Cold War Continued

Today in class we continued our look at the Cold War and American domestic and foreign issues in the 1940's and 1950's.

We began by having a brief discussion about the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan, considering the concept of containment and how the Marshall Plan helped to accomplish that.
We then turned our attention to the end of the Korean War and a continued examination of ideas of fear, conformity and rebellion. We used the next episode of The Century (Happy Days) to help inform our ideas.  The video is embedded below and the viewing guide is here.
After the break, Mr. Rigler read a poem called America by Allan Ginsberg which reflected on the era portrayed in the film. We responded to the poem in our notebooks by trying to identify what Ginsberg's point was. After a discussion of the poem, we created our own version of an America poem modeled after Ginsberg's work.

Your HOMEWORK for Friday is to first, watch 3:03-9:19 (just these 6 minutes) from Poisoned Dreams in order to introduce John F. Kennedy and then read and annotate parts of four different speeches from him.  The first speech is his Inaugural Address which you can find in the American Reader (which you will have to bring to class on Friday) and the others are in this Kennedy Speeches Packet which you will have to PRINT out. We will be using and responding to these speeches in class on Friday so there is no journal entry necessary but we will be checking in your annotations.

Baltimore

For the past two days we have been discussing the ongoing events in Baltimore related to protests and demonstrations in response to the death of Freddie Gray.

Here are links to some of what we have been showing / discussing in class:

• "The Mysterious Death of Freddie Gray" - The Atlantic magazine
• The Baltimore Sun - the main daily newspaper of Baltimore (they have made their content free)
• "29 Moments That Show Another Side of Baltimore" - Buzzfeed
• "Angry mom beats son suspected of rioting" - a link to the video of Toya Graham (there are many other sources and commentary about this)
• "Nonviolence as Compliance" - The Atlantic magazine (article by Ta-Nehisi Coates)

If there are other sources you find and want to share, please post them in the comments below.

Origins of the Cold War

We began class by reviewing and discussing the events in Baltimore over the last few days and hearkening back to Langston Hughes' Dream Deferred and Mookie's decision to Do the Right Thing. After doing some reflection on these issues in our notebooks, we moved on to begin our discussion of the post WW2 period in American History.  To do so, we looked at old issues of Look Magazine and began to make some hypotheses about American society in the late 1940's and early 1950's.
We then looked at The Century: The Best Years using this viewing guide.  The video is embedded below.
Homework for tonight is to Read and annotate this Cold War Packet-and do a Journal Response: What image of the U.S. during the 40’s and 50’s is presented here? How is the Cold War being defined? How do the domestic and foreign issues connect?

WWII - In-Class writing

Here is a link to the assignment for today.

Be sure to take the first few minutes to read through it and understand the directions.

WWII - Unit Assignment

Here is a link to the handout from today describing your weekend homework - preparation for the in-class essay on Monday.

Here is a link to the charts you will complete over the weekend.

To complete the charts, consider these topics we studied in this unit:

• Timeline - The Road to War - When to take action / When to go to war?
• All My Sons
• FDR speeches
• Pearl Harbor
• Japanese Internment
• The homefront / collective sacrifice / the “war effort” / propaganda
• The War in the Pacific
• The Bataan Death March
• Iwo Jima
• Okinawa
• The War in Europe
• D-Day
• The Battle of the Bulge
• American and the Holocaust: Deceit and Indifference - Beschloss and Schlessinger articles
• Why We Fight film and discussion
• The atomic bomb discussion

All My Sons - discussion

On Monday in class we checked in your journal entries for the play and a few others from this unit.

We distributed this handout about All My Sons and asked you to choose two of the 18 assertions to write about.

• All My Sons discussion questions

We performed Act 3 of the play - thanks to our outstanding volunteers! - followed by a discussion of the whole play based on what people wrote about in their journal responses and in class.

Questions for All My Sons

Greetings!

As you finish reading All My Sons over the weekend, you may find you want to re-read some of the early parts of the play to look for clues about the ending. Reading the play for a second time is a very different experience!

Also, here is a glossary of terms in the play. There are several things specific to life in the US in 1947 explained in these notes.

• Glossary

To guide your journal entry, and to prepare you to work with and discuss the play Monday, use one (or more) of these questions:

1. Consider Chris Keller’s world view versus his father’s: One is guided by a sense of responsibility to the greater community, the other by a sense of responsibility to family. Is one of these moral compasses inherently right or wrong?
2. Do you believe there is some truth to Joe Keller’s argument that certain wrongs are excusable in the name of family? 
3. Is Joe Keller basically a decent member of society? Do you accept Chris’s idea that his father is “no worse than most men”? Or is what Joe did actually evil?
4. In what ways does the experience of war impact this play? Do you think American citizens today still retain that sense of “country” that Chris refers to in the climatic scenes of the play?