Last year we learned all about WWI, social injustices during the interwar period, and WWII. Though, we never came into great detail on how WWII ended. That’s were this blog comes in. This blog is about how the US amazingly pulled off creating the first atomic weapon of mass destruction, without anyone knowing, and once and for all ending the war.
This video was our final product of this really interesting unit on the Manhattan project. A quick summary would be that the Manhattan Project was established in the United States during WW2 to create the atomic bomb and end the war. It took many brilliant scientists, engineers and military workers aswell as a lot of money, space, and determination. They kept the hole thing a secret until the bombs were dropped an hiroshima band Nagasaki.
This blog will reflect on my learning and understanding throughout the assignments and reasearch we did on the Manhattan Project. I will also describe the process on how we created our video and what I learned from it.
Before we knew what the final project would intail we did a smaller News Reel video about the dropping of the bombs. A newsreel is like a short documentary that contains news stories about what’s going on at that time. In the 1910s to the late 1960s they would display News Reels at the movie theatres.
For this project my group was Sam, Ryan, and Calum. While watching a couple news reals we took note on the style of the film and what we should include in ours:
- Announcer voice
- Mix of media
- Intro text
- Music from that time
- Black and white
- Voice overs
- Static film
- Telling the audience what to think
- Historical perspectives 1945
- 2 min or less
Now that we understood what the project should look like it was time to get a good understanding of our topic.
One thing that I found very interesting was the Sound Portrait we listened to about the horrors of Hiroshima. It helped me understand what the US was hiding from there citizens and how they made light of the event.
storycorps: witness to the atom bomb
After the bombs were dropped not only did they cause massive destruction and killed 129,000–226,000 civilians, but many more victims were severely burned and were affected by radiation sickness. The US only showed a small fraction of the damages therefore even today people don’t know the truth.
here are the notes I took:
- In Japan the destruction wasn’t seen as shortening the war
- The first day of having wounds there skin peeled, eyes closed, head swollen couldn’t drink water
- The second day there burns turned yellow
- There was a city then no city. Could see the ocean
- Black rain came down and then the fires started
- She doesn’t tell anyone that she was there during the atomic bomb because she wants to move on
- the interview wasn’t broadcasted in the U.S
Like usual we made a group google docs to add our notes in and any additional research we did:
Even though, we split up our work evenly, I found that some people weren’t as motivated as others to get this project done therefore we fell behind and didn’t produce our best work. I also think that if we had a second draft it could have been much stronger.
Overall this project gave me a good basis on how the war ended and the Manhattan project but I still had much to learn.
As we started learning more and more of the Manhattan project and its secrets we also learned about the people who worked there. We each chose one of the many employees to research and do a character card on.
I new I wanted to pick a woman because the Manhattan Project needed as many talented scientists as possible so they took in woman which was less likely during this time.
Once I found Elizabeth R. Graves I was set on her.
What really interested me about Elizabeth Graves is that she moved around a lot with her husband who was a fellow physics major to find jobs. Sadly she often didn’t find a job because of discrimination against woman so once she got her job working with Enrico Fermi and later her job at the Manhattan project she was awfully grateful. Even when she was pregnant she finnished her experiment while timing her contractions with a stop watch. I think she is a great female role model and hope to be as passionate and hardworking with my career.
Now that we all knew a lot about the Manhattan Projects we got our groups and started the final project. This project was called History In 5 because the film has to have historical perspective and each team will select five people, places, and/or events. It was also recommended that we chose a theme that the five topics revolve around.
We also were given a example of a History In Five video that was about life and the woman in the secret cities of the Manhattan project.
My group for for this project was Mimi and Ryan. The first thing we did as a group was pick our main topic and five topics/facts based on it. This is what we came to a agreement on:
Topic: Secrecy
- Creating the secret cities (Building codes/bus routes)
- While getting hired an FBI study would be completed on you to make sure you weren’t apart of the axis powers
- There was atomic spies from other countries. (Krause Fuchs)
- Reported leaks and how they delt with them
- Telling the world
Once we established who was going to research which fact we got right to it adding all our information once again into a shared google doc.
Aswell as creating our first draft of our script we also made a first draft of our video. This was hard to do because we had to imagine were we would put our clips we were gonna get on our field study and interviews.
Realizing our script needed work we created a story spine that helped connect and organize all of our ideas.
Story spine:
Once upon a time… The American government was hiding a big secret in a very unlikely location.
Everyday… in Hanford they secretly worked on developing the atomic bomb without letting anyone in the outside world know
Because of that… spies from other countries would try to find the secret city
Because of that… They hired the FBI to protect the secrets of the project in Hanford.
Because of that… They made sure no one got their information or spilled it.
Until finally… they dropped the bomb and told the world.
Once we got approved and finalized our treatment there was one last step to do before going on our trip which was the story board.
this storyboard helped us understand where we needed to get shots and what of, aswell as where it would be good to place the interviews.
Once we came back from our trip we created our first draft
Once we got a lot of criteria from our peers. We made a list in Things and split up the editing.
Conclusion:
At the start of this unit I wasn’t sure about this topic, because I thought that all it was about was America creating an atomic bomb and dropping it on Hiroshima. To my suprised this was one of my favourite units so far. It’s amazing how they were even able to create the bomb in such little time. They had to find the perfect place, evacuate the residents, build, bring in all kinds of people from scientists to plumbers, keep the cities secret, test the bomb, and finally drop it on Hiroshima and tell the world. Even though it’s amazing and they did end the war, to this day there is a lot of controversy about the event. As I learned from the horrors of Hiroshima even though it ended the fighting for both the Japanese and Americans most Japanese aren’t grateful. The Manhattan project also created tremendous amount of radiation and pollution. We still don’t know everything about what truly went on in the Manhattan project. As any other great event in history, it’s important to learn about it and discover its secrets because it affected and continues to affect our world today.