Christopher Catherwood – författare

Exam Board: Edexcel

Level: GCSE

Subject: History

First teaching: September 2016

First exams: Summer 2018

Series Editor: Angela Leonard

This Student Book:

* These resources have not yet been endorsed. This information is correct as of 31st July 2015, but may be subject to change. You do not have to purchase any resources to deliver our qualification.

We’ve worked with teachers to develop versions of our core textbooks that feature reduced content and language level, providing greater support and enabling students of all abilities to progress.

Now available for the seven most popular options, these foundation versions help make the GCSE content more accessible and are designed to be easy-to-use alongside the core textbooks in a mixed ability classroom and are also ideal for home learning.

How have we made them more accessible?

It is often said that the special bond between Britain and the USA was forged in war between Roosevelt and Churchill. But the closer link in many ways was that between Churchill and Eisenhower, since it existed both in wartime 1941-1945 but also again in very different circumstances between 1951 and 1955, when Churchill was Prime Minister and Eisenhower was briefly the first Supreme Allied Commander NATO before going back to the USA to win the 1952 Presidential race and overlap in the White House with Churchill’s peacetime premiership from 1953-1955. And in 1945-1951 Churchill by his speeches and Eisenhower by his tenure as first ever Supreme Allied Commander Europe were continuing to create the new and stable global world order that held until now.

In other words theirs was a much longer relationship than that between FDR and Churchill, and spanning peace as well as war. And it was the Eisenhower and Churchill relationship that essentially created the world order that lasted down until current times.

Churchill and Eisenhower can also be seen as a passing of the baton, from Britain as the fading superpower to the dynamic new world of the USA. Churchill’s relationship with Eisenhower spans this transition perfectly and is the ideal prism through which to witness this change, in terms of how the balance between the UK and USA altered both as countries and in personal terms between the two men themselves.

Western civilization began in the Middle East: Judaism and Christianity, as well as Islam, were born there. For over a millennium, the Islamic empires were ahead of the West in learning, technology and medicine, and were militarily far more powerful. It took another three hundred centuries for the West to catch up, and overtake, the Middle East.Why does it seem different now? Why does Osama bin Laden see 1918, with the fall of the Ottoman Empire, as the year everything changed? These issues are explained in historical detail here, in a way that deliberately seeks to go behind the rhetoric to the roots of present conflicts. A Brief History of the Middle East is essential reading for an intelligent reader wanting to understand what one of the world''s key regions is all about. Fully updated with a new section on the Iraq Invasion of 2003, the question of Iran and the full context of the Isreali/Palestine conflict.