Not many people realize how big of a factor fear plays within societies and how many people it influences from small advertisements to war aggressions.
This project called “Fear Factor” dove deep into the nature of fear and the various forms it has influenced societies throughout the history of the 20th century to the present day. Instead of having a fixed common final product throughout the class as we have in the past, we were allowed to design our final product as long as it could both answer the overall driving question “How has fear been used as a political, defensive, and cultural tool to shape our society?” and a personalized inquiry question that would be the guide for all of our projects. I decided to build off of my success in designing an E-book for our Manhattan Project (project) and create another one – this one without the constraints of relying on others to do their part. I’m very pleased with the way my E-book turned out and you should take a look at it in the card below to answer the inquiry question I carefully crafted “How has fear been historically utilized to influence human behaviour and decision-making?”
Reading John Hersey’s Hiroshima allowed me to dive into what the deadliest attack in human history looked like from multiple first-person perspectives. Considering the first half of this project in our Manhattan Project² was all about the creation of the first atomic bomb and all the work put into it, we had to learn and comprehend the human impact and the truth in what ended the war. It wasn’t a triumphant new invention made in the West, it was a deadly massacre that scarred the world forever. This book tapped into the “emotional feel” and realism aspect of the project which was key to understand when moving onto the effect it had on societies across the world.
We organized our new knowledge and thoughts in a complicated but eventually effective method called a Zettlekasten – which essentially is a very in-depth manner of organizing your work, notes, and ideas and turning them into memorable phrases. Although I understand the potential of a successful Zettlekasten, I still struggle to catch up with the multiple stages within this system on my own time. We were tasked to make notes while reading Hiroshima and later evolved them into more sophisticated notes. I used this note-making method throughout this project to preserve and connect ideas to build my final product.
Using the permanent notes I created from Hiroshima, I wrote a theme analysis that focuses on how in the bigger picture, the attack on Hiroshima was more than a weapon of mass destruction – it was a humanity test.
I’m still adjusting to using the Zettlekasten system, but I enjoy the level of organization it provides and literature notes inparticular make information very quick and easy to understand. It allowed me to organize my research on how fear shapes human behaviour as well as in-class materials such as the Netflix series Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War.
At this point of the trip half of the class including myself made our way down to the Mohave Dessert to embark on an educational road trip starting in Tucson, AZ to Las Vegas NV to learn about the details of the USA’s participation in the Cold War. For the next 10 days, we would travel about 580 km and visit many museums, monuments, historical landmarks, and more but the following destinations were the ones I believed had the most relevance to our driving question.
Visiting places like the Titan Missile Museum and the National Atomic Testing Museum was incredible because of how real everything suddenly became. We stood in front of a real nuclear missile (that has been decommissioned due to Nuclear Arms Treaties) and spent hours reading and taking in all the information that was offered throughout the museums. Although almost everything that we learned from the Cold War has diminished over time its legacy lives on in the way countries relate to each other and how some societies were shaped to become the ones we know today.
Small towns in the middle of the desert, doomsday bunkers, and an experimental scientific research facility were born out of the way people reacted to the new threat of nuclear weapons. Our visit to Biosphere 2, provided us with a real-life example of what life could have had to evolve to. This was one of the most anticipated destinations of the trip because of its unbelievable construction and maintenance of environments from across the world to support human life in a series of domes in the event of Nuclear fallout. Personal doomsday bunkers were built to protect the owners from the radiation exposure above and created an introverted paradise underground. Many across the country range from 16 stories deep to a massive basement with a recreation of housing and landscapes to present a “normal” life. I found that the towns that appeared and thrived during the Cold War were very interesting because of their form of income. These towns were builtoff of the culture of the Nuclear Age and offered memorabilia and themed vacations for visitors to experience as they drove by, specifically down the historic Route 66. Over time some of these towns slowly died away or relied on their historic relevance but they continue to represent the pinnacle of the 1960s.
Nearing the end of the trip, visiting the Hoover Dam and Las Vegas gave us new examples of what how the Cold War and the Nuclear Age culture formed cities. Before Las Vegas was the flashy “American dream” city we know today, it was a small town where atomic testing site workers went to get laid loose from the job and indulge in activities such as gambling, prostitution, and drinking. As the town grew more popular, investors built hotels and casinos and advertised themselves with large neon signs along highways to draw more and more workers. The city continued to grow its fame and drew more and more people from across the country who were often making their way down Route 66. The Hoover Dam, completed in 1936, was not a direct result of the Cold War but it did support many of the towns and cities that grew and thrived in the area due to the Nuclear Age culture. It supported economic growth, provided crucial hydroelectric power, and ensured water resource management, all vital for national stability and security. Additionally, it symbolized American technological prowess, which was important in the ideological competition with the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Everywhere we went on the trip had significance for our project and I managed to pick out information, record interviews, and capture media that would support my answer to my inquiry question. I found this project to be one of the most interesting and captivating and I genuinely enjoyed learning about the many aspects of the Cold War. I decided to answer my inquiry question through a digital book, or “Zone”, where I used multiple themes and tied them together to form an answer to “How has fear been historically utilized to influence human behaviour and decision-making?”. I put a lot of effort into connecting ideas, gathering footage, making a professional-looking layout, and crafting paragraphs to make my final product so do check it out below.
This project has overall been great – from learning about a significant part of human history to going on an incredible field study in the Mohave Dessert. Since concluding this project, I’ve begun seeing traces of the Cold War everyone and then and has allowed me to understand how and why some countries co-exist the way that they do today. The whole process of this project has been simply remarkable to me and it will stick with me for a long time.