How I've Changed

This year's history class has been a lot of fun.  To go with the plethora of historic dates and names that we have been forced to mindlessly memorized, I have taken some important lessons about the subject of history and myself.

I heard recently that "History is not the old stuff in textbooks, but how we look at it."  This has taken on a huge meaning in our class this year.  On a very annoyingly ironic note, we studied old civilizations with a blog, something completely foreign, if not unimaginable, to the people we're talking about.  But more seriously, our class has taken some creative ways of looking at the past.  We played a weird version of Risk to explain the Cold War.  We made a movie to look at the Muslim Empires, China, and Europe.  We did a ton of cool stuff that probably makes no sense, but it helped us learn.  That was an amazing realization to me, because as well as being more effective at interacting with the material, it helped me learn to love history more than I did at the beginning of the year.

To go with this bountiful enjoyment, I believe that my writing style has improved and I have learned more about research papers (e.g. don't procrastinate!!!!!)  I'm sure these will be useful in RUSH next year.

Most importantly, I learned a lot about my classmates and myself.  For example, I make a lot of annoying, smart-ass comments.  Like a LOT.  But I also found that some teachers aren't totally against that, as long as it's relevant, and I can let my sarcastic side contribute to a discussion instead of taking away from it.

Rosie the Riveter

Rosie the Riveter was a fictional character (modeled by very real people, like Shirley Karp) used in propaganda by the US during World War II.  Rosie was depicted as having her sleeves rolled up and strong arms to show that women were capable to help with factory work on the home front to aid the troops.  As an extra precaution for really slow people, the posters had motivational slogans like "We Can Do It!", just in case it was unclear what the message was of the poster.  Also, and importantly, Rosie was painted as being a relatively beautiful woman, proving that you don't have to be totally manly to work at a real job.

These posters were essential to aiding the American war effort, as much of the workforce was enlisted and without them the factories would have been forced to operate at less than maximum capacity, which would be very bad.  Plus, Rosie was seen as a symbol of the upcoming feminism movement and how women could be productive in the workforce.

And to prove how America is far superior to Canada, Rosie the Riveter would own Canada's equivalent, Ronnie the Bren Gun Girl.

Post-Colonialism in Culture

I haven't seen/read much on the topic of areas having been recently decolonized (tricky verb tense but accurate).  I kinda dislike downers.  However, here is a list of those this I have been exposed to:

"The Kingdom"

Kite Runner

Things Fall Apart

China's Commie Revolution

Obviously, the Communist party in China was using both the Red Guards and the land reform to cement a stable power structure for themselves.  With the land reform, they gained the mass support that they needed to avoid too much complaining.  And to guard against letting the peasants get too powerful, they created the Red Guard to keep order through fear.

In a very zoomed-out view of things, both these moves by the Communists were made to accomplish the same goal: eliminate everything associated with the previous, Nationalist government.  These measures may have also had positive other results, but that was the main goal.  The land reform basically destroyed the widely-hated aristocracy in rural China, which had been a key element in the Nationalist government as the primary local tax collectors and rulers.  The Red Guard was assigned the task of removing all traces of the old China from people's lives, whether documents or art or people who just wouldn't shut up about it.  And in both measures, the government used the same tactics.  Inspire a mass following, especially among young adults, that is willing to partake in violence for your cause.

Cold War Oral History

So despite what mama Pugs told us, neither of my parents thought that they grew up during the cold war, so I had to do a rushed interview with my grandmother instead.

She was living in Southern California from the mid-50s on through the end of the war, and she said that the West Coast just seemed much less worried about impending doom than the East Coast.  I have never seen her worried about anything, and I could definitely see her shrugging off an alleged threat from halfway around the world.  The only way in which it affected her life was that when voting, her primary concern was attaining a lasting peace with the USSR.

Desperate to find something about Cold War paranoia, I asked about the weird cement foundation on their house in Portola Valley.  She told me that the people who had lived there before them had been insane about the war, and they had built a bomb shelter into the house.  They had a full food supply and independent gas lines and a generator, fearing the nuclear apocalypse.  But in general, the war didn't seem to worry her that much, and the only emotion I could get in the conversation was internally laughing at the crazy people who used to own their house.

MENA Oil vs. Topography

Looking at the map of the MENA region that Mama Pugs linked us to, the green regions are clearly near the major waterways because not that surprisingly, water tends to congregate in relatively low places.  These places have been inhabited by humans for tens of thousands of years, and it is there in Sumeria that the first sophisticated human cultures are said to have sprung up.  The areas are rich in culture and history, and still densely populated.  Most of the major oil-producing regions are in these fertile valleys and coastal areas, and as I see it, that is for two reasons:

One, oil is a liquid.  That being true, it will try to flow to the lowest possible place.  Seeing as the Earth's mantle is pretty impassable, those low spots are determined by where the mantle is or isn't.  As anyone who has studied plate tectonics knows, mountains are made when the mantle forces pieces of the crust to collide, and they both turn up.  Thus, the mantle is higher than average.  As a matter of fact, the same thing could be said of almost anywhere there is land sticking out of the water on Earth.  Thus, oil tends to flow and collect wherever the measured elevation is low.  So low altitude means more oil, as is reinforced by the maps.

Two, (which is a bit more of a stretch), the oil has been discovered in lowlands and in the Persian Gulf.  Perhaps that might be because it's a lot easier to drill for oil in water-churned sediment than mountains?  Nobody wants to drill through an extra 3000 feet of rock, so of course no oil has been discovered under the mountainous regions.  It would be expensive to find, gather, and transport.  Instead, companies have stuck with just finding oil in more cost-effective places, in order to make more profit.

Rural Life In Kenya

I decided to look at the quality of life in rural areas in Kenya, a very interesting and recently messed-up country.  According to the WHO website, only 58% of Kenyan citizens live in rural environments, as opposed to a whopping 84% for nearby Ethiopia, but the information given is from 2005.  On the CIA World Factbook, Kenya's urban population is listed at only 22%, and the data is from 2008.  It also lists that the urbanization rate over the last five years has been roughly 4%, so people are continuing to move into the cities.  

Despite this information, Kenya remains a country most recognized for its small tribal villages which have kept the same way of life for centuries.  While culturally stimulating, this system has proven to be unproductive in terms of raising the standard of living for the majority of Kenyans.  The national unemployment rate is around 45%, higher than the average in Africa, which is mildly surprising considering Kenya's relatively strong economy.  Also, 75% of the country's workforce are agricultural workers, mostly using archaic and inefficient methods, again hampering the potential for growth.  

Although the image of men with spears herding cattle is a beautiful defining image, Kenya's rural population is far too great to be efficient in moving the country towards a better future.

Articles Relating to 228 Peace Memorial Park

This article covers the background of the 228 Incident, and its importance to modern-day Taiwan, especially in the way it's remembered and honored.  It is a good piece of unbiased, journalistic writing.  This article is a very opinionized piece in opposition to the reign of Chiang Kai-Shek, a good example of an argumentative piece.  And finally, this article is another unbiased article about an effort by Taiwanese-Americans to get the US government to help promote Taiwan on the world stage and remember the 228 Incident.

Final Project Research Questions

The 228 Peace Memorial Park is dedicated to the thousands of protestors who were killed in government crackdowns on rioters beginning on February 28th, 1947.  For a long time this topic was illegal to discuss in Taiwan, with disobeyers arrested and jailed, but it was recently, and completely unexpectedly, made discussable by the Taiwanese government.  The main questions I want to answer with this project are:

1.  What government was in power during the 228 Incident, and what tension led to it?

2.  Why was the topic recently un-tabooed?

3.  What does the architecture and design of the memorial park and statue represent?

I believe that all of these questions are intriguing, as well as relevant to an in-depth study of the park.  In learning about the park, the first question seeks to uncover the details of the original event.  The second question relates to the park's relevance to today, since the recent buzz about legalizing the discussion of the incident is certainly important.  And the third question applies to the unique layout of the park relative to the others in Taipei, and the commemorative statues in the middle of the park.

Fran(t)z Fanon

Franz Fanon was a great philosopher, physician, and a leading campaigner for decolonization in the forties and fifties, publicly speaking against the French controlling remote territories, especially Algeria.  His findings about the influence of brutal French control for generations were frequently referenced after his death by other anti-colonialism leaders.

I found it interesting that this website, named after one of Fanon's pieces about the fight for freedom in Algeria, is full of literature by Aime Cesaire, who was of course his teacher and fellow advocate of anti-imperialism.  One of the first listings is a piece about Toussaint L'ouverture, which is cool because we know about him.  Like Franz Fanon, he was a minority living on French-owned land who rose up against the French establishment, became a figurehead for anti-colonialism, and became wanted by the French government.  Unlike L'ouverture, Fanon didn't actually bargain or debate with the French, and he never held any official power after resigning from his government post.

I found this article in the New York Times and thought it was an interesting and relevant thing to share with the class(es).  A summary:

A group of fifth and sixth graders from a public school in a poor, minority-dominated area of the Bronx is going to the remains of the Dachau concentration camp in Germany.

I personally side with some of the teachers in the article who think this is a little early to learn about the Holocaust on site.  Nearly everyone quoted says that they are afraid of the the kids' reactions will be, with just reason.  Most of the buildings are still standing, and it is no place for kids unless there is a very good reason to be there, such as ancestral history.  This seems like a very bad choice by the teachers, but it will certainly be a memorable experience for the students.

World War Two Media

After conducting an exhausting and scrupulous examination of the books and movies I have read and seen in the last five years, tho only relevant one I could find was "The Counterfeiters", a German film (originally titled "Die Fälscher") about a counterfeiting scheme run by the Nazis, which remains the largest in history. It is an excellent movie unless you feel like laughing or singing along, because there's none of that.

Others that I remembered after scanning previous blogs:
The Sunflower
A Separate Peace
"The Sound of Music"
Maus

"Das Boot"

Children's Education

The education system in Britain was drastically affected by World War Two. Children were only in school until the age of fifteen, and legislation to extend the age was postponed when the war started. When the city bombings began, children and teachers were evacuated en masse to the rural areas, where the schools had fewer supplies and materials. The children who weren't moved now had no school, and lost the health tests and free food perks, as well as increasing the rate of hooliganism in cities. Then, as teachers started to get drafted to fight, the class sizes exploded, making any learning very difficult. Eventually, the school day had two be slit into a double shift system, where kids could only come in the morning or in the afternoon.
These problems were very difficult to avoid, as logistical snags will affect any type of mass movement of people. The British government should have enforced an evacuation of all children in the cities to avoid the problems created by the stragglers, and then invested the neccessary money to build the additional building needed for the schools. Then they'd be able to focus on the war without another unneeded distraction.

For more detailed information, see this page.

Textbook Unfairness

Our textbook invariably went through many, many revisions and edits before being published, and that included the chronology of the chapters. I am sure that a lot of discussion went into how to split up the information into separate topics and what information should deserve its own chapter. And yet somehow, despite hours and hours of meetings and thinking, they still got it wrong, because in our textbook, the Holocaust gets described in a grand total of a page and a half.
The Holocaust was the most gruesome example of ethnic cleansing in human history. More than 10 million people died within ten years because of Hitler’s dream of an Aryan race. Because of this event, the Jewish community has lost a huge part of its culture and population. This was one of the most morally wrong events in human history. So why do Duiker and Spielvogel think that we don’t need to learn about it?
This textbook has more than thirty pages about World War 2, and there is a lot of information packed in there, so it is understandable to think that there is not much space to talk about the Holocaust in a certain page limit. Also, there is not enough information solely about the Holocaust to make an entire chapter about it, without delving into relatively unimportant filler for the chapter. In these ways I can see why the editors chose to instead have the Holocaust be just a part of the whole chapter on World War 2.
But despite these logical arguments, the space given to the Holocaust just isn’t enough. The stories of those tem million people deserve more respect than that. A whole chapter is unreasonable, but a sub-chapter is more acceptable. Currently, the chapter is split into 6 parts, each about a different facet of the political or physical struggles of the involved countries. Just one area needs to be devoted to the emotional struggles of the people of Europe, entitled, “The Genocide”, to explain solely about this horrible piece of history.

World War 2 Vets

I was not able to interview anyone directly who fought in World War Two because of my two relations who fought, one died in the war and the other died a number of years ago.  Instead, I asked my grandmother, who was cousin to both of them, about their war experience.

The first man, Eugene Arning, was in the Air Force and flew many combat missions in Europe, specifically over German soil.  He had just gotten married and had no intentions of going to war, but was drafted and went anyways.  He was shot down and died in 1943.

The second man, whose name I did not get, was also drafted into service, and had a wife and three children when he left.  While serving in the army, he was captured and held in a POW camp in Germany for almost a full year.  When he returned, his wife had left him and he had to restart his life, which he was able to do, and he never talked about his experiences in the camp.

In terms of the question of why they went to war, I didn't find much of an answer.  Both men led happy lives in Texas before being drafted into a war they didn't really feel like fighting in.  

Appeasement

Apologies tend to be hard to stomach, but appeasements would appear to be even worse. While politicians can publicize them as a diplomatic solution to an otherwise inflammatory problem, it would be more accurate to say that they are a preferred option for a lazy or inferior country. With an appeasement, the country can avoid having to mobilize any force, while slowly giving up ground and resources. In theory this results in satisfying the opponent's thirst for power, but in reality, it never works.

Seeing as appeasement is a sign of weakness or laziness, I never really use it in my life. My brothers aren't scary enough to fear, and I prefer to debate with my parents rather than submit to their will. Which doesn't work at all. I guess I need to trade strategies with those weak, lazy countries.

Adolf Hitler was Crazy

Adolf Hitler was remarkably similar to Dr. Gregory House from House. Both were geniuses in their main fields, politics appealing to the masses and advanced medicine, respectively. And, according to this article, from the Holocaust Teachers' Research Center online, Hitler had many extremely odd personality issues, just like Dr. House. (It is important to notice the bias on any piece about Adolf Hitler, because he was such a volatile character; this article has very little, seeing as it's designed to help teachers teach impartial information). Hitler had "almost hypnotic power" over his subordinates, with his grand visions and eloquence. But he also had intense disputes with his more-experienced generals about tactics and frequently flip-flopped on important decisions, often with disastrous results for his troops. He was determined that a complete social upheaval was not necessary, but he saw nothing wrong with abolishing the political system and crowning himself ultimate dictator. He condemned his army to death by refusing to surrender, and was bordering on insanity. By 1943, he was being kept alive by injections, which may have had a hand in his later madness.

This article has much more information than just on his mental health; I just thought that was a new look at his life, and more interesting than the rest of the article. It is impartial and factual, and a good resource to learn about Hitler's life.

A Humanitarian Crisis

Pakistan is the sixth-most populated country in the world, with more than 172 million people living inside its borders. Of those, roughly twenty-five percent are school-aged children. And of those, just under half are girls. That is over twenty million girls who will not be educated, or whose education is under attack by the Taliban. These Islamic extremists believe that girls should not be educated, and should remain the ignorant and purely domestic women that mirror the path that many of their mothers have been forced into.
The Taliban very much resemble the fascist governments or groups of power that were prevalent before World War 2. As we know, these include the USSR under Stalin, Italy under Mussolini and Germany under the control of their fuehrer, Adolf Hitler, as well as Japan under Emperor Hirohito. Like these examples from the past, the Taliban has chosen to bypass the bureaucracy, and instead take power by force. Stalin used his uprising to directly seize the title of dictator, as did Mussolini. The Nazis most closely resemble the Taliban by way of their similar scare tactics and invoking of fear in their opposition. Both were relatively small, regional nuisances until they received greater attention, at which point their power exploded and they quickly became a force to be reckoned with. Both staged public displays of humiliating their rivals and executions, inspiring fear and giving them a pushover crowd to work with. However, after gaining popular support, the Nazis began to take parliamentary seats, and elected Hitler to be chancellor, while the Taliban has yet to take any legal political action to further its cause.
Instead, the Taliban focuses on fear-mongering and violently suppressing opposition. As they have accurately realized, a smart opponent is a dangerous opponent, so they have forbidden for girls to become educated, seeing as their lower status in fundamental Islamic society would make them more likely to stand up against the injustice. 20 million people are having their futures stripped away by an injust power. To put that in perspective, that is almost the same number as have died of AIDS in the last 30 years. I’m not saying that what these girls are suffering is as bad as having no immune system, but you notice that AIDS is considered a major humanitarian crisis, while the issue of girl’s education is commonly overlooked. Another example: malaria is a huge issue for the population of sub-Saharan Africa. For every person that dies of malaria, there is a girl in Pakistan having her life stripped away by the Taliban. Although frequently passed over, the issue of girl’s education in Pakistan as well as other Islamic-rule countries is a crisis that must be solved by the global community.