Anyway, Japanese Internment...So I found that Dr Seuss actually drew a cartoon to target the Japanese in America. I think I'm going to give this to the kids to help them get a feeling of the fear, distrust, and ignorance of the time.
Crazy, right?
I love working with images in my classroom though. I think pictures can be so powerful. Look at this one from the Japanese bombing raids during the Battle of Shanghai:
This picture reached the US during WWII and shocked the American public. This was not a coincidence. The rescue worker who found this baby under the wreckage after this bombing raid set him up on the platform specifically to take this picture and show the horrors of this war in Asia.
During the Myth Busters lesson I mentioned in my last post, I will use images for each slide. Some of them are more powerful than others. My recent favorites are these pictures of Auschwitz survivors posing to show their tattoos.
I hope my kids can appreciate photography and art like this. Again, images can be so powerful. Even though we're American History, we're looking at the Holocaust as an attack on civilians, along with the Rape of Nanjing and the A bombs and Japanese Internment. I once took a class on Concentration Camps and Penal Colonies, which gave me insight into some of the camp mentalities, so those are very interesting to compare. But then if we think of these camps as civilian targets, we can also connect them to acts of war at the time, and this helps dispel some of the romanticism surrounding America in the war. I can't tell students what to think of the war, but I am not going to sugarcoat anything. There were a lot of great things that the US did, and there were a lot of bad things too. This is war, after all. My hope is to create an engaging unit that will open up this era for their own exploration. There's no way we can get through everything in three weeks, so I have to make sure that every lesson really counts for something.
These are powerful images, Brittany. Seeing the Dr. Seuss cartoon, I am reminded of how important it is to try to convey a sense of history in context, as well as from a safer historical distance. I'm sure that as the years went along, Theodore Geisel would not have pointed to this cartoon (and others that he did on this same theme) as his proudest moment, and yet he was not a monster and doubtlessly took the stance he did from motivations that we understandable and even commendable. Giving your students an opportunity to explores the shades of gray in a story like this is a wonderful gift, Brittany, especially when they can start from an image, giving them the opportunity to fully employ their intuition and their observational skills.
ReplyDeleteGood for you, Brittany!