Cold War #9

The final week is here. The projects are due next Monday. I spent a couple of days putting all of my files together in one location. I am now working on the power points for my final project. I am sitting in Lansing, Michigan and put together 2 slide shows today. They need some serious refining and I am not 100% sure that the final project will look like my outline. The ideas are still there but I have picked up a lot more information over the last few weeks that may change the project a little. I need to look at some more online journals just for content and history. I am trying to isolate my time period to about 15 years-from Eintein's letter to FDR to the Oppenheimer hearings. However, my last power point is intended to teach the legacy of nuclear weapons which I have found a lot of information on but not as many visual images. Visual images are so important to power points that I am a little concerned but will do some more looking. It will feel good to get this done.

Cold War #8

I'm heading into the final stretch of the course. I spent several hours yesterday working on my power point. As expected I have more material than I need. I also found that I have 'stuff'' everywhere. I worked on power point #1 for about an hour before I remembered I had an outline that I had written and should probably follow. The outline was helpful and I was finally able to focus. I also worked on creating a hyper link in my power points and was marginally successful. My links need to take the viewer to the exact video I want seen and some are just taking viewers to the website and the viewer has to click on the correct video. I also have several primary source text documents that would be ridiculous to read in the power point but I am working on retyping the most important text from the document on the slide while including a picture of the actual document. I know that power points are not for reading. They need to be visually appealing. I also may play with the idea of including a photostory in a power point but have yet to work out that technology. In addition I know that the topic "Cold War" is a high school standard with indicators in Kansas so my audience for my power point needs to be at the high school level. I will continue to work on the technology piece but for now I have 4 slides completed for power point #1 and 2 completed for power point #2. Two weeks to get it done.

Cold War Entry #7

I got a little behind on my final bibliography and finally got it submitted tonight. I knew I needed time to sit and think about where I was going with this project. Dr. Woestman recommended that I find some articles or sources that had some viewpoints similar to those of the nuclear scientists and in support of their claim that nuclear weapons were very dangerous in the wrong hands. I was able to find a great deal of information about the danger of nuclear weapons including a web site that had an extensive time line composed by Japanese scientists about the number of close calls we have had concerning the deployment of nuclear weapons. All of the close calls were somewhat unnerving to read including a malfunctioning 46 cent microchip that launched 100 B-29s loaded with nuclear weapons towards the Soviet Union in the early 1980s. A journal article that I read raised some important questions for all of us. If our nuclear weapons stock pile is intended to be a deterrent then why do countries/organizations that do not have nuclear weapons continue to challenge us-are they calling our bluff? Congress has begun to take some action to determine the role of nuclear weapons in the 21st century since our enemy no longer appears to be a nation but rather a radical group of individuals. Once again my research has created more questions for me than answers. I am anxious to get started on the final piece so maybe I can begin to develop answers to my questions.

Cold War Entry #6

Every time I pick up this assignment to work on it I get so drawn into it that the time disappears. I am excited by the topic I chose and every piece that I research leads me to another and another. I'm afraid my biggest problem as I work towards completion is that I may have too much material. I believed I chose a narrow topic to cover but it expands every week. Now my task will be to narrow it back down again. I am really excited about one aspect of the project. I will be completing 4 power points as a final project. I have been trying to import the short video clips of the nuclear test blasts into my power points. I have the video clips from 6 tests of atomic and hydrogen bombs. I finally succeeded yesterday. I am not sure how it will play out on the big screen but I am just excited that I got it to work. Included in this blog is a picture of the blast over Hiroshima from August 6, 1945.

Source Info:

Records of U. S. AirForce Commands, Activities, and Organizations. "ARC Search." National Archives. August 6, 1945. www.archives.org (accessed October 15, 2007). ARC: 542192

Cold War Outline

I had the opportunity to visit Cleveland this weekend and got enough peace and quiet in my hotel room to really work on my outline. I went to the National Archives website and found plenty of documents including a number of visual aids to enhance my power point. I teach 8th grade and while the Cold War is not a part of my curriculum I do touch as much of the 20th century as I can using visual images. I worry because there is so much my students do not know about the 20th century and they are already 14. Anyway, I got very excited about my project but I am worried I may have made the project too big. The power points are supposed to be 10 slides each. I hope that is a minimum and not a limit. My first 2 power points will exceed the ten slide recommendation while my last two should be fine. I enjoy the way we have processed through the development of this project. I can put my work away for a few days then pick it up and it is like I am fresh again. This is what I did with my outline. I did a very rough draft last week then put it away until Saturday night. When I looked at it again on Saturday I got very excited about my ideas and worked until almost one in the morning even though Sunday was an early day for me. Now I can put the project away for a few more days and pick it up fresh later in the week as I develop my final annotated bibliography which has grown by quite a few sources.

Cold War #4

I am starting to put the pieces of this project together. My most recent find was a very long telegram written by the scientists at Los Alamos, Chicago and Oak Ridge laboratories to President Truman about the dangers of atomic weapons. These were highly intelligent, moral men who were extremely concerned about what would happen next. 1945 seems to be an important turning point in the politics of the Cold War. Most students of the Cold War focus on the problems in Germany as the war came to a close. The decisions that were being made in Washington, D. C. concerning atomic technology would have a greater impact on the next 62 years than the problems of Germany and Eastern Europe. Even after the fall of Communism in 1991 the world still had to deal with the issue of nuclear weapons stockpiles. Hopefully by exploring this topic with students they can begin to question who was right when World War II came to a close. When my students discuss what to do about terrorists today some are quick to say we should just bomb the country that they live in. Other students realize that innocent lives could be lost. Maybe if the students knew the facts from the scientists and the politicians perspectives they would take their time making a decision about what to do with the problems the United States is dealing with today.

Cold War #3

I had an opportunity to visit the Kansas Cosmosphere this weekend. The space race is an absolute reflection of the cold war. The scientists of the space program in both the United States and the Soviet Union are a large part of the exhibit. Whether they were Russian scientists, American scientists or German rocket scientists (the precursor to the space program) there was a lot of pride in what they were able to accomplish and some dismay at the same time. For example, when Werner Von Braun, German rocket scientist, successfully launched a V2 rocket against Great Britain during World War II he was quoted as saying "the rocket performed perfectly, it just hit the wrong planet" . If the scientists of the nuclear age are able to count a success of their technology it is certainly the success of the space program both in the United States and Russia. However, this idea leads to further questioning. If there had not been a weapons program, would there have been a Cold War? If there had not been a weapons program, would there have been a space race? And finally, was the development of nuclear technology inevitable?

Historiography of the Cold War

The origin of the Cold War continues to be unclear for historians today. Every school of thought continues to speculate on when the Cold War started. Some scholars date it back to the communist revolution in Russia thus setting the starting date in 1917. Others schools of thought put the Cold War origins in the 1930s with the growth of Stalin's power in the USSR, and his purges. And finally, another school of thought puts the origins of the Cold War at the Yalta Conference in February 1945. Massive amounts of documents related to the Cold War are constantly being released putting more information in the hands of scholars. Traditionally the Cold War has been portrayed as primarily a weapons race between the United States and the Soviet Union. However, as more documents related to the Cold War are declassified it is clear that the weapons race was just a part of the Cold War. The Arms Race was a central piece of the Cold war much like a pebble in a pond; the weapons race created ripples in global relations for all countries of the world. Scholars can now study the role of race relations in the United States, Presidential records and the development of atomic weaponry in other World War II powers such as Great Britain, France and Germany. And finally, the former Soviet Union has begun to reveal their role in the arms race so historians can now study both countries Cold War policies.

COLD WAR

Possible topics for the cold war that hasn’t been done to death? I received some documents the other day through the Gilder Lehrman web site. The documents were specifically about the scientists who ‘created’ the science of atomic weaponry. The scientist involved in the Manhattan Project were opposed to the choices being made by the United States government about the management and the use of atomic weapons after World War II. I think this might be interesting to pursue. The documents also mentioned the May-Johnson bill that was proposed to the House of Representatives giving control of atomic weapons completely over to the military. I would like to explore this topic more thoroughly. I know that Robert Oppenheimer ran into some difficulties in the 1950s because of his stance over atomic weapons.