Historical Significance is Difficult to Define.

I possess the ability to speak and the ability to write. That includes writing a speech. What I have not yet fully achieved is the ability to write a good speech.

In this project, we were given the task of writing a speech and presenting it in front of a class. Before we learned the speech however, we had to learn the topic of our speeches, the Manhattan Project. This is because we would be presenting a speech in which we would attempt to convince the class of the historical significance of the Manhattan Project and convince the class of our reasons for it’s historical significance.

I, being who I am, found it much easier to research the scientific aspects of the Manhattan Project than anything else. This is because scientific metrics are much more measurable, quantifiable, and comparable than social ones. More easily put, there are things we have and things we do. Some things that we do can be quantified but most cannot. What we do as a society can only be described in generalist terms. These may describe the society best but leave out the great discrepancies between individuals and even different parts of the society.

The way in which the consequences of the Manhattan Project affected different people and the variation of it’s historical significance between the classes of people in Canadian society are something one must consider before trying to assess it. In the USA, rich Americans likely benefited much more from the medical breakthroughs that the Manhattan Project enabled than those who were or are poor.

In my desire for the truth, I realized that there is no definitive truth known to man about how society is or how historically significant an event may be for a population. Of course, I did also carry a bias. I, a German, think that the Japanese war of aggression in the Pacific was a wicked example of the Japanese brutality and the fascist ways of Japan at the time. The American invasion of Japan after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour was logical and the lives lost in the war in the Pacific were lost for a noble cause. Those who didn’t die because of the nuking of Nagasaki and Hiroshima could live good lives. The amount of lives saved by the nuking also greatly outweighed the negatives. As Stalin said, “The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of a million is a statistic.” A war such as this is really a game of numbers. You want to get as much as possible while loosing as little as possible. The nukes did that job, no women were raped, no Americans died, and no one else had to die.

I can only describe the consequences of the Manhattan Project after this by talking about major breakthroughs, not about the lives of the average person.

The arms build up during the Cold War was definitely not the best but it might have stopped an all out war that otherwise might have happened. Now, with another escalation of tensions due to the war in the Ukraine, we see how the Ukraine is armed, but otherwise left to fight on it’s own against Russia due to everyone being so scared of a nuclear escalation. It may be good for me, I’m not going to get drafted because there’s a good chance that things will already have gone too far before a draft. Instead of dying brutally and slowly in an ongoing war, people nowadays and into the future can expect to die very quickly if another conflict between major powers breaks out.

I think that for the writing, I could’ve redone my speech a few more times to make it more cohesive and feel more like a speech. I also think that I should’ve had some more juice (logos) to create a good message surrounding the bulk (ethos) of my speech.

In terms of speaking, I didn’t see myself speak so I can only stand to what my peers told me. I need to practice in order to make my speaking better. There’s not much that beats practice. If you speak well enough, then the speech will take care of the rest.

In the combination of speaking, researching, and writing, I think I could’ve done better. I hadn’t prepared as much as I could have and I think that I did not think clearly enough when writing my speeches. They all seemed a little bit off. I think that next time I do something like this, I will use the criteria chart better, figuring out the parts that I had neglected to do. I did not do them because I was already part way into my speech and didn’t want to go back and redo everything I had done. I think that going back and changing my errors would have been the better option.

I will nevertheless use what I have learned here for my next projects, hopefully creating something that I will be impressed by and exceeding at accomplishing what my teachers have taught me to do.