The Cold War, what is it exactly? That is what I learned in this super cool and epic project. Before, I knew generally what the Cold War was, however, I didn’t really know many of the specific events that happened during the Cold War. This project helped me gain a better understanding of the Cold War and the new age of the atomic bomb.

Hiroshima

Hiroshima by John Hersey gave me a better understanding of the consequences of the atomic bomb. Our previous project, The Manhattan Project went into how the bomb was developed however, did not touch very much the consequences of the atomic bomb in Japan and America. I think I did a very good job at understanding the events and themes of this book. We even did a theme analysis analyzing the messages of this book. However one thing I need to improve on it taking better notes while reading a book. For this book I had to read it twice in order to look through my notes again. Overall, this book helped me to understand and connect to the experiences of victims of the atomic bomb. 

Building the Second Brain:

Devolving the second brain and my Zattlekasken is a skill I still need to work on. I think I did really good on the fleeting notes and literature notes. However, for the literature notes I still need to practice creating them faster instead of spending hours making the perfect literature notes. I also need to on making more permanent notes and jotting down good ideas when I think about them. Overall this is a work in progress and I shall report if I actually took the time(hopefully) to improve on these skills in the future. 

Final Product Essay:

The research process did not go well. For the final product of this project we were meant to create something that would answer a driving question connecting to the Cold War and fear. I did mine on the death of Stalin and how it caused fear, this was inspired partly from watching the movie the death of Stalin. I wanted to find out how accurate the movie was and learn more about the Cold War from the Russian perspective. 

Suffice to say, I did quite the bit of research. I read slashed skimmed four books on Russia during the Cold War, the most useful being The Last Days of Stalin by Joshua Rubenstein, helping me to understand the short term consequences of his death. Also I read The Cold War: A New History by John Lewis Gladdis which summarized the entire conflict quite nicely and gave me a general idea of what was going on internationally. I also used the book A Failed Empire and Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War which gives an in-depth look at Soviet leaders’ thought processes during the Cold War. 

However, when I went back to my notes there would be some notes without any context thus, I had to reread sections of the book to find where I got that information and than write it in my essay. This also made my essay quite disorganized since rereading each book took a lot of my time meant for writing. If I’m going to university and have to write a paper I need to master this skill for time efficiency, also apparently according to my teacher my 2000 word essay is short for universities. This makes me scared of what I will need to write for the future. 

Another thing I struggled with is citations. I attempted to do mine in APA citations however, I’m not completely sure that I did everything correctly since I’ve never done APA citations before.  I used the citation generator which has helped me get through many hard times with citations and is a gift from above. 

The main point of this section is that I really need to improve on being better at understanding and jotting down my research thus, this will make the writing process better quality and more efficient. 

Conclusion:

The answer to the driving question is fear has been used as a motivator to change societys. For both the government and civilians fear has driven people to do drastic things in order to secure their and their nation’s safety. The Cold War is all about how this new weapon, the atomic bomb, create fear among the nations and the escalating conflict toward nuclear destruction. Overall, this project taught me how much fear can impact the entire world and what I need to improve on for my future in University.