Now that we have passed our halfway point in the year, we are switching gears in the PLP program and have changed to history. But before we jump right into historical events we have to learn how to analyze events and what questions to ask ourself when we investigate. So we start off with different concepts, causes and consequences, evidence and interpretation, continuity and change, ethical judgements, and historical perspectives. We all have a group and are assigned one concept, and had to present that concept with a historical event that we analyzed.

In my group was Kirby, Maria, and Stanfield, and our concept was causes and consequences. We chose the event of the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, or better known as 9/11. So we looked at the causes and the consequences, and with our analyzation we saw that the U.S. had been interfering in Middle Eastern affairs, because of this we can theorize that if the U.S. had not have done that, the terrorist attack may have never happened. Now our next assignment was to choose another historical event that wasn’t used in the presentations and use all of the concepts to analyze it.

The historical event that I chose was the Chernobyl disaster. On April 26, 1986, the world’s worst nuclear accident happened at the Chernobyl plant near Pripyat, Ukraine, in the Soviet Union. An explosion and fire in the No. 4 reactor sent radioactivity into the atmosphere when plant operators made several mistakes, creating a poisonous and unstable environment in the reactor core. This disaster caused up to about 4000 eventual deaths to the higher exposed Chernobyl populations. I chose this event because it made a huge change in the way the world looked at radiation, this event was a big turning point. Chernobyl has lots of evidence, photos, videos, and trustful sources where I can properly analyze.

I made a newspaper article called the “Historical Lenses”. I made it into a newspaper article type format since we were working with primary and secondary sources, and I got the idea reading a newspaper article about Chernobyl. I used all the different concepts as different headings in the article and filled it with photos and evidence of the disaster.

EXTRA! EXTRA!