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The following research and activity ideas are intended to offer suggestions for complementing social studies and history curricula; to trigger additional ideas for enhancing learning; and to provide cross-disciplinary projects for library and classroom use.

Many of the causes of tension between Iraq and Kuwait in the 1980s can be traced back to the era of European rule over the Middle East. Make a list of all of the reasons Iraqi leaders gave for invading Kuwait in August 1990. Make check marks next to the ones that stem from the decisions made decades earlier by British colonial rulers. What other sources of political tension and turmoil in the Middle East might be attributed to the period of European rule?

Read a biography of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. What factors in his early life, and in the history of Iraq, may have led him to become a brutal dictator who used violence to eliminate his political...