For this Thursday’s class, I was responsible for reading/watching JFK’s 1962 “We choose to go to the moon” address at Rice University. Throughout the course of his speech, I noticed three interesting rhetorical techniques that I will explore throughout the course of this blog. At the outset of the speech, I was immediately struck by …
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For this Tuesday’s class, I was responsible for presenting the class with a brief, three minute or less, history of the Cold War to put the space race into context. Before class, I thought it was important to contextualize the space rate within the history of nuclear weapons and nuclear proliferation. At the end of …
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For this Tuesday’s class, I examined the historiographical approach known as either “history from below” or “people’s history.” Initially, I did not know that people’s history was its own historiographical approach because I always thought this style of historiography fell under a socialist/Marxist lens. I most likely thought this because a people’s history approach seems, …
For this Thursday’s class I read “The Sad Irons” which is an excerpt from Robert A Caro’s book The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power. “The Sad Irons” was an interesting chapter to read because it did not necessarily contain an overt argument about the electrification of rural America. Instead, the chapter traced …
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For this Tuesday’s class, I read about U.S. involvement in Latin American political coups during the Cold War since I felt like there was an interesting juxtaposition between US and Latin American narratives surrounding the events. To explain, when I was in high school I remember these political coups being taught in one of three …
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For this Thursday’s class, I read the Sjolander article “Through the Looking Glass: Canadian Identity and the War of 1812.” To start with, the article was not at all what I was expecting. Based on the title, I thought the article would be about how an emerging Canadian identity led to or affected the War …
For this week’s class I ready the chapter of Never Done by Susan Strasser called “Blue Monday.” Strasser begins the chapter with a detailed description of the laundry process during the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. For this post, I am going to focus more on the social argument of …
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For this Thursday’s class I read Christian Conger’s article, “How Revisionist History Works.” Since I am absent from class attending the annual GLMA conference, I thought I would connect the commentary in Conger’s article to one of the lectures I attended at the conference, so that I may apply the lessons from class to my …
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For Tuesday’s class, I read the article “The Decision to Drop the Bomb” by James West Davidson. In this article, Davidson examines the decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan through three theoretical frameworks: Rational actor model Organizational process model Bureaucratic politics model In this blog post, I will attempt to explain the theory …
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For this Thursday’s conversation, I was responsible for finding and presenting the basic “facts” of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To do so, I turned to every-historian’s-favorite-source, Wikipedia, because I knew it would give me a good starting point for this information as well as be (mostly) devoid of commentary on the decision to …