Good Morning!

Welcome to my first blog post of semester two! Throughout the past few weeks, we have begun a new project following last year’s WWI project, and as you can probably guess from that, it was all about WWII. From the warfare to the people, we learnt all about the actions of different nations and individuals and how these events affected the cause and consequence of WWII.

As always, lets first begin by briefly talking about what we did. Similar to the book “Leviathan”, PLP 10 were assigned multiple books to guide our learning and of the 5 available books, I chose a fictional historical book called “All The Light We Cannot See”. The book follows the events from way before to long after WWII from the perspectives of different characters part of different nations. Besides our reading and special “book chat contributions”, activities based around our books, our end goal was to make a class podcast. I should mention besides the reading, we had prepared personal zettelkastens (a note system) to connect and store our learning. These zettelkastens also helped us choose the topic we wanted to podcast about as the plan was for everyone to to their own topic of the war. Ultimately after considering multiple choices, I ended up deciding on making my podcast about “music” in the war. You can take a listen my and my peers episodes here:

(Link will be inserted upon release here)

Now you know what we did, what exactly is my answer to our question: “How might we use stories to better understand the causes and consequence of WWII”. If you had listened to my podcast, you probably know the answer but just to recap, my basic answer was all about symbolism. Through this project and my experience with WWI, I have found that individual stories might be small, but telling these journeys of either music or a service jacket artifact represent something much bigger. All though you might think music is its own individual topic, after learning about it, you realize how interconnected things might be. Through my podcast, I explored the rise of fascist culture to the journeys of individuals and after understanding “what happened”, we can start answer “why it happened” and this can lead to greater insight on the overall event.

I always like finishing off my posts with a connection to real life by answer: “why this relates to you”. Learning causes and consequence of and event might score well in school or interests people but how does an event like WW2 connect to us. Obvious answers might include the giant consequences like the sheer number of deaths to the changing of borders but is this all. Many things from our everyday lives are outcomes of conflict this size whether you realize it. Although the cruel experiments conducted by Nazi and Japanese at the time were atrocious, did you know biology greatly improved in that period due to the lack of ethics? Many modern science was built upon findings like WW2 and how many times have you visited the doctor? This is not all, technology in warfare and communication and compute systems all improved as well due to the massive resources poured in by multiple nations. This is not to downplay the tragedy WWII was but rather to show you what things might have changed if it did not take place for you.

In the end, WWII is, and I will hope to remain, human’s biggest conflict but understanding such it from the causes to consequences might teaches paths we hope not to tread. We study history to learn and prevent repetition so let’s not start WWIII.

Sincerely,

Jordan