Core option B groups the twentieth-century international relations units that students meet in IGCSE History. In this map that means the Versailles settlement, the League of Nations, the road to war in 1939 and the early Cold War. Your school may teach only some of these, so confirm your own option with your teacher and on the Cambridge History 0470 page listed below.
Whatever the unit, the same three skills decide your marks: placing events in order, reading sources carefully, and writing explanations that are supported. This module teaches those skills on real content.
What should you know before starting?
You do not need advanced background. You do need a working sense of the First World War period (1914 to 1918) and the habit of writing dates beside events. If chronology is shaky, start with chronology and historical context, and for source handling see evidence and source interpretation.
One orienting example: three kinds of statement
Take one sentence about the Treaty of Versailles and sort it. The treaty was signed on 28 June 1919. That is established fact, recorded in the treaty text and in many accounts.
A German newspaper of the time calling it a “Diktat” gives a source’s viewpoint: it tells you how that writer reacted, not whether the terms were fair. A later historian arguing that the treaty was less harsh than Germans claimed is an interpretation: a reasoned judgement built on evidence and open to challenge.
Every answer you write should keep these three apart. Phrases such as “the treaty stated”, “the newspaper claimed” and “one historian argues” do that work.
In what order should you study the lessons?
- Place a unit in context: build a timeline first so every later fact has a home.
- Versailles terms and responses: your first agreement to practise on.
- Terms versus later interpretations: learn to separate what an agreement said from what people later said about it.
- The League of Nations: organisation and documented activities.
- European diplomacy and 1939: a long chain of events that needs careful qualification.
- Comparing source accounts: practise with a defined episode.
- Cold War origins, containment and Soviet influence in Eastern Europe: the most interpretation-heavy units.
- Sourced explanations without present-day endorsements: pull everything into answer writing.
What traps catch students?
- Treating one source as the whole truth. A speech shows what its speaker wanted listeners to believe.
- Mixing up date and cause. “Before” does not prove “because of”.
- Judging the past by today’s politics. Explain what people at the time did and why, using evidence.
- Memorising a verdict. Examiners reward the reasoning, so a remembered conclusion without evidence scores poorly.
How should you use the practice set?
Work through the integrated practice set after two or three lessons, not at the very end. Write answers before opening the worked responses, then use the routing section to return to the right lesson.
Your teacher at school sets the course. Where students want help applying these skills to their own option and answers, we offer online one-to-one History tuition.