Here were to be the remaining World History assignments for the remaining days of this second semester. But teachers have received instructions that there Will NOT Be Any New Assignments to students to be graded and recorded on Power School (only late/make-up assignments from prior to Spring Break. This list below is for your own educational information purposes only to see how World History was shaped after World War II. There will be No Extra Credit given for these assignments.
Video Essay: CNN Cold War: Comrades 1917-1945 - Documentary (1 page essay)
Analyze the growth of communism from the Russian Revolution in 1917 to the end of World War II in 1945.
Video Essay: CNN Cold War: Iron Curtain 1945-1947 - Documentary (1 page essay)
Discuss the beginnings of the Cold War tensions between the Soviet Bloc and the free world.
Video Essay: CNN Cold War: Marshall Plan 1947-1952 - Documentary (1 page essay)
Discuss the origins and consequences of the United States financial plan to aid European Recovery after WWII
Video Essay: The CIA and the Nazis - Documentary (1 page essay)
Analyze the covert US policy of the use of former Nazis for intelligence purposes against the Soviet Bloc after WWII.
Video Essay: CNN Cold War: Reds 1948-1953 - Documentary (1 page essay)
Discuss the domestic consequences in the United States of the Cold War and "McCarthyism."
Video Essay: Messengers From Moscow: The East Is Red (1 page essay)
Discuss the myth of monolithic communism and the rise of the People's Republic of China under Mao Zedong, the Korean War, and the Sino-Soviet Split between China and the Soviet Union.
Video Essay: Seeds of the Sixties (1 page essay)
Evaluate how this episode establishes the political and social context of the sixties generation. Examines the young parents of the 1950's in pursuit of the American Dream, their values shaped by the Depression, World War II, the Cold War and McCarthyism. Looks at how their children's generation began to bond together in rebellion against a restrictive set of societal rules, shaping the decade to come. Additionally it shows what life was like for blacks as the civil rights movement emerged.
Video Essay: We Can Change the World (1 page essay)
Evaluate how this episode examines the heady idealism of the 1960's when it seemed possible that youth could change the world; when more teenagers entered college than ever before; when John F. Kennedy inspired social and political activism on both the left and the right; and when the civil rights movement reached a peak of influence, involvement and momentum.
Video Essay: JFK: A President Betrayed (2 page essay)
Narrated by Academy Award winner Morgan Freeman, “JFK: A President Betrayed” uncovers shocking evidence that reveals how President John F. Kennedy, early in his term as president in 1961, felt entrapment, that he had been misled by his military and intelligence advisors regarding the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Because of this betrayal he was determined to constantly be on guard regarding subsequent strategic advice issued to him.
After his confrontational June 1961 Vienna Summit meeting with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, later that year in September Kennedy under took a bold initiative and introduced at the Sixteenth General Assembly of the United Nations a Program for General and Complete Disarmament in a Peaceful World.
Conversely the national security establishment (particularly the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff and CIA) believed, not in disarmament but in a nuclear first strike policy against the Soviet Union, and that JFK was naive and lacked determination and resolve in his opposition to this apocalyptic doomsday scenario. On March 13, 1962 the JCS submitted Operation Northwoods as a pretext for a Cuban Invasion.
This war between JFK and the military intensified following the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. Pentagon leaders such as Air Force chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay believed the peaceful resolution of the Crisis was not Kennedy’s finest hour but had been appeasement of the Soviets and the worst disaster in American history.
JFK proceeded to embark on secret back channel peace efforts with Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro and was determined to get out of Vietnam despite intense opposition inside his own government.
“The Peace Speech” — JFK Commencement Address at American University, June 10, 1963.
To the deep state, this was treason.
It all came to an end on November 22, 1963, when an insidious coup d’état by Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson and the highest echelons of the National Security State was accomplished with the brutal murder of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas.
Video Essay: Why Was JFK Killed ? (1 page essay)
Douglas P. Horne served as head of the military records team on the Assassination Records Review Board, the independent federal agency established by Congress in the 1990s to secure release of long-secret official records relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Horne played an instrumental role in locating and securing the release of U.S. military records on Cuba and Vietnam policy from 1961 through 1964. He is the author of the five-volume book Inside the Assassination Records Review Board: The U.S. Government’s Final Attempt to Reconcile the Conflicting Medical Evidence in the Assassination of JFK (2009) and the author of FFF’s bestselling ebook JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated (2014). He also made a 6 1/2 hour video presentation entitled “Altered History: Exposing Deceit and Deception in the JFK Assassination Evidence,” which has now received 240,000 views. Horne, who served as chief analyst of military records at the Assassination Records Review Board, presents his theories of why President Kennedy was assassinated by the top echelon of the national security state.
Video Essay: CNN Cold War: Vietnam 1954-1968 -- Documentary (1 page essay)
Analyze how the French defeat by Vietminh communist forces at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu (which brought an end to the First Indochina War, 1946-1954) created a power vacuum in Vietnam which the United States attempted to fill until peace negotiations began in 1968.
Video Essay: 1968 (1 page essay)
Detail the impact of how events such as the Vietnamese Tet Offensive, the insurgent presidential campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy against incumbent Lyndon Johnson, Johnson's announcement of his refusal to seek re-election, the assassination of Martin Luther King, the rise of the counter-culture and student protests at Columbia University, the Parisian student-led revolution in France in May, the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the police riot at the Democratic National convention, the massacre of protesters in Mexico City, the Prague uprising, the insurgent presidential campaign of George Wallace, and the presidential race between Republican Richard Nixon and Democrat Hubert Humphrey, made 1968 the pivotal year which shaped a generation of Americans.
Video Essay: The Secret Government - The Constitution In Crisis -- Documentary. (2 page essay)
This acclaimed PBS documentary is Bill Moyer's 1987 scathing critique of the criminal subterfuge carried out by the Executive Branch of the United States Government to implement covert operations which are clearly contrary to the wishes and values of the American people. This film discusses how the "secret government" has no constitution; the rules it follows are the rules it makes up. It also compares and contrasts the Watergate Scandal and the Iran-Contra Affair as detailed in the film.
Video Essay: Cold War: The Wall Comes Down (1 page essay)
Describe how the pivotal events of 1989 in Eastern Europe began the process of ending the Cold War confrontation between the Soviet Bloc and the Western democracies.
Video Essay: CNN Cold War: The End of the Cold War - Documentary (1 page essay)
Gorbachev and Bush meet at Malta in December 1989 to consider the recent dramatic events. Only the previous week the Communist government resigned in Czechoslovakia; and shortly Nicolae Ceaușescu would be deposed and executed in the bloody Romanian Revolution. Gorbachev permits German reunification and removes Soviet troops from Europe, but fails to secure financial support from the West. As the Soviet economy collapses, Gorbachev faces opposition from both reformers and hardliners.
Video Essay: Hijacking Catastrophe (1 page essay)
Evaluate how the horrific events on September 11, 2001 changed America and the world.
Video Essay: The Iraq War (1 page essay)
Evaluate the information presented in this documentary of interviews with varied U.S officials and intelligence experts who offer a deconstruction of the Bush administration's case for war in Iraq in the wake of 9/11.