Hello
Today I will be talking about the most recent project in my PLP Humanities called “Hidden Chapters of History”, which was all about World War II. In this project we learned about all the different events from the rise of the nazi party, all the way to the nuking of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. We learned about the War itself and the battles and the political war at the same time. To give a brief recap of what happened, Nazi Germany took over Austria and then derailed a Japanese train and then blamed it on China, Italy sided with Germany and then Japan did as well and Russia allied with Germany. On the allied side it was Britain France America and Canada. Eventually Russia switched sides and then so did Italy after the death of Mussolini. America joined the war after Japan attacked pearl harbour. Eventually the Americans after island hopping in the South Pacific eventually got close enough to nuke Japan twice and after the second bomb Japan surrendered. Hitler had no allies so they were overwhelmed and lost the war.
At the start of the project we had to read a book that was about World War II. The book I chose to read was Maus by Art Spiegelman. The book focused mainly on the concentration camps and the POW camps during the war. Which I thought was interesting because usually you dont really talk about the POW camps during the war, and mainly focus on the war itself and the battles that were fought in it. I think that this book really helped me understand a lot more about the topics that were a little less known and helped me extend my understanding of WWII.
In this project we got to make a podcast episode about a specific topic and then combine all the topics together to make 1 podcast with 23 episodes. The topic that I made my podcast on was the firearms during the war. I really liked doing this topic and it was quite enjoyable to do the script for the podcast because I didn’t have to use any sources other than my knowledge when writing it. I found it fun to test my knowledge to see just how much a knew from the topic. Obviously at some point i did research the topic but that was years ago from a few books my dad read to me when I was younger.
So now I will answer the driving question for this project which was “How might we use stories to understand the causes and consequences of World War II?” I believe that using the stories that we studied with Camp X and in the book Maus we can understand different perspectives of the war and see what kind of consequences happen for different people.