World History Assignments
Mr. Burris' students can easily access their late/overdue video essay assignments for prior to Spring Break by viewing the listed assignments provided below on their home computer, laptop, or cell phone. Once you have viewed the video write your essay and send it to Mr Burris at burrich@tulsaschools.org to grade and record on PowerSchool. He recommends you use Microsoft Word for your essays and send them in a .pdf format.
If you send your essay to me as a Google Document please be sure to give me permission to access or open the Document so I can read, grade and record it on Power School.
Compose essays only on the assignments listed below.
Second Semester Essay Assignments
Video Essay: Benito Mussolini (1 page essay)
Evaluate the rise and fall of Italian Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and his place in world history.
Video Essay: Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin: Roots of Evil (1 page essay)
Compare and contrast how the abusive and dysfunctional childhoods of Hitler and Stalin psychologically shaped how they became evil men as adults.
Video Essay: Adolf Hitler: The Artist (1 page essay)
Adolf Hitler: The Artist, is loosely based on the book, The Young Hitler I Knew, by August Kubizek who was Hitler’s best friend when he was in Vienna trying to become an art student at the Academy. It is a perfect companion piece to the outstanding documentary, The Rape of Europa, and the feature films The Monuments Men and Woman in Gold. It has the arrogant boorish young artist Hitler commenting on the Vienna Secession, Van Googh, Klimt, Freud, and more in turn of the century Vienna.
August Kubizek met Adolf Hitler in 1904 while they were both competing for standing room at the opera. Their mutual passion for music created a strong bond, and over the next four years they became close friends. Kubizek describes a reticent young man, painfully shy, yet capable of bursting into hysterical fits of anger if anyone disagreed with him. The two boys would often talk for hours on end; Hitler found Kubizek to be a very good listener, a worthy confidant to his hopes and dreams.
In 1908 Kubizek moved to Vienna and shared a room with Hitler at 29 Stumpergasse. During this time, Hitler tried to get into art school, but he was unsuccessful. With his money fast running out, he found himself sinking to the lower depths of the city: an unkind world of isolation and 'constant unappeasable hunger'. Hitler moved out of the flat in November, without leaving a forwarding address; Kubizek did not meet his friend again until 1938.
His book, The Young Hitler I Knew, tells the story of an extraordinary friendship, and gives fascinating insight into Hitler's character during these formative years.
Video Essay: The Occult History Of The Third Reich - Part 3: Adolf Hitler (1 page essay)
Describe how this film investigates Hitler's own occult beliefs, in particular the German mysticism of Guido von List and Jorg Lanz, and how they informed his upbringing and his political beliefs.
Video Essay: The Enigma of the Swastika (1 page essay)
What are the origins of this infamous symbol of National Socialism which would strike terror in the hearts of millions?
Video Essay: Nazis - The Occult Conspiracy (1 page essay)
Describe the origins of the National Socialist religion of the blood based on pre-Christian and occult mythology.
Video Essay: Triumph of the Will (2 page evaluative essay written on completion of the film)
Compose a two page evaluative essay regarding the propaganda feature film of all time, Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens) the 1935 propaganda film directed, produced, edited and co-written by Leni Riefenstahl. It chronicles the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, which was attended by more than 700,000 Nazi supporters.
The film contains excerpts from speeches given by Nazi leaders at the Congress, including Adolf Hitler, Rudolf Hess and Julius Streicher, interspersed with footage of massed Sturmabteilung (S.A.) and Schutzstaffel (S.S.) troops and public reaction.
When writing your essay imagine you are not a history student in 2020 in Mr. Burris' class watching this film but a enthusiastic young member of the Hitler Youth or League of German Maidens in 1934 (as shown in the film) or a German war veteran from WWI who has lost everything in the Great Depression and have been without a job for four years unable to feed your family. This movie was made five years before WWII began and only a year and a half after Hitler had taken control of Germany.
Video Essay: Hitler: The Whole Story #1 (1 page essay)
Video Essay: Hitler: The Whole Story # 2 (1 page essay)
Video Essay: Hitler: The Whole Story #3 (1 page essay)
This three part profile of the German dictator examines his rise to power, leadership of the Nazi party and eventual World War II defeat. Included: a look at his childhood and schooling; a study of his military conquests in Eastern Europe; and clips from his early speeches.
Video Essay: Hitler and Drugs (1 page essay)
Discuss the pharmacological effects of the 77 prescribed drugs by his doctor on the health and behavior of Adolf Hitler.
Video Essay: The Democrat and the Dictator (1 page essay)
Compare and contrast the childhood and formative years of development of "the Democrat," U. S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, with that of "the Dictator," German Chancellor Adolf Hitler, in shaping their distinctive personalities and leadership of their two nations.
Video Essay: The Plot to Overthrow FDR (1 page essay)
Evaluate how former US Marine Corps Major General Smedley Darlington Butler saved the United States from an attempted fascist coup d'etat by Wall Street plutocratic militarists in the early days of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal.
Video Essay: WWII: The Propaganda Battle (1 page essay)
Analyze how propaganda was used in National Socialist Germany and in the United States to motivate their peoples during World War II.
Video Essay: Why We Fight: Prelude to War (1 page essay)
Discuss the Japanese incursion into Manchuria, the Italian conquest of Ethiopia, and the beginning of the National Socialist German takeover in Eastern Europe.
Video Essay: Why We Fight: The Nazis Strike (1 page essay)
Discuss the relentless advance of Germany's mighty military machine, as Hitler's armies terrorize their victims into submission with their blitzkrieg tactics and spread like a cancer through the Rhineland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland.
Video Essay: Why We Fight: Divide and Conquer (1 page essay)
Describe the fall of Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, and France to the seemingly invincible German army.
Video Essay: Why We Fight: The Battle of Britain (1 page essay)
Discuss the 1940 six-week blitz against England by the German Air force (the Luftwaffe) and the indomitable spirit of the heroic Londoners in what is known as the Battle of Britain during WWII.
Video Essay: The Negro Soldier (1 page essay)
Evaluate the history of Black Americans' participation in America's wars from the American Revolution to World War II.
Video Essay: The Soviet Story (three page essay)
The Soviet Story is a story of an Allied power, which helped the Nazis to fight Jews and which slaughtered its own people by the tens of millions on an industrial scale. Assisted by the West, this power triumphed on May 9th, 1945. Its crimes were made taboo, and the complete story of Europe’s most murderous regime has never been told. Until now…
The film tells the horrific story of the Soviet regime:
- The Great Famine in Ukraine (1932/33) which murdered millions.
- The ideological compatibility of German National Socialism and Soviet Marxism/Leninism and their social engineering attempts to create “a new man.”
- The Nazi SS-Soviet NKVD secret police partnership and collaboration;
- The Hitler/Stalin Non-Aggression Pact and the subsequent joint invasion of Poland in September 1939 as allies;
- The Katyn massacre of Polish officers (1940);
- Soviet mass deportations of millions during WWII;
- Medical experiments in the Soviet GULAG comparable to those in the Nazi concentration camps.
Video Essays: World War II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis and the West (1 page essay on each episode)
Exceptional six part BBC documentary series based on archival information obtained after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Shows the true barbaric nature of the conflict and the duplicity of all major leaders by dramatic reenactments of behind the scenes meetings.
Episode 1 examines the back story of the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, the Battle of Poland together with the planning and start of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union of 1941.
Episode 2 explores the relationship between the Soviet Union and Great Britain during the war, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and Allied plans for a Western front in Europe.
Episode 3 features the Moscow Conference between Stalin and Churchill and two battles on the Eastern Front: Stalingrad and Kursk.
Episode 4 covers the Tehran Conference, the first between the "Big Three;" the D-Day Normandy invasion in France; and the Warsaw Uprising in Poland.
Episode 5 details the Battle of Normandy, the Battle of the Bulge, the Yalta Conference, the push to Berlin, and the victory over Germany from the perspective of Allied nations.
Episode 6 focuses on Operation August Storm, the end to the Pacific War, the Potsdam Conference, the fall from grace of Zhukov and Molotov, the 1953 death of Stalin, to the eventual fall of communist influence with the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Video Essay: Selling Murder: The Killing Films of the Third Reich (1 page essay)
Analyze the Nazi Aktion T4 system of "euthanasia" (systematic murder) of the disabled and handicapped in the days leading up to World War II.
Video Essay: Nazi's Secret Killing Squads (1 page essay)
Analyze the Nazi SS Einsatzgruppen (special action squads) murderous activities in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union killing over 1.1 million persons in this first stage of the Holocaust.
Video Essay: Memory of the Camps (2 page reflective essay on what you thought and felt while viewing this powerful documentary)
This is the most important film you will ever see. Filmed by British, American, and Soviet forces in 1945 as the Nazi concentration and death camps were liberated. The searing graphic images are horrific. The wry ironic narration by the late Trevor Howard perfectly magnifies this horror.
Video Essay: One Survivor Remembers (1 page essay)
Describe the ordeal of Holocaust survivor Gerda Weissman Klein in World War II.
Video Essay: America and the Holocaust: Deceit and Indifference (3 page essay)
Complex social and political factors shaped FDR's and America's response to the Holocaust, from "Kristallnacht" in 1938 through the liberation of the death camps in 1945. For a short time, the US had an opportunity to open its doors, but instead erected a "paper wall," a bureaucratic maze that prevented all but a few Jewish refugees from entering the country. It was not until 1944, that a small band of Treasury Department employees forced the government to respond. Analyze how Antisemitism, political opportunism, and bureaucratic inertia were major factors in the United States tardy efforts to rescue the Jews of Europe from Nazi genocide.
Video Essay: Dr. Josef Mengele (1 page essay)
Describe the role of "the Angel of Death" in the Holocaust.
Video Essay: Hitler's American Business Partners (1 page essay)
This documentary uncovers the unholy alliance between Nazi Germany and some of the biggest corporations in the US — companies which were indispensable for Hitler to wage war. Henry Ford, the automobile manufacturer; James D Mooney, the General Motors manager; and Thomas Watson, the IBM boss were all awarded the Grand Cross of the German Eagle — the Nazi’s highest distinction for foreigners for their services to the Third Reich. Of course, many American corporations were also actively engaged in building up the Soviet military-industrial complex during the interwar period. Describe how War is the health of the State (and its corporatist adjuncts).
Video Essay: WWII Summary (1 page essay)
Summarize and evaluate the impact of World War II in Europe.
Video Essay: Hitler Lives! (1 page essay)
Describe how that as long as racism, intolerance, and hatred exists - Hitler lives
Video Essay: The Rape of Nanking (1 page essay)
Describe "the Rape of Nanking" by Japanese troops in December 1937 murdering over 250,000 persons and raping 60,000 women and girls.
Video Essay: Horror in the East (3 page essay)
Analyze the horrific chain of events throughout Asia and the Pacific by Japanese military forces in their conquests and ultimate defeat in World War II.