US History II

Document Workshop Chapters 23-24-25-26

Assignment for Today: Each group will address one of these questions below, using documents from your assigned part of our textbook. By the end of the day (preferably by the end of class) each group should leave a comment below, responding to your assigned question USING primary source EVIDENCE. Continue reading →

Links for today’s Culture of the 1930s workshop/discussion/review:

Radio:
A Day in Radio (21 Sept 1939)
Mercury Theater of the Air

Popular Songs:
“Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” (NPR)
“I’ve Got a Pocketful of Dreams” (Bing Crosby)
“Pennies from Heaven” (Billie Holliday)

Film:
“Somewhere Over the Rainbow” (Wizard of Oz, dir. Victor Fleming 1939)
Two for a Penny (Grapes of Wrath, dir. John Ford 1940)
“Remember My Forgotten Man” (Gold Diggers of 1933, dir. Mervyn LeRoy 1933)

Image: “Fireside Chat Listener” statue in the FDR Memorial, Washington DC

Today’s workshop concerns the Iran-Contra Affair (scandal, controversy, crime, pick your title). Continue reading →

Links for Friday’s workshop on sourcing the documents in Chapter 29 –

What is Historical Thinking? (NHEC)
http://historicalthinkingmatters.org/scopestrial/0/inquiry/main/resources/41/

Mon 5/5 Discussion Day – come prepared to share what you learned in the History Now Project, which is due in class (no electronic submissions)

The last exam (Chapters 27-29) will take place on May 12th from 8:30 – 11:30 am in our regular classroom. It will be the equivalent of the other three exams. It is not designed to fill the full three hours, but you should expect it to take longer to complete than our other exams. As before, you may bring one 8.5×11” sheet of notes.

Download the 112 Ex4 StudyGuide.Spr14 (PDF)

Today’s workshop concerns the Iran-Contra Affair (scandal, controversy, crime, pick your title).

Our task:
Figure out what happened
Use evidence to revise an existing narrative
Reflect on the process of writing/revising history

In groups, you’ll be working with 4 different accounts of this event in Google docs, and with the textbook’s collection of documents. Study your documents; discuss and decide what’s important and what’s not; and edit the account I’ve provided for you WITH A PARTICULAR AUDIENCE IN MIND. In your Google doc, avoid changing the text in red, that’s the original; scroll down for the same text in black, which is the one you should change.

Our 4 versions:
Digital History online textbook
Boyer, The Enduring Vision (an AP HS textbook)
Wikipedia as of yesterday
Hewitt / Lawson (our textbook)

Assignment for Today: Each group will address one of these questions below, using the documents in our textbook. By the end of class each group should leave a comment here, responding to your assigned question.

Question 1: Using the evidence in Documents 23.1 – 23.5, which of these is the more correct statement and why?
World War II transformed racial and gender relations in the US.
World War II reinforced traditional racial and gender relations in the US.

Question 2: How should the end of the war be remembered? Whose point of view needs to be acknowledged, respected and included? Try writing a brief account of the end of the war that follows your own advice. Use Documents 23.6 – 11

Question 3 (laptop based): What physical resources, and what moral reasoning, did official American messages employ to build support for the conflict? How did war promotional materials construct World War II as a just, or even a “good” war? What kinds of commitments were being asked of the American people? Use any of these media documents:

WW2 Radio and Film Propaganda Examples (requires Windows Media Player)
Internet Archive: Films Made by the Office of War Information
Internet Archive: Audio recordings w/ keyword “World War II: Homefront”
“It’s Everybody’s War” (20th Century Fox)
Produce for Victory: Posters on the American Home Front

Question 4: After 1945, the new postwar historical context included both the reality of atomic weapons, and a deep ideological standoff between “the West” and the USSR. How did this context affect understanding of foreign affairs and the US’s role in them? Use Documents 24.1 – 5

Question 5: In the 1940s and early 1950s, many Americans feared internal threats as well as those in international relations. Using Documents 24.6 – 10, answer these questions: In what different ways would HUAC and the witnesses appearing before it have defined “un-American”? What gave HUAC and the broader cultural movement now termed “McCarthyism” so much power at the time?

Today, in groups, you’ll be working with documents from Chapter 20 about the national debate over imperialism / anti-imperialism. Each group will receive the same blank newspaper template as a Google doc. To work on your paper, click on your assigned group; Google automatically saves any changes you make to the document. More than one person can work on your document at the same time.

Update: the documents are now viewable, but no longer editable. Thanks for all the good work in class today!

By the end of class, your group needs to edit your newspaper like a team of true “yellow journalists” of the time, including the following:

• give your paper a made-up name
• replace “Headline 1” with an article (as much in the historical style as you can) reporting on an event described in Ch 20. Remember that news reporting in that time period was *not* necessarily neutral or objective!
• replace “Headline 2” with an article giving response/reaction on the event using “on the record” quotes from the original documents
• write a letter to the editor providing a realistic alternative / opposing opinion (you can use the letter on p. 650 as a model)
• insert a photograph or political cartoon FROM THE TIME to illustrate your newspaper’s editorial point of view

Some links you might find helpful:
The World of 1898 (Library of Congress)
America 1900 (PBS)
World War I Posters (Indianapolis Public Library)

To locate historic images, try a Google search for terms like these, then limit the search results to images, or add the word “cartoon” to the end of your search string

war of 1898
philippine-american war
us wilson veracruz
zimmerman telegram
lusitania
panama canal
hawaiian annexation
cuban independence

The voting was a little different for this unit – you voted to emphasize the first and last chapters in this unit, so we’ll be talking about World War II (Ch 24) and then taking a flying leap into the 1960s to focus on the (multiple) movements for American civil rights (Ch 27). The online quiz (opening Friday, Nov 1) will cover the material in between (Ch 25-26). Here’s the schedule for the first part of the unit, dealing with the Second World War and including the submission of your Primary Source-based paper.

For Mon 10/21, the “Road to War” read ACH 24: 724-732 (MDQ likely)

Great link for today: World War II in photographs, the Battle of Britain (The Atlantic online)

Wed 10/23, we’ll take a break from history content to focus on the history writing process. Bring the rough draft of your Primary Source paper to class with you as a printed paper – we will be having a peer writing workshop in class.

Update: we made this handout on proper footnote form using the Fernlund book. Email me or drop by office hours if you have questions. All footnotes from Fernlund’s book should have 2 parts: the original source, and its location within Fernlund’s volume. Click on the image to download a PDF of the handout.

Fri 10/25 – WW2 Mobilization and Life on the Homefront. Reading: ACH 24: 732-745

Mon 10/28 – WW2 Fighting and Postwar Plans. Reading: ACH 24: 754-755

Wed 10/30 – Primary Source paper due in class. Workshop Day on the 1940s and 1950s in film (no reading).

Links:
It’s Everybody’s War (1945)
Duck and Cover (1951)
THEM! (1954)
See the USA in Your Chevrolet (1953)
Two Ford Freedom (1956)

Links for Class Discussion

“Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” (NPR)
“I’ve Got a Pocketful of Dreams” (Bing Crosby)
“Pennies from Heaven” (Billie Holliday)
“Somewhere Over the Rainbow” (Wizard of Oz, 1939)

“Remember My Forgotten Man” from the film Gold Diggers of 1933

Links for Group Work

1) New Deal Network
2) Hoovervilles in Washington State
3) Hoovervilles: Primary Sources & Other Resources from Gilder Lehrman Institute
4) New Deal: Library of Congress Primary Source Set
5) Bonus Army: “Occupying” Washington, 1932
6) WPA Posters: Colorful Messages in Dark Economic Times (Library of Congress)
7) Voices from the Dust Bowl: Migrant Worker Collection (Library of Congress)
8) Remembering the Flint Sit-Down Strike of 1937 (HistoricalVoices.org)
9) Dear Mrs. Roosevelt
10) My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt
11) Documents regarding migrant labor and “Okies”
12) Voices from the Thirties: Life Histories from the Federal Writers’ Project

One of the concerns of many literate, reform-minded Victorians was to document–and then improve–their industrialized urban surroundings. This was true for Americans of all races; today’s digital workshop provides some examples. These people included so-called “muckrakers,” investigative journalists, literary realist authors, artists, musicians and public intellectuals, and their work shows us not only the strenuous efforts of urban reformers, but also their assumptions and values about American social classes, race, gender, immigration, and poverty. Historians can learn a lot about reformers AND the targets of their reforms by using sources like these to better understand life in American cities at the turn of the twentieth century.

Instructions: Use our classtime to explore one or more of these sources (or collection of sources), using your best primary source analysis skills. Take good notes. This workshop is a good way to study the concepts and people in Chapters 18 and 19 in greater depth, and you should be prepared to discuss today’s evidence in detail on Friday’s exam! Don’t worry about getting to all of them – quality is better than quantity.

Read a 1913 broadside (i.e. a paper flyer) by Jane Addams, founder of Chicago’s landmark Hull House settlement house, titled “Women and Public Housekeeping”

Examine Jacob Riis’s photographs of working-class neighborhoods in New York

Or Lewis Hine’s haunting images documenting the extent of child labor in the 1900s and 1910s

Study oil paintings by John French Sloan (1871-1951)

Or oil paintings by Robert Henri (1865-1929)

Explore the “Exhibit of American Negroes” assembled by W. E. B. DuBois for the Paris Exposition, 1900

Read an excerpt from Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle

If you want to try your hand at finding your own muckraking photographs, try one of these image-search tutorials from author Ann Bausum, to find pictures or stereoscopes of meatpacking, stockyards and other grisly industrial jobs

Read about “charity meals” in turn of the century New York, and then locate some restaurant menus from the period 1890-1910 to get a feel for food and prices of the time period

Got headphones? Try listening to some ragtime records from this period; are these “ashcan artists” too?

Delve into the history — and primary sources — of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire