Arranging the textbook

Before we go into the chapters themselves, we should take a look at that bigger picture of the layout. I think it makes a lot of sense for these two chapters to be separated. When I think of WWII, I only think about the Holocaust and the targeting of the Jewish race. By designating a chapter to each aspect of this time, both the politics/war itself and the exile of the Jews seem to have great importance. While the Holocaust itself captures more emotion, we would be lost reading about that without all the historical events leading up to it, which is why I think there should be a great focus on the two. Although I would keep these chapters separate, I would have the Holocaust, titled "The Incomprehensible Truth", directly follow the chapter with all the politics leading up to it. This may sounds stupid, but textbooks forget that we are only human and the truth is, we don't remember everything we read two nights ago. Within The Incomprehensible Truth chapter, there would be a great deal of summary of what happened in the previous chapter. There's just too much detail to combine these two into one, but the Holocaust doesn't make sense without knowledge of the Nazi Party and it's effect on everyone else. 

Now, looking at the information discussed in chapter twenty four, we face a dilemma. We could either organize it by country, which is what the textbook has done. Within similar time periods, the book goes country by country. We could go another route and go chronologically. This way, the text would talk us year by year through the war. By doing this, we wouldn't have to keep flipping through the book to go back and forth to different times. When reading through the pages each night, it would be less confusing to go by time for we could form a timeline in our heads. But in the long run, I think it is more helpful to sort information by country/government. It is easier to flip through the book for dates instead of sorting all the facts into regions. If I were designing a textbook, I would sort the information overall by time and follow that order so that reading it each night made sense and people wouldn't have to skip all over the book for chronological order.  It doesn't have to be year by year but generally what war went before the next and such. Within these separations of time, the countries should be distinct as well; color coding, flow charts, etc. The overall goal is that when a student like myself could read each night going through history in order, but also be able to go back after they've read, link events of many countries, and compare them to others. This chapter would be called "World War II: How did we end up here?"