As my class worked through this unit, we came to learn that there is much too much history to remember all of it so we have to create a process that helps us make choices about what is worth remembering, what is significant. Many social scientists claim that significance is measured by five characteristics;

Importance:

Who was impacted and how did it affect their lives.

Profundity:

How deeply where people affected.

Quantity:

How many people where affected.

Durability:

How long did the affects of this event last.

and

Relevance:

Is the event important to our understanding of the past and present.

 

So if we agree that significant events include those that resulted in great change, over long periods of time, for large numbers of people, then the events included in Billy Joel’s song “We Didn’t Start The Fire” could be considered as significant.

The significant events referenced in this song took place between 1949, when Billy Joel was born, and 1989, when he wrote the song. You might think that these 100+ events were only significant to Billy Joel but they were not and our class was challenged with determining why they were considered historically significant.

It was actually a really interesting learning journey. 

We started off by gaining an understanding of what significance is and how to define it. When we applied the criteria I shared at the start of this post, it was easy to see why the events Billy included in his song are considered as significant in history. Almost every one of these events impacted large numbers of people, significantly, over a long period of time.

But our exploration of this popular song did not stop there. We now had to take one event, referenced in the song, and explain or prove why it had significance. I decided to choose the Soviet Afghan war. In the song it states:

“Birth control, Ho Chi Minh, Richard Nixon back again
Moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, punk rock
Begin, Reagan, Palestine, terror on the airline
Ayatollah’s in Iran, Russians in Afghanistan“

Interestingly, this required me to research a war I had never heard about. For those of you who may not know me personally, I really like military history. I’ve spent hours researching World War Two, World War One, the Vietnam War, etc. Now I’ve been given the chance to learn about a war I’ve never even heard of! Sign me up! Needless to say I was exited.

When I first spoke to my teacher about what my driving question would be, I said I wanted to focus it on the entire Soviet Afghanistan war but she suggested that I might want to pick just one aspect of the war and so I did. I chose to focus on its eventual impact on Afghanistan’s relationship with the United States. Spoiler alert: it has something to do with another significant event we refer to as 911.

After compiling my research, I came up with the following, driving question:

“How did the Soviet Afghan war impact the war on terror and the relationship between Afghanistan and the U.S. ?” 

 

Ok,  I did some research on this event and have created a short summary for you below.

In December 1979, Soviet troops entered Afghanistan in an attempt to bolster the communist, pro-Soviet government. Side note: in 1979 Communism had not yet failed, at least not in the public way we know it as today,  so anything to do with Communism, at this time, was a big deal.  For the next eight years, close to 15,000 Soviet troops died, 35,000 were wounded and about two million Afghan civilians were killed. Now, the United States was totally against the Soviet’s having a presence in Afghanistan so they expressed their discontent by stalling talks on arms limitations, issuing economic sanctions, and even ordering a boycott of the 1980 Olympics held in Moscow. Westerners referred to this war as “Russia’s Vietnam” and when the Soviets left Afghanistan, it did not bring an end to the fighting. In the late 1980’s a movement called the Al Qaeda was created and a few years later, around 1994, a group known as the Taliban rose to power and supported the Al Qaeda movement, which ultimately resulted in the bombing of America, which was another significant event in history referred to as 911.

So it could be said that the Soviet Afghan war created the conditions required for a group like the Taliban to be created and it was this group’s actions that created such an acrimonious relationship between Afghanistan and the United States.

OK, so with the answer to my driving question settled, I next needed to determine how I was going to communicate my thoughts and views on the event. I realized I needed to create an artifact of my own creation.

I chose to do so through an original painting.

At first I was going to do the painting on my usual 8 X 8 canvas but after talking to my teacher, she suggested I go larger as it would give it more of a “wow” factor and, as I discovered, it gave me more room to communicate the story I wanted to tell, the story that reflected my driving question.

I chose to do an acrylic painting for my project because I had recently taken up painting. Sadly I severely underestimated the time it would take to paint.

Usually I paint on an 8×8 inch canvas which take me around 4 hours to finish. This time, however, I was using a 20×14 inch canvas which, after I was done, clocked in at about 11.5 hours of painting. Though I was fully exhausted by the end of it, I was really happy with how the project turned out.

The painting project really forced me to think about how to represent some very complex and multi layered activities in just a few images. I realized that colour and  really clear, identifiable images would be required.

I also chose to have the painting divided into two sides: how the war started and what happened after the war finished.

On the top, left side I depicted the constant switching of power in Afghanistan, which contributed to an invasion by the Soviet Union, resulting in a puppet state being forming.

Below this I depicted the war itself, supported by China and Pakistan, funded by the US.

Within the line dividing the two sides are the colours gold and white. The gold represents the rebels victory and the white shows the vacuum of power immediately following the rebels’ victory. The right side of the painting depicts the Taliban’s take over of Afghanistan. Following that you see the 911 attacks. Finally you see the Taliban protecting Al Qaeda with the US launching a war on terror.

So the painting took almost 12 hours but I only had five minutes to present it. On presentation day I was a bit nervous. I had practiced my presentation and clocked it at four minutes and 40 seconds, but I was worried I would forget some of the information. In an incredible twist of irony I ended up going over my time limit as I went into too much detail. My take away from this was that during presentations I just need to relax and run through the motions in the exact same way I practiced them. I need to make sure I know the key points to share and make sure I get to act of them.

So what I learned through this project was that there are moments in history that society sees as more significant than others and that there are some common factors that all significant historical events share. It also seems to me that that these events have something like a ripple effect because they happen and then they ripple out and affect other people and events. Some them seem to never stop, they just keep creating impact and legacies, like the Residential Schools and our Indigenous communities. They are still recovering from that time in history, still rippling out.

This as a great project but I had challenges sharing my learnings through this post because in my first draft, I spoke to what we did around this project, then in my next revision, I shared more about my artifact, but I did not share information around my journey through the project, which was important because I did write my paper, create an artifact and write this post without some guidance from and critique from my teacher.

This project was a really fun one to do. I enjoyed how I could dive deep into a topic of my own choosing that I felt really passionate about and present it in an artifact I enjoyed creating.