April 13

Social 30-1

We watched a couple of videos today from the BBC 20th Century History series: "The Road to Berlin" which explored the end of WWII in Europe, and "Cold War Confrontation" which looked at the division of Germany, the Berlin Airlift and the Korean War. I gave you a timeline of key events in the Cold War that you must memorize. I also gave you a Cold War Events package that included a chart of key events in the Cold War and associated key concepts of the Cold War that must be completed using a supplementary book that you had some access to today. Tomorrow we will be looking at the Korean War in greater detail, and then you will have some more time to work on your Cold War Events notes.

I would like you to go to the World War II Behind Closed Doors website tonight, and read the sections on the Yalta Conference and the Potsdam Conference. This is an excellent site, with tons of information, maps, video clips, timelines and archival footage and re-enactments as well. You do need to really make sure that you understand the Yalta Agreements and the Potsdam Declaration (among other things) and this is a great site to do this. Episode 3 is the one that contains most of the information that you would need to read and watch. There's a great little video clip on this website called "Stalin's Distrust of the West" that might help you see WWII from the Soviet perspective and why the Soviets might wish to extend control over Eastern Europe and be so distrustful of their wartime allies. You can find this video clip in Episode 3 (Dividing the World), scroll down and click on the video clip on the right called "Stalin's Distrust of the West". It's a short little clip, but you'll get the idea. We'll continue our look at the Cold War tomorrow.

Social 20-1

We watched a video today on the development of the atomic bomb from the "History's Turning Points" series. After watching the video you were to copy down the notes that I had written on the board based on the topics covered in the video. If you missed today's class, you'll have to get these notes from a classmate. We then started a film study of the HBO documentary "White Light/Black Rain". We will finish this video off tomorrow.