION 4 (the longest) asks an essay in miniature using the sources AND your own knowledge, with a firm two-sided structure.

The toolkit for all of it is OPVL — origin, purpose, value, limitation — with the rule that VALUE and LIMITATION are always RELATIVE TO A QUESTION: a propaganda poster 宣传海报 is worthless as evidence of living standards and excellent as evidence of what a regime wanted its people to believe. Origins (who, when, where) and purpose are the handles; the mistake to avoid is "this source is biased, therefore useless" — bias itself is historical evidence.

MILITARY LEADERS: one leader's rise, campaigns and impact, read through two case studies from different regions (the classic pairing is a modern and an early-modern conqueror — e.g. Charlemagne with a twentieth-century commander). The questions: what made leadership possible, and what did victory change?

CONQUEST AND ITS IMPACT: the conquerors, the conquered and the aftermath, with two conquests compared, with themes of administration, culture, resistance and demography (classic: the Spanish in the Americas, 1492–1600, against the Mongol expansion, 1200–1300).

THE MOVE TO GLOBAL WAR (the worked example below): the expansionist steps by two states that broke collective security — GERMAN EXPANSION 1933–38 (rearmament, Rhineland 1936, Anschluss and Munich 1938) and JAPANESE EXPANSION 1931–41 (Manchuria 1931, China from 1937, the push south to Pearl Harbor). The enquiry: why did collective security 集体安全 fail?

RIGHTS AND PROTEST: the struggle for civil rights in TWO twentieth-century states (classic: the US civil-rights movement and apartheid South Africa) — the legal architecture of oppression, the movement's strategies, the turning points.

CONFLICT AND INTERVENTION: intervention in ONE conflict after 1990 (classic: Rwanda 1994) studied against a second case (e.g. Kosovo 1999) — the causes, the outside response, and the doctrine debates (humanitarian intervention versus sovereignty).

Worked example (the move to global war). A Paper-4 style question — "Evaluate the claim that collective security failed because of the aggressors' audacity rather than the democracies' weakness" — is answered with the sources' treaties and memoranda against your knowledge: the League's Manchuria verdict (1933) that Japan simply walked past; the Hoare–Laval humiliation; the Rhineland's bloodless walk-in; and Munich's surrender of the Sudetenland. Two-sided means weighing whether the pattern shows aggressors escalating faster than institutions could respond, or institutions unwilling to respond at all.

• Q1 technique: quote the source, no outside knowledge (craft).
• Q2: value and limitation of content relative to the enquiry, with a named feature as the handle (craft).
• Q3: purpose as intended effect, inferred from form and moment (craft).
• Q4: a mini-essay — thesis, three sources, outside knowledge, a counter-case, a judgement (craft).
• OPVL with the bias-is-evidence rule; "useless because biased" is the banned move (craft).
• The five prescribed subjects with one classic case-study pairing each; the move-to-global-war timeline 1931–41 worked through (menu).

Boundary notes: Paper 1 is 60 minutes and marks Q1 [8], Q2 [8], Q3 [8] and Q4 [16]: timing discipline is one mark a minute. All case-study facts cited are the standard historical record.

IB Diploma Programme History HL (first assessment 2020; current guide). This topic equips PAPER 2 — the essay paper. Schools teach TWO of the TWELVE world history topics, each studied through TWO case studies from different regions; the paper asks two essays [22] from a choice of questions on each topic, 90 minutes, with the questions centred on CAUSE, EFFECT and CHANGE. This handout teaches the essay craft and then kits the most widely taught topics with their classic case-study pairings and core contentions — so any school's two choices are covered.

Must-know for Paper 2:

The [22] essay 论文 is thesis-led, not narrative-led: a direct answer 回答 to the question in the first two sentences, then three body paragraphs each arguing one leg of the thesis with named evidence 证据 (dates, actors, provisions — “the Enabling Act, March 1933” beats “he consolidated power”), a counter-case 反方论证 paragraph that concedes and answers the other side, and a judgement 判断 that weighs rather than repeats. The COMMAND TERMS decode as: “discuss/evaluate” — a case with strengths and limits weighed to a verdict; “compare” — a connective discipline (whereas, in both cases) with direct comparison in every paragraph, never two parallel stories; “examine” — the assumptions of the claim itself on the table. TIMING: 45 minutes an essay, five of them for planning; and the classic failures to avoid: narrative (telling what happened instead of arguing the question), single-case answers to “compare”, and evidence-free assertion.

AUTHORITARIAN STATES (20th century) — the most taught topic: rise (economic crisis, weak institutions, propaganda, violence), rule (political control, social policy, opposition) and impact, read through TWO states from different regions — the classic pairings: Hitler's Germany with Castro's Cuba; Mao's China with Mussolini's Italy. Core contentions: does the rise need crisis more than ideology, and does control rest on coercion 强制 more than consent?

CAUSES AND EFFECTS OF 20TH-CENTURY WARS — two world wars or a world war with a civil war; LONG-term (alliance systems, imperial rivalry, ideology), SHORT-term (crises, mobilisation) and TRIGGER causes distinguished, and effects measured politically (borders, regimes), economically (costs, reconstruction) and socially (demography, women's roles, memory). Classic pairing: the First World War with the Second.

THE COLD WAR: SUPERPOWER TENSIONS AND RIVALRIES — origins (ideology, security, power), development (crises from Berlin to Cuba; deterrence and the arms race; spheres and proxy wars), and end (economic failure, leadership, the revolutions of 1989–91), read through US–Soviet relations plus ONE regional case (classic: Korea, Vietnam, or Afghanistan).

The remaining topics kit briefly: SOCIETY AND ECONOMY (750–1400) and DYNASTIES AND RULERS (750–1500) — pre-modern states, trade and belief; SOCIETIES IN TRANSITION (1400–1700) and EARLY MODERN STATES (1450–1789), with expansion, absolutism, knowledge; CAUSES AND EFFECTS OF EARLY MODERN WARS (1500–1750); ORIGINS, DEVELOPMENT AND IMPACT OF INDUSTRIALIZATION (1750–2005); INDEPENDENCE MOVEMENTS (1800–2000), studied through classic India with a Latin American case; EMERGENCE AND DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRATIC STATES (1848–2000) — liberal reform, suffrage, one democratic state's depth. Each supplies the same skeleton: two regions, one big question.

Worked example. A favourite Paper-2 question — “Discuss the view that authoritarian rule rested more on propaganda than terror” — is answered with the paired states: Germany's radio and rallies made a political religion, yet the Night of the Long Knives and the Gestapo's informant web answered dissent; Cuba's literacy campaign and symbolism coexisted with Committees for the Defence of the Revolution. The judgement: propaganda 宣传 manufactured consent; terror policed its boundary — the two were one system, but terror 恐怖 was the backstop that propaganda alone never was.

• Thesis-led structure with named evidence in every paragraph; counter-case conceded and answered; judgement that weighs (craft).
• The command terms decoded; timing 45 + 5 (craft).
• Authoritarian states: rise (crisis, ideology, violence), rule (consent and coercion), with two-region pairings; 20th-century wars: long/short/trigger causes and three effect families (menu).

IB Diploma Programme History HL (first assessment 2020; current guide). This topic equips the INTERNAL ASSESSMENT — the historical investigation 历史探究: an 2 000-word piece of original historical research on a subject of the student's choosing, worth 20% at HL and SL alike. It is marked against six criteria, and this handout walks each: choosing and focusing a question, planning the research, selecting and evaluating sources, organising the evidence, analysing and concluding, and reflecting on the method — then the sources-and-referencing craft the whole thing stands on. The worked example is original and carried through every section.

Must-know for the investigation:

The question 问题 makes or breaks the investigation. A good one is NARROW (a person, a decision, an event, a policy — not “a war”), ANSWERABLE (the evidence exists and is accessible to a student) and NON-TRIVIAL (historians actually disagree, or the answer is not in the textbook). Compare: “Why did the League of Nations fail?” (too broad, narrative) against “How far was the Hoare–Laval Pact (1935) the decisive blow to League credibility?” (a decision, a date, a debatable “how far”). The The research plan 研究计划 states the question, the proposed method (which kinds of sources, which archives or editions) and a mini-bibliography — a plan, not a straightjacket: it is expected to evolve.

The research plan criterion also rewards a reasoned CHOICE of topic: personal interest, resource access and a genuine historiography 史学辩论. The classic failure is the biography-report: a life story retold with no question. Every step of the investigation answers back to the question — if a source or paragraph does not serve it, it goes.

The SOURCE-WORK is the investigation's heart: a broad, relevant and precise set of sources: primary sources 一手史料 where possible (documents, speeches, statistics, memoirs), secondary sources 二手史料 for context and debate (monographs, journal articles, reputable reference) — and then, crucially, TWO sources evaluated IN DEPTH with OPVL from topic 01: origin and purpose as handles, value and limitation RELATIVE TO THE INVESTIGATION'S QUESTION. A cabinet minute is valuable for ministers' real positions and limited for what happened in the room next door; a retrospective memoir is valuable for self-justification unmasked and limited for the sequence of events.

EVIDENCE is then organised to the argument, not to the narrative: grouped by THEME (each cluster serving one leg of the answer), with the sources cross-checked for corroboration 相互印证 and contradiction are both findings. Citation runs in-text (author, page) with a full bibliography; the apparatus criterion is consistency, not any single convention.

Analysis 分析 is argument: each thematic section argues its leg with evidence, weighs the counter-case, and hands on to the next — the structure criterion rewards an investigation that is ORGANISED AROUND A THESIS, with signposted sections and no narrative dead-ends. The CONCLUSION answers the question directly, states the judgement's grounds, and — the reflection 反思 criterion — OWNS ITS LIMITS: which sources were unavailable, whose voice is missing, what the investigation could not settle and why. Reflection is methodological, not confessional: what the evidence allowed and forbade.

Worked example. Question: “How far was the Hoare–Laval Pact (December 1935) the decisive blow to League credibility?” Plan: British and French cabinet records in published collections, the Contemporary press, and the historiography from 1936 to the present. Two deep sources: the pact's published text (origin: a Franco-British proposal leaked to the press; value: shows exactly what was conceded to Italy; limitation: a proposal, never a policy) and a leading article in “The Times” (origin: the newspaper of the British establishment; purpose: to rescue the government's policy; value: evidence of elite opinion in real time; limitation: political interest). Analysis: the pact followed Manchuria and preceded the Rhine remilitarisation — the thematic sections weigh concession as pattern against structure. Conclusion: the pact was decisive less for its terms than for its LEAK and withdrawal — credibility destroyed by its own authors — with the reflection noting the closed French archives and the pro-League bias of much historiography.

• Question narrow, answerable, non-trivial; the plan states question, method and a mini-bibliography (criteria 1–2).
• Source set broad, relevant, precise; primary where possible; TWO sources evaluated in depth with OPVL relative to the question (criteria 2–3).
• Evidence organised by theme to serve the thesis; corroboration and contradiction both reported (criterion 4).
• Analysis argues, weighs and signposts; the conclusion answers directly and owns its limits methodologically (criteria 4–5).
• In-text citation with a complete, consistent bibliography (criterion 6).
• The worked Hoare–Laval example's question, two deep sources and conclusion understood (all).

Boundary notes: 2 000 words for the body (plan, sources and bibliography excluded), marked against six criteria totalling 34; the word discipline is real — the reflection and analysis criteria reward precision, not padding. The worked example is original.

IB Diploma Programme History HL (first assessment 2020; current guide). This topic equips PAPER 3 — the HL-only REGIONAL DEPTH paper. Schools choose one of four regions 地区 (history of Africa and the Middle East; the Americas; Asia and Oceania; Europe), studied through THREE of its listed topics in depth; the paper sets three essays 论文 from a choice on the region, 150 minutes, marked like Paper 2 but expecting DEEPER regional knowledge and HISTORIOGRAPHY — knowing not just what happened but how historians have argued about it. This handout teaches the depth-and-historiography craft and kits each region with its classic topic menu.

Must-know for Paper 3:

Depth means the evidence becomes regional and precise 精确: not “industrial growth” but the Bessemer converter's spread; not “reform” but the Reform Act's specific clauses; not “the revolution” but who held which street on which day. The Paper 2 skeleton (thesis, named evidence, counter-case, judgement) carries over, but the top markband's “precise, relevant knowledge” now means detail a textbook summary omits — and TWO cases per point where the question spans a period.

Historiography 史学 is Paper 3's signature: the history OF the history. An essay on the Cold War's end that weighs Gaddis's “victory” narrative against revisionist accounts of Soviet agency; an essay on empire that knows the orthodox-prosperity school, the nationalist critique and the post-revisionist synthesis. The craft: Name the historians 历史学家 or schools (“the Gaddis view”, “revisionists such as…”), state their claim, and use the disagreement as an analytical tool 工具 TOOL — the essay asks why they disagree (sources? politics? decade?) and what the evidence favours. Historiography is not decoration; it is the counter-case professionalised.

Timing: three essays in 150 minutes, the essay structure 结构 discipline — 45 minutes each with five to plan, same discipline as Paper 2; and choose questions where your depth is strongest, not where the question looks shortest.

History of Africa and the Middle East: from the pre-colonial states 国家 and the slave trades' impact, through nineteenth-century European penetration (Egypt under Muhammad Ali, the Scramble's Berlin Conference 1884–85), to independence and the modern Middle East (mandates, Israel–Palestine, Nasser's Egypt, Iran's revolutions). Classic depth pairings: decolonisation in Algeria or Ghana with the Arab–Israeli conflict.

HISTORY OF THE AMERICAS: from independence (the United States 1776, Latin America 1810–25) through the nineteenth century (Civil War and Reconstruction, Latin American caudillos and modernisation) to the twentieth (the New Deal, the Cuban Revolution, civil rights, and Latin American authoritarianisms and transitions). Classic depth pairings: the US Civil War 内战 with the Mexican Revolution.

HISTORY OF ASIA AND OCEANIA: empire and its end (British India to 1947, Dutch Indonesia, French Indochina), China's century from the Late Qing through revolution to reform (1911, 1949, 1978), Japan from Meiji modernisation to its twentieth-century wars and postwar settlement, and the Pacific after 1945. Classic depth pairings: the Chinese revolution with Indian independence.

HISTORY OF EUROPE: from the French Revolution and Napoleon, through 1848, the unifications of Italy and Germany, the world wars and the totalitarianisms, to the Cold War division and integration 一体化 (the EU from coal and steel to Maastricht). Classic depth pairings: German unification (1871) with Italian unification, or Weimar's failure with the Russian revolutions.

Worked example. A Europe-depth question — “Evaluate the historiographical debate on Weimar's failure” — is answered with the schools: the classic “weak from birth” reading (structural: Versailles wounds, proportional representation, elite disloyalty), the revisionist “golden years” view (Stresemann's stability 1924–29, the failure contingent on Depression), and the synthesis (structures set the trap; the slump and Nazi agency sprang it) — with named evidence for each (the 1923 hyperinflation; the 1928 Reichstag results; Brüning's deflation after 1929) and a judgement weighing structure against contingency.

• Depth defined: regional, precise, two cases per point where a period is spanned (craft).
• Historiography defined: schools named, claims stated, disagreement analysed, not decorated (craft).
• Timing: three essays in 150; choose by depth, not by question length (craft).
• The four regions with their pairings; the Weimar schools; Paper 3 shares Paper 2's markbands with higher expectations of precision and historiography.