IB DP history class

This article is part of the Financial Times free schools access programme. Details/registration here. Our panel of teacher advisers selects relevant FT articles to help improve study, exam and interview success, with suggestions for class questions and discussion.

• Soviet control: Ukraine through the lens of history

• Origins of industrialisation: How Africa made the modern world

• Early modern states: Merchants by Edmond Smith — the profit motive that propelled an empire

• Demography and destiny: Lousy demographics will not stop China’s rise

• Historical method: Biographers — myth-busters or myth-keepers?

• Causation: The lay of the land: how geography shapes national destiny

• Perspectives: Stalin’s War by Sean McMeekin — alternative perspectives

• Significance: Artist Sue Williamson explores South Africa’s painful history

• Historical method: Truth and daring in retelling Mao’s China

• Perspectives: River Kings — were the Vikings really violent?

• Change: What pagans, Putin and the Volga teach us about Russia

• Perspectives: Monumental struggle: the 20-year campaign for a slavery memorial in London