JANUS ESSAY QUESTION FOR THE JUNE 4 TEST

Do we need to change our nature in order to survive? Reference the different conceptions of human nature you've learned about in the course, your readings on Nazi Germany, and the film, "Obedience." 

Extra Credit

Mr. Janus and I have agreed to provide extra credit points for attending the other classes' play productions.  One is today (5/25), one is Friday (5/29) and the last one is Saturday (5/30).

Britain Resigns As a World Power?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/britain-resigns-as-a-world-power/2015/05/21/d89606f8-fff1-11e4-805c-c3f407e5a9e9_story.html

Gerst class: People's Century (Total War)

A look at the war from the "civilian" perspective from 1936-1945:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wVRoHKG5UI

US Invasion of Iraq War Resolution (2002), Congressional Vote, and Opposing Viewpoints

In The Big One, Adam Gopnik argued as follows: "The last century, through its great cataclysms, offers two clear, ringing, and unfortunately, contradictory lessons.  The First World War teaches that territorial compromise is better than full-scale war, that an "honor bound" allegiance of the great powers to small nations is a recipe for mass killing, and that it is crazy to let the blind mechanism of armies and alliances trump common sense.  The Second teaches that searching for an accommodation with tyranny by selling out small nations only encourages the tyrant, that refusing to fight now leads to a worse fight later on, and that only the steadfast rejection of compromise can prevent the natural tendency to rush to a bad peace with worse men.  The First teaches us never to rush into a fight, the Second never to back down from a bully." 

What lesson should we take from these lessons?  How does it impact your thinking about the foreign policy challenges of today with Russia, the Middle East, etc? 

Joint Resolution Authorization For Use of Military Force Against Iraq 

House Vote 

96% of Republican, and nearly 40% of Democrat, members of the House voted for the war resolution. 

Senate Vote 

98% of Republican, and 58% of Democrat, members of the Senate voted for the war 

resolution. 

And did President Bush lie?  Arguments from the two sides:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/laurence-h-silberman-the-dangerous-lie-that-bush-lied-1423437950 

http://www.salon.com/2015/02/10/yes_bush_lied_about_iraq_why_are_we_still_arguing_about_this/

Art History Modernism lecture slides

Please click here for the Modernism slides. The prompt appears at the end of the slides. You can pick one of the four comparisons in the prompt to answer.

REVIEW SEESION

There will be a review session for the Inter-War test during Monday lunch in 106.

POSSIBLE CATENAS FOR JANUS' SECTIONS

Catenas for Interwar test

There will be ten catenas of which you must answer five. Some of them for Janus' class may be the following:

The Bolsheviks/ Provisional Governemnt

Lenin's NEP/Stalin's Collective Farms

Lenin/ Marx

The Catholic Church and Fascism

Democracy/Fascism

Marxism/Fascism

The State/Fascism

Fascism/Pacifism

The Locarno Pact/The Versailles Treaty 

The Stock Market Crash/Margin

The Gold Standard/Great Depression

Machiavelli/Hitler

Hitler/Nationalism

Hitler/Vienna

Hitler/Social Darwinism

Hitler/The Scientific Community 

Fascism/Capitalism

Hitler and Late Modernity

Benito Mussolini: Hero or Villian?

The Great Recession and Its Personal Stories (2008-?)

Periodization: use of the term "Great Recession" between Jan 2008 and March 2009: 

"Some 73 percent [of Americans] either lost a job themselves, or had a member of their household, a close relative, or a friend lose a job at some point in the past four years."  http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/02/07/171420747/study-finds-vast-majority-of-americans-felt-great-recession-personally

The Great Recession :

Federal Court "Judge Cote’s ruling described a dangerous and toxic period in the American economy. As house prices were soaring, Wall Street banks were purchasing high-risk mortgages and then bundling them into bonds that were sold around the world. As this huge mortgage machine churned on, the quality of the loans plunged."
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/05/12/business/dealbook/nomura-found-liable-in-us-mortgage-suit-tied-to-financial-crisis.html?referrer= (Thanks to Ilana for the article). 

The story of "toxic assets," the mortgage-backed securities we discussed as underpinning the financial crisis of 2008.  It is a very interesting podcast made as a colloboration between This American Life and Planet Money, available at http://m.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/418/toxie

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130641385

http://www.epi.org/press/class_of_2010_faces_worst_job_market_in_a_generation_says_epi_report/ (Class of 2010 faced worst job market in a generation) and it has not gotten better for some.  Article from a couple of weeks ago regarding unemployed or underemployed law school graduates of Class of 2010).
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/27/business/dealbook/burdened-with-debt-law-school-graduates-struggle-in-job-market.html

http://www.npr.org/2014/12/05/368746013/2014-the-year-when-the-job-market-finally-turned-the-corner  (7 years later, the job market finally hit pre-recession levels)

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/06/06/319404238/will-the-u-s-finally-gets-past-pre-recession-jobs-total

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111904199404576536930606933332 (University of Chicago professor Gary Becker on causes of the Great Recession)

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/2013/05/young-people-face-worst-job-market-in-50-years/ (Young People Face Worst Job Market in 50 Years)

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/05/31/187548260/all-the-wealth-we-lost-and-regained-since-recession-started

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/05/04/151936447/23-million-americans-are-unemployed-or-cant-find-full-time-work

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125906997

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303591204575169693166352882

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703837004575013592466508822


And its personal stories:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/yourmoney/chi-051909-recession-lead-story.html#page=1

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/03/we-are-99-percent-stories-victims-great-recession_n_992340.html

http://www.latimes.com/la-recessionstories-htmlstory.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/03/we-are-99-percent-stories-victims-great-recession_n_992340.html

Freud, America & Nazi Germany

http://time.com/3840374/freud-birthday-anniversary-history/

GIVING MEANING TO THE SLAUGHTER

Survivors called it a perfect hell on earth, the devil’s slaughter pen. The ground that had grown swaying fields of corn and wheat was soaked with blood. Thousands of men’s bodies lay putrefying in puddles of blood and mud. Some of the dead men embedded in this hell clutched their bibles. The three-day Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, the bloodiest battle ever in the Western Hemisphere, left nearly as many dead or debilitated as all the American soldiers felled in the decade-long Vietnam War. Although the Union forces had lost almost half of the casualties, “it was the most beautiful thing I ever saw,” a victorious Union soldier exulted.1 The battered Confederate remnants hobbled back home across the Potomac. From then on the rebels waged a defensive war whose days were numbered. But the stench and pollution from the crashingly quiet battlefield, overrun by buzzards and black flies, alarmed the traumatized farming town of Gettysburg in southeastern Pennsylvania. “In many instances arms and legs and sometimes heads protrude,” Gettysburg banker David Wills reported to the governor, “and my attention has been directed to several places where the hogs were actually rooting out the bodies and devouring them.”2 Wills cranked gears in motion to create a massive burial ground that became the Soldiers’ National Cemetery. Like all cemeteries of the time, it had to be formally dedicated. When poets Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and John Greenleaf Whittier refused Wills’s invitation, he turned to the greatest orator of the age, Edward Everett, diplomat, ex-senator, and Harvard president. Belatedly Wills invited the president of the United States to make “a few appropriate remarks.” As in early July, thousands of Americans invaded the farm town just before Thanksgiving, but these people were older and well clothed, women and men, all on the same side. Everett spoke of the battle for two hours, enthralling the crowd. Abraham Lincoln followed him, for three minutes. He was disappointed by the tepid response. Yet his melodic 272-word speech transmuted the grisly deaths on the battlefield—burying of the decayed bodies still not complete, Cemetery Ridge still pockmarked with rusted rifles, strips of blue and gray, skeletons of horses—into the vital value of the war. Out of these parched fields of death Americans would create new life, Lincoln proclaimed, a “new birth of freedom,” national rebirth. His words rewrote the nation’s founding document of 1776 as a commitment to equality more than to life or even liberty, and set the stage for postwar reform of the Constitution to follow suit. He accomplished a feat in a few phrases that history had belied and that the war had so far cruelly mocked: conjuring the meaning of America as a single people dedicated to a single proposition, their union defined by equality. Lincoln’s incantation, which drew no distinction between North and South, forged the ideal of a new America that would complete the American Revolution, a second founding to fulfill what was promised in the first.3 But at what cost? Although the Union commander-in-chief may have confessed later that he became a Christian only after seeing the “graves of our dead heroes” at Gettysburg—“I then and there consecrated myself to Christ”—he was glorifying, even sacralizing, hideous, painful death, the mass destruction of the young men under his ultimate command who on this battlefield died senselessly.4 Neither side had a compelling reason to fight at Gettysburg, no strategic necessity. And the suicidal “Pickett’s charge” up Cemetery Hill was one of the craziest blunders in military history, for which Robert E. Lee asked his Confederate president to fire him. Transubstantiating the flesh and blood of fifty thousand young Americans killed or wounded into an abstract promise of equality and union, himself as high priest of this Eucharist, Lincoln justified the mad horror of the war, no matter what the outcome. In four years over six hundred thousand Americans would die over Lincoln’s lofty principles, seeding the national myth that it was a war of sacred justice. The war freed the slaves, and it launched a powerful industrial nation with railroads steaming from sea to shining sea. But equality of any sort would remain a mirage. Lincoln was speaking over the heads of his audience, beyond hearing of the buried heroes, to an America that did not exist. The heroes had died for Lincoln’s dream.

Imperialism and WWI Test: Last Minute Study Tips

Since a few of you have been emailing today, I figured I'd "reply to all" in terms of studying for tomorrow's test.

The first question asks (1) How did imperialism create the conditions where a world war might occur? Cite examples.  This question really seems aimed at some of the causes for the war, so possible source material includes Palmer section 75 Imperialism: Its Nature and Causes, section 77 The Partition of Africa, section 78 Imperialism in Asia (focus on India), and Palmer, Section 81. Your specific, argumentative (not generic, not vague) thesis and roadmap should appear in the introduction. You should have paragraphs organized logically (and you should have paragraphs, not unbroken text continuing on for 1-3 pages).  

The second question asks (2) Why might it be argued that World War I was a Late Modernity War?  Cite specific events and people that might lead you to this conclusion.  This question really seems aimed at how the war unfolded, so possible source material includes the Marshall handout, the Craig handout, and the Gopnik handout.  Don't forget to specify the defining qualities of "Late Modernity" and isolate events and people from 1914-1918 that are illustrative.   Your specific, argumentative (not generic, not vague) thesis and roadmap should appear in the introduction. You should have paragraphs organized logically (and you should have paragraphs, not unbroken text continuing on for 1-3 pages).  

David Brooks, NYTimes columnist @ Chicago Council

Please join Ms. Gerst at ANOTHER GREAT CHICAGO COUNCIL ON GLOBAL AFFAIRS PROGRAM: Don’t miss New York Times columnist,author,and political and cultural commentator David Brooks on the topic of the importance of building character. He will speak at the Fairmont Hotel at 200 N. Columbus Drive on Wednesday, May 6th from 6:00-7:15 p.m.  As usual, a bus will pick us up in front of Blaine Hall at 5:00 p.m. for the trip downtown and will return us to Lab after the program. You may also travel to and from the program on your own and meet us downtown. If you wish to attend, please sign up no later than Monday (5/4) with Ms. Shapiro (in class), Ms.Martonffy in Judd 105, or in the History Department Office.

European Map-Making and the Creation of the Modern Middle East

The maps below show Europe before and after World War I as well as the Middle East before and after World War I: