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  • Writer's pictureJonathon

Structuring Power and Authority

Updated: Aug 26, 2020


The 'Alley of Rulers' in Moscow, Russia (2018)

The following outline is for the NESA HSC Modern History Core Topic: Power and Authority in the Modern World. Obviously, the table provided here should not be treated as a replacement for the syllabus but merely one interpretation of it.


In this approach to the Power and Authority topic I have retained the same basic structure as the syllabus outline for this topic (starting with the survey and finishing with the 'search for peace and security') but have adjusted the specific order in which some of the content-points are addressed.


The key changes are as follows:

  • 'the intentions and authority of the League of Nations and the UN' from the last section of the topic ('the search for peace and security...') has been split into two parts. The first part, introducing the League of Nations has been inserted into the 'Introduction' section of the topic and connected to the 'survey'. This makes chronological sense since the League was created around the same time as the peace treaties that ended the First World War. It also introduces what I consider to be one of the central (unmentioned) themes of the topic: the struggle between internationalism and nationalism. This content-point is then returned to at the end as a way of drawing the topic to a close - examining why the League of Nations failed and providing an opportunity to compare-and-contrast the League with its updated institution, the United Nations.

  • 'the ambitions of Germany in Europe and Japan in the Pacific' has also been split into two parts and moved from the end of the topic. The 'ambitions of Japan' is covered during the overview of the Japanese 'dictatorship' (Part 2: 'Rise of Dictatorships') and the 'ambitions of Germany' is covered during the investigation of the Nazi Regime to 1939 (Part 3).


A .pdf version of the following table is available here.



There are probably many other ways to logically structure this but this strikes me as a coherent way to balance the narrative of the period with the specific points that we are required to cover.


© 2024 Jonathon Dallimore

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