Students will understand how waging a "total war" altered the nature of American society.
Students will read, write, listen, and speak for critical analysis and evaluation.
Students will understand the effects of World War II at home.
Propaganda was one of many weapons used by many countries during World War II, and the United States was no exception. From posters to films and cartoons, the federal government used propaganda not only to buoy the spirit and patriotism of the home front, but also to promote enlistment in the military and labor force. Several government agencies were responsible for producing propaganda, with the largest being the Office of War Information (OWI), created in 1942. The OWI created posters, worked with Hollywood in producing pro-war films, wrote scripts for radio shows, and took thousands of photographs that documented the war effort. Worried by the increase in government sponsored propaganda, academics and journalists established the Institute for Propaganda Analysis. The Institute identified seven basic propaganda devices: Name-Calling, Glittering Generality, Transfer, Testimonial, Plain Folks, Card Stacking, and Band Wagon. [For more on the IPA and the seven devices, please see http://www.propagandacritic.com/] All of these devices were used during the war. In this activity, students will analyze World War II posters, examining the different techniques and themes used by the OWI and other branches of government.
Step 1: Poster Analysis
Before the lesson begins, the teacher should prepare packets of posters for each nation: United States, Great Britain, Nazi Germany, and Soviet Union.Â
Divide students into small groups of 3-4 students. Assign each group one of the four nations and pass out the packets to the appropriate groups. Each student should choose one poster from the packet to analyze, using the Poster Analysis Worksheet.Â
After individually analyzing posters, the groups should reconvene. Each group member should present their poster to their group members. After presentations, group members should discuss how they feel the posters work together: Is there a common theme? Are there common images? What aspects of the posters make them propaganda?
Step 2: Essay Writing
After the group discussion, students should individually write an essay about the posters. The teacher may choose one assignment from the list below or allow students to choose from among the options; the teacher may also differentiate the lesson by varying which assignment is given to each student:
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Compare and contrast two or more posters
Visual essay: pull together different images to tell a story; text should bridge the posters together
Responsive essay: elaborate on the emotions (anger, sadness, pride, etc.) that the poster(s) evoke
Historial writing: Historically contextualize the poster: Is there a particular event or person the poster refers to? What makes this a World War II poster? (Requires additional research)
Point of view writing: Pretend you are a person in the poster; what story do you want to convey?
Fiction writing: Make up a narrative describing the events leading up to or following the scene depicted in the poster
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Students will read an interpret texts in a variety of genres (poetry, novel, essay, interview, speech) by drawing on their experiences and their interactions with other readers.
Students will develop an understanding of and respect for diversity in language use, patterns, and dialects across cultures, ethnic groups, geographic regions, and social roles.
Students will examine the contributions of writers.
Note: For this activity, we recommend that students choose from among the following works of literature and poetry. Except where linked to an outside source, the works are all available The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Vol. II (Houghton Mifflin, Fourth Edition, 2001). (Page numbers given are from Vol. II.)
Langston Hughes, "I, Too" (p. 1605)
Rosario Morales and Aurora Levins Morales, "Ending Poem (Child of the Americas) (P. 3146)
Gish Jen, "Mona in the Promised Land" (p. 2982)
Paul Lawrence Dunbar, "We Wear the Mask" (p. 174)
James Baldwin, "My Dungeon Shook: A Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation" (Link)
Richard Rodriguez, "Hunger of Memory" (excerpt) (p. 2593)
Sherman Alexie, "Indian Education" (Link)
Jose Martí, "Our America" (p. 879)
Step 1: Choosing a Piece of Literature
Allow students to individually browse the literary pieces and choose ONE piece of writing on which to concentrate. After students have chosen their literature, divide students into small groups of 3-5 students. In each group, aim to have a variety of literature pieces representative, though it is okay if more than one student is reading the same work. Not all pieces of literature have to be represented in each group.
Step 2: Analyzing the Documents
Have students read their selected literary pieces and then write a brief reflection about the work. In their writing, students should focus on the following:
What key words stand out for you? Why?
What are the recurring themes?
What do you feel the writer is expressing in this work?
What literary techniques (repetition, imagery, metaphor, rhyme, subject matter, personifications, etc.) are used by the writer?
What observations or insights do you have about the selection?
Step 3: Presenting the Literary Texts
Have students present their selections to the members of their groups. They should share why they chose the piece they did, and share their thoughts raised in Step 2.
Then groups should discuss the following:
What similarities or differences do you notice in the selections?
What can we learn about race from them?
Step 4: Creating a Literary Piece about Race
Have each group create a found poem by selecting key words and phrases from the original texts and their writings that incorporates their understandings about race.
Students will examine primary source materials that address the impact of the railroad upon Indian life from different points of view.
Students will engage in a critical reading of an image.
Students will create a new illustration drawn from the perspectives of Plains Indians.
Step 1: Project or pass out copies of the 1872 print American Progress. Draw attention to the activities represented in the foreground, middle, and background of the print. As a class, discuss the following points and make notes on the board or in students' notebooks.Â
List the objects or people you see in the image.
List adjectives that describe the emotions portrayed in the image. What seems of significance?
Describe the action taking place in the image.Â
What does the image tell us about what happened on the Great Plains? About interaction between settlers and Indians?
What is the point of view of the artist? Does he view what happened on the Great Plains as good? bad? both? Explain.Â
Step 2: Pass out copies of "Federal Agents Offer Solutions for 'Solving the Sioux Problem'" and "Native American Warriors Describe the Threats to their Way of Life. As a class, read the documents aloud. After reading the documents, have students fill out the change taking place on the Great Plains and who was involved. What new information do the primary documents provide? How do they complement or contradict the perspective shown in "American Progress"?
Step 3: Pass out copies of "George A. Croffut Explains The Print 'American Progress'" and read aloud together. Be sure to point out to students that the essay originally accompanied the image "American Progress." Â Ask students to look over their original observations about the print. Ask students to share whether they would change any of their observations and explain why or why not. Â
Step 4: Divide the class into small groups. Using the text that accompanied the print written by George A. Croffut, students should discuss how, if they were Ten Bears or Sitting Bull, how they might draw an illustration of the same subject from an Indian perspective. Each group should produce a rough sketch of such an illustration. (Don't worry about artistic skill; it's the concept that's important.)
Step 5: Have each group share out their drawings. As a class, compare and discuss illustrations.Â
Students will examine poetry, lyrics and letters in order to deepen their understandings of the experiences of the Irish in the United States.
Students will compose original found poems using words and phrases they find in the primary documents.Â
The potato famine of the 1840s and 1850s spurred the migration of thousands of impoverished Irish to the United States. The new immigrants—rural, Catholic, and starving—settled in the poorest districts of large cities in the East, especially in New York’s Five Points neighborhood. Without formal social services or adequate skills for an industrial society, Irish immigrants struggled to establish homes and provide for their families. Meanwhile, native-born Protestants, especially those from the upper- and middle-classes, were highly suspicious and often hostile towards the immigrants. Nativists felt immigrant culture, religion, and social customs degraded “real†American society. They also feared the growth of Irish political power. These factors combined to keep Irish immigrants in low-paying and dangerous jobs. Yet, despite these deplorable conditions, Irish immigrants built a vibrant working-class community in the Five Points and other cities.
Step 1: The students should read the texts. Depending on the level of the students, the teacher may choose to give students only a subset of the documents to work with. The teacher may also choose to read aloud (or ask for volunteers to read aloud) the poems, lyrics and letters. As they read the poems, students should underline or list words or phrases that they believe are central to the meaning and content of the text. Â The teacher may want to model the procedure with one document.Â
Step 2: Working independently, students should each create a found poem that incorporates as many of their chosen words and phrases as possible. The poems should reflects students' understandings about the experiences of the Irish in America. The teacher may want to discuss or project the following guidelines for found poems:
Words and phrases can be rearranged; they need not be in the order in which they appear in the original text.
Words can suggest your point of view and an idea that might not be stressed in the original text.
If necessary, other words that do not appear in the original documents may be added.
The authors should give their finished poems a title.
Step 3: The teacher should divide the students into small groups of 4 or 5. Group members should share their poems with each other and discuss:
What statements or ideas from the readings did the poems reflect?
Were many of the chosen key words and phrases the same? If so, compare and contrast the ways different people used the same language.
Step 4: Each group should choose at least one poem to share with the whole class. Â
Students will examine the experiences of African Americans during the Uprising of the 20,000.
Students will analyze the ways that race and class affected the goals and impacts of social reform movements. Â
This activity supports the following Common Core Literacy Standards in History/Social Studies:
WHSS.6-8.2. Write informative/explanatory texts.
Step 1: Have students watch the 30-minute film Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl. Â Alternatively, students can read relevant passages from the viewing guide for the film. Â
Step 2: Give each student a copy of the excerpt from Meredith Tax's The Rising Women and the triple-entry journal form. Â Each student should read the excerpt and take notes with the form:
In column A, note key facts, words or phrases
In column B, note your reactions to the reading
At the bottom of the page, identify areas or issues you wanted to know more about as a result of this reading.
Step 3: Now have students choose a partner (or divide students into pairs). Â With their partners, students should exchange their notes on the reading and write their responses to the notes in Column C. Â After noting their responses, students should pass the journal form back to their partners for them to read. Â Partners should discuss the issues raised with each other. Â
Step 4: Lead the entire group in a discussion of the reading and the questions it raised. Â Discussion questions include:
What has the reading informed you about issues of race, class and gender?
Do similar issues resonate today?
What do you still want to know more about?
Step 5: Ask students to imagine that they are journalists in 1909. Â Using the information provided in the film, the viewer's guide and Meredith Tax's excerpt, they should write an editorial about the Uprising of the 20,000, focusing on the situation of black women. Â
Students will analyze primary sources to determine why African-American soldiers fought in the Civil War. Â
Students will be able to describe the motivations of black soldiers in the Civil War.Â
In January 1863 with the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, President Lincoln invited African Americans to serve in the Union Army as soldiers for the first time. African Americans responded enthusiastically to Union recruitment; nearly two hundred thousand had enlisted by spring of 1865, nearly eight percent of whom came from slave states. By the end of the war, African-American soldiers comprised ten percent of the Union Army. These new recruits helped ensure that nothing short of universal emancipation would be the outcome of the war. African-American troops distinguished themselves in the war and gained the respect of white officers and soldiers as they helped determine the outcome of key battles.Â
Nevertheless, African-American soldiers felt the effects of continuing racism as they were kept in segregated camps, given the most menial jobs, treated as inferiors, and paid less than white soldiers. Widespread protests against pay inequity compelled the War Department to equalize wages in June 1864. In the process many black soldiers realized that their fight was not only against southern slavery, but against northern discrimination as well.
Step 1: Divide students into small groups of 2-4. Â Have students read through all of the letters once to get an initial impression of their topics, issues, and language; the teacher may choose to read aloud all the letters with the entire class. Then, in their groups, students should each select one or two letters to analyze more closely. Make sure that each letter has been selected by at least one person in the group.
Step 2: Have students read through the letters carefully and take notes to answer the questions in the Letter Analysis worksheet. Â Ask students to note other questions they may have about the letters, the authors' use of language, and the authors' descriptions of soldiers' experiences. Â
Students will analyze letters and printed sheet music to determine attitudes in the North about the draft during the Civil War.
Students will identify who fought for the North and how the draft affected the composition of the Union army during the Civil War.
Despite the economic hardships that secession brought on in many northern cities, the outbreak of fighting galvanized northern workers. White workers, both native- and foreign-born, rushed to recruiting stations. Midwestern farmers and laborers, the backbone of the free soil movement, also enlisted in large numbers, making up nearly half the Union Army. Most northerners believed that Union military victory over the Confederacy would be quick and decisive. The North possessed a larger population (more than twice that in the South), a growing industrial base, and a better transportation network. The quick military victory was not to be, however, and Union soldiers (along with their Confederate counterparts) suffered tremendous hardships. For every soldier who died as a result of battle, three died of disease. Food was scarce, as were fresh uniforms and even shoes. Medical care was primitive.
In March, 1863, faced with inadequate numbers of volunteers and rising numbers of deserters, the U.S. Congress passed a draft law. The Conscription Act made all single men aged twenty to forty-five and married men up to thirty-five subject to a draft lottery. In addition, the act allowed drafted men to avoid conscription entirely by supplying someone to take their place or to pay the government a three hundred-dollar exemption fee. Not surprisingly, only the wealthy could afford to buy their way out of the draft. Workers deeply resented both the draft law's profound inequality and the recent expansion of the North's war aims to include the emancipation of the slaves who, they assumed, would join already free blacks as competitors for scarce jobs after the war ended. When the draft was implemented in the summer of 1863, rioting broke out in several northern cities, and the most widespread and devastating violence occurred in New York City.
Step 1: Ask students to consider the question: Who fought for the Union during the Civil War?
Step 2: Break students into small groups of 3-5. In their groups, have students read the historical background information on the New York City draft riots of 1863.
Step 3: Next ask students to read "A New York Rioter Explains His Opposition to the Draft" and answer the following questions:
What is the letter's point of view? What is his argument on behalf of those who rioted to protest the draft?
What argument does the New York Times make about the draft in response to the letter writer?
Can you determine from the documents what each writer thinks about the causes of the Civil War?
Step 4: Ask students to look closely at the details in the sheet music--both the cover art and the song lyrics--and answer the following questions:
What images appear on the cover of the sheet music?
How do the two men depicted differ from each other? In their hair? facial expressions?
What is written over each of the images? Is this a clue to which man is the "substitute"?
What do the song lyrics describe? Do you think these lyrics are meant to be satirical?
What might the audience for a song like this have been? Do you think that the song format influenced the way people thought about its message about the draft?
Step 5: Have students discuss within their groups what they learned from the letter and from the sheet music about attitudes toward the Union military draft during the Civil War. As a group, students should summarize who fought for the Union. As a whole class, lead a discussion comparing and contrasting the information in the sheet music and the information in the letter. Ask students what kind of information sheet music conveys that is different than a letter to the editor in a newspaper.
Students will closely analyze a letter to the editor and a political cartoon to determine who fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War.
Between December 1860 and May 1861, eleven southern states seceded from the United States to form the Confederate States of America. The decision to secede was largely based on the fear that the federal government, under Republican Abraham Lincoln, would limit the expansion of slavery and perhaps ultimately abolish it. Yet three quarters of the southern white population idd not own slaves, and many southern yeoman (white farmers who did not own slaves) disliked the haughty pretensions and prerogatives of planters. The majority of white southerners, however, did support secession, and for a variety of reasons: their close economic ties with local planters, reinforced by ties of kinship; a belief in states' rights; hopes that they might one day rise to the slaveholding class; and the fear that Republicans would free the slaves and introduce racial amalgamation in the South. One Georgia secessionist offered this typical warning to his non-slaveholding neighbors: "Do you love your mother, your wife, your sister, your daughter? IF you remain in a nation ruled by Republicans, TEN years or less our CHILDREN will be the slaves of Negroes."
As the Confederate States, also known as the Confederacy, went to war with the Union, it faced the task of raising an army where none had existed before. Despite a strong military culture, bolstered by many souther military academies that educated the sons of the planter elite, by 1862 the Confederate Congress could no longer rely on a volunteer military and instituted a draft. This activity ties together two kinds of primary sources about Confederate conscription laws: a letter from a Confederate soldier and a political cartoon that appeared in a Northern magazine.
Step 1: Before reading the letter or looking at the cartoon, ask students to consider the following question: Who fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War?
Step 2: Have students read the historical background on the "Twenty Negro Law" passed by the Confederate Congress in 1862.
Step 3: Have students read "A Georgia Soldier Condemns the Exemption of Slaveholders" and answer the following questions:
What does the solider claim in most worrisome to soldiers away from home?
How does the soldier define patriotism? What does the soldier see as the key to the success of the Confederate States as a new nation?
How does the soldier describe the different interests of rich and poor men in the Confederacy?
Step 4: Ask students to look closely at the details in the cartoon "Southern Volunteers" and answer the following questions:
How many scenes are depicted in this cartoon? What is happening in each of these scenes?
How do the words being spoken support the visual message of these scenes?
Do you think that this cartoon was published in a northern or southern publication? Why?
Step 5: Ask students to discuss with a partner or small group what they learned from the letter and cartoon about the Confederate military during the Civil War. Return to the question with which you began this activity: Who fought for Confederacy during the Civil War? Consider what kinds of historical information a text document can convey and what kinds of historical information a cartoon can convey. How does the information in the cartoon fit with or contrast with the information in the Georgia soldier's letter?
Choose one member of the group to report back to the larger group about these documents. The reporter should briefly describe the contents and the points of view of the documents they examined, what they learned from them, and how they relate to the following questions: Why was the Civil War fought? Who fought in the Civil War? What were the consequences of the Civil War?
Students will analyze two descriptions of the lives of enslaved women. Â
Students will describe how slavery affected women differently than men. Â
Students will create a dialogue between an enslaved woman and a slaveowner. Â
Step 1: Divide students into small groups. Â Have students read Sections V and VI ("Trials of Girlhood" and "Jealous Mistress") from Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Â Ask students to free write their general impressions, including any aspects of the reading that surprised them.
Step 2: Have students read aloud and discuss the brief excerpts from Harriet Jacobs and Mary Boykin Chestnut ("A Plantation Mistress Decries 'A Monstrous System'"). Â In discussion, students should address the following questions:
Does Jacobs, a formerly enslaved woman, see enslaved women as victims or perpetrators?
How does Chestnut, a plantation mistress, see enslaved women?
Step 3: Ask each student to imagine and write a dialogue between Harriet Jacobs and Mary Chestnut. Â
Step 4: Based on their written dialogues and a careful study of the readings, ask students to assess gender roles and moral and sexual attitudes under slavery. In their groups, students should address the following:
How did sexual or moral attitudes differ for whites and blacks during slavery?
Jacobs and Chestnut believe that oppression differs for women and men under slavery. Do you agree? Â
Why do you think the authors wrote these passages? Â Who do you think were the audiences for these writings? Â
As students listen to their group members, they should make a list of common points of view and areas of difference between Jacobs and Chestnut. Â Then ask groups to reconvene and as an entire class, discuss the differences and similarities between the two women's views. Â