IB Diploma Programme History SL (first assessment 2020; current guide). Paper 1 and the prescribed subjects are shared by SL and HL, and 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 SL (first assessment 2020; current guide). Paper 2 and the world-history topics are shared by SL and HL: schools teach TWO of the TWELVE topics, each through TWO case studies from different regions, and the paper asks two essays [22] with every question centred on CAUSE, EFFECT and CHANGE. This handout teaches the essay craft and kits the most widely taught topics with classic case-study pairings and core contentions.

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 SL (first assessment 2020; current guide). The internal assessment is shared by SL and HL: the historical investigation 历史探究, a 2 000-word piece of original research worth 20% of the final grade, marked against the same six criteria. 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 — with the worked Hoare–Laval example throughout.

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 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.