Post date: Nov 30, 2011 4:25:38 PM
Hi All,
I was just looking at Assignment 11 in Unit 4, Human Rights Project, and have decided to change the requirements for this assignment. The original requires you to write a report on human rights and I fail to see how this has anything to do with the Civil War, so I altered the assignment. Here is the new topic:
America lost more men in the Civil War than in any other war it has ever participated in, and the battles fought in this war are still the largest battles ever fought in the Western Hemisphere. In addition to producing massive casualties, the Civil War was a brutal struggle, producing some of the highest casualty rates ever seen in war before or since. Write a 5 paragraph essay on the scope and brutality of the Civil War, which mobilized more men than any conflict before it and would not be topped in scope and brutality until WWI. Some suggestions for how to organize your essay:
Pick three major battles of the Civil War and describe their scope and brutality: how many men fought? how many casualties? what was the cost in material?
Pick three reasons the Civil War was massive and brutal and organize your essay around this.
Describe three aspects of the Civil War-you could include treatment of prisoners in camps such as Andersonville; The Wilderness Campaign or Sherman's March to the Sea; the blockade on the South and how it affected them, etc-and organize your essay around these.
The Ken Burns Civil War films will provide rich detail for your essay and definitely should be used as a resource for this assignment, especially the two included in this unit.
Please let me know if you have any questions on this and/or if you would like me to do a live class to cover this essay topic. Sorry to change things around, but I feel that essays written in a Civil War class should actually be about the Civil War, what a crazy idea!
Trehal