DBQ-14 – Page 5 – Ed Methods

October 26, 2014

Blame the Loser

A DBQ design Process by Erik Nelson

The DBQ design process has already proved an enlightening process for me. I have been painfully learning to shift from a gatekeeper of information to an architect of a learning experience for students. At first approaching this project I wanted to pick an interesting topic for students to cover. My original topic did not lead to enough possible student questioning, so I needed to expand the question that would drive the DBQ (and consequently expand the topic being covered).

The essential question of this unit will be: How should the losing side of a war be treated? Though I don’t know if students will find this interesting, I certainly think it is an important question to deal with. This question will use the Treaty of Versailles and post-WWI Germany as the topic for this question. I wanted to choose content material that teachers would find probably want to include in a high school course, while also designing a process that would engage students in asking questions about the documents.

There are tons of documents available on the Treaty of Versailles, and more importantly how Germany was impacted in that process. There are letters, newspaper articles, political cartoons, even some video clips, though I am not totally sure how to access those in the public domain.

In talking with my classmate Sam Kimerling, we decided to parallel our DBQs to create easily accessible teaching materials for teachers. As we discussed our projects we were struck by how different the decisions made towards Germany were after WWI and WWII. Because those two topics are popular in history classes, we thought creating DBQs that teachers could use that connected both the Treaty of Versailles and the Marshall Plan, having students ask the same questions of both topics, and potentially drawing larger scale conclusions in the process.

Through this process it is likely that students will be challenged in their thinking about resolving international conflicts. Students will be asked to focus centrally on the impacts of the strict reparations Germany was forced to pay, as well as issues like the guilt clause while questioning ideas of guilt in international war. One thing I will want to address is how much background knowledge students bring into the DBQ as they work to create interpretations of the source material.

Questions for the project will be:

Do the victors in war have responsibility to the losers?
Can one side in war be blamed more than another side?
How does national debt hurt economic development?
Why might national pride influence national policy?

Moving forward from this point, I will need to narrow the documents I want to use, and also narrow the scope of some of my ideas. At this point I need to focus on what questions I want students to ask, and how to best guide them through a series of documents.

October 26, 2014

Nothing More or Less Than A Big Brothel

Topic

Originally, I designed by DBQ around Operation PBSuccess when the American CIA helped stage a coup in Guatemala in 1954. However, it became clear after speaking with the professor that this topic would not be feasible due to the sources available and the background knowledge required to answer the generative questions.

I thought instead about what primary sources I had easily available that did not require extensive prior knowledge to understand. Fortunately, as part of the Senior Thesis in history, I have accumulated a wealth of letters written by Anzacs in World War I from Egypt that provides accounts of racial tensions.

As a dominion of Great Britain, Australia was called to serve the metropole– a call 320,000 answered most proudly. The Anzacs are most famous for participating in the Campaign of Gallipoli when the Entente Powers attempted to open up the Dardanelles in order to send supplies to Russia via ships. In the end, they were defeated and thousands of Australian soldiers lost their lives. However, this event is regarded as the birth of Australian nationhood. Rather than focus on this particular event which has already been studied extensively, I want to direct my students to Egypt where the Australians trained for Gallipoli.

In Egypt, many Australians were quick to raise sales in alcohol, narcotics, and brothels. However, their opinion of the local people who provided these goods and services was very low to the point they nearly burned down the red light district of Cairo. Anzac letters provide extensive details on the locals that are less than flattering. Generally, these letters see whites as superior based on hygiene, intelligence, and morality.

For my DBQ, I hope to have students examine these letters in order to figure out the what and why.

Example of Source

Questions

What did the Anzac soldiers think of the Egyptian “natives?”
What were their opinions informed by?
Are these letters reliable sources?
Do the Anzac letters corroborate each other?

Looking Ahead

In order to further my DBQ, one goal is to narrow down my sources. There are dozens of letters available, but I want to select the most powerful and descriptive letters.

Secondly, I would like to see if there are any letters that speak to the contrary and describe the Egyptians in a much more positive light in order to provide contrast. I do not want to encourage students to generalize Australian soldiers in World War I and I think finding other points of view will prevent that from happening.

Overall, I feel that this topic is much more appropriate for the task at hand than my previous one and I look forward to continuing to modify and improve my DBQ.

October 26, 2014

It’s the Bee’s Knees: Examining Clashing Cultures in the Roaring Twenties

By Ceci Brunning and Jenna Bunnell

Originally, we were going to do our DBQ project on the emergence of flappers in the 1920s. However, we decided that this topic was too specific, and thus decided to focus more broadly on the social tensions of the 1920s. The 1920s were a decade full of controversial changes that some people embraced and others fought. It was truly a war of cultures, and examining documents from the “Roaring Twenties” exposes how these cultures clashed and what it meant for the future of Americans.

We plan to use a variety of primary sources. These include video clips, which were relatively new in the 1920s. We also plan to use photographs, samples of literature, and magazine articles. We chose these types of sources because they are reflective of the popular culture. They include both positive and negative reactions to the shifting societal norms.

scopes trial — Newspaper headline highlighting the Scopes Monkey Trial http://s3.amazonaws.com/Website_Properties/features/umns11_187_1_lightbox.jpg

To what degree was the 1920s defined by a clash of cultures in America?
Why did societal norms shift so dramatically after World War I?
What societal tensions emerged during the 1920s as a result of societal norms shifting?
What groups promoted dramatic change in society? What groups fought to preserve the past?
How were tensions between these groups demonstrated?

We see this assignment as the equivalent of a large lab experiment for a historian. We want these students to learn how to examine primary sources and make and argument based on their observations. The DBQ projects gives students a chance to do this on a larger scale, because it involves so many primary sources. This is not to say that it is more work, but it is actually an advantage for students because they have more evidence to base their argument off of. Additionally, it gives students a chance to do what historians do.

We are very excited about this project because the 1920s is a fun, radical, scandalous topic. There are also a lot of resources out there that we can use to model our DBQ. One setback is that there are almost too many sources that could work for our topic, so a challenge will be sifting through the sources and determining which ones we want to use.

October 26, 2014

First Families as an American Ideal

For this project I was initially looking into portraits and family photos from the late 1800s, and intended to explore what differences there were between how white and blacks were posed and portrayed. However, I soon realized that while this topic was interesting to me, I would be limited in the amount of documents there were. Furthermore, I was struggling to come up with questions to go along with these photographs. I knew that I wanted to do something with photos though, and that got me searching for a new topic. This new search led me to the photo below, which immediately captured my interest.

The George Bush family in 1964 in Houston

Accompanying this photo were an assortment of other family photos of George H.W. Bush’s family, and diplomatic meetings that his wife Barbara conducted. From there I saw photos of other First Families and First Ladies, and I was hooked.

Potential Questions

How is the First Family used as an extension of the president’s image?
How does the way in which they are depicted show what the perception of the ideal American family was at that time?
What reasons might exist for the First Lady being photographed with someone? What message was the administration trying to get across?
How was the First Family used in the United States compared to the families of leaders in other leading power countries?

For example, we have the following photo of Barbara Bush and Raisa Gorbachev together in 1990. If someone did not know who these two women were, they likely would assume that they were two good friends, rather than the wives of the leaders of nations that were coming to the end of an unspoken war. Why were they both chosen to give this address? What was to be achieved by depicting the two as being so comfortable around each other? It should also be noted that the school at which they spoke, Wellesley, is an all-female college. What importance should be attached to this?

Mrs. Bush and Raisa Gorbachev give the Commencement Address at Wellesley College

Looking Forward

I am not going to have any problem finding photographs that I could use for this project. If anything, I am going to struggle with narrowing down what era the photographs should cover, and which are the most important. I need to decide if I want to work with families that were in power back to back, or if I would prefer to have a gap, to show how things changed over the years. During our critique session in class, I got the suggestion to look into First Family equivalent photos from other countries, which is a great idea that I have not explored yet. Again, this will raise the problem of having too many potential documents to work with.