WRITING GUIDELINES

On the midterm, the written presentation of the essay was not a consideration. On the out of class essay, it is. Be sure to review your final draft before turning it into turnitin.com.

To fall into the A category, the essay has the following characteristics: demonstrate superior control of syntax and vocabulary, engage in sophisticated prose, fully explore ideas and offer effective examples and analysis, represent strong analytical thinking and precise logic, and be virtually free of errors.

Essays falling in the B category will have solid examples and some analytical reasoning, ideas that are explored with some relevant analysis, a variety of sentence types and use of precise vocabulary, and be largely free of errors.

Essays that fall into the C category will have flawed or imprecise thinking, ineffective connections between ideas or critical connections that are unexplored, some organizational weakness to the paragraphs, and marginal awkwardness or imprecision to the prose. Errors in the C paper will be noticeable but will not obscure meaning.

Essays in the D category will show flawed thinking or a lack of an original argument, mention ideas without exploring them, provide sweeping generalities rather with little or no analysis, have paragraph and structural weaknesses that disrupt the essay’s fluency, and have simplistic vocabulary and frequent errors that impede meaning.

In terms of how to write the essay that is due next Friday, consider the following ideas.

1. STRIVE FOR SIGNIFICANCE! Do not just describe the what. We practice deep thinking every day, and even if the participation has not been all that widespread this quarter, you probably notice that students make good claims based on the questions in class. Pay attention to those questions and responses. And how often is the question a what, when, or who question? It is usually something like this: what is the meaning of this source, event, image, or document? You MUST STRIVE FOR MEANING in your writing. When you write academic essays, you are supposed to be offering a thesis and providing evidence that suggests why your thesis is correct. If you are having trouble creating a thesis, it means you need to do more reading on the subject. Then, test your thesis: can you disagree with it? If not, then it is no good.

2. EDIT LIKE CRAZY! Do not allow yourself to turn in a final draft that has a single typo, misspelled word, missing capital letter or period, or any other simple editing mistake. Simple editing mistakes will be penalized with great severity. Now, I am not talking about comma errors—those are more difficult to learn. But if you turn in a finished product that is edited in a sloppy way, do not expect any grade above a D.

SOME SIMPLE EDITING ISSUES THAT MIGHT FALL INTO THE PET PEEVE CATEGORY FOR SCHMOLL:

1.      “would of” versus  “would have”….there is NO SUCH THING AS WOULD OF!!!! Never ever write “would of” again;

2.     it’s versus its…This is a simple editing issue. It’s always means it is;

3.     With quotes, the period goes inside the quote, “like this.”

4.     You need a comma before the “and” in a list. I have friends named Tim, Bill, and Pam;

5.     The word very is very bad…okay, seriously, this is not a major issue, but just stop using the word very. (In fact, one goal in life should be to stop using adverbs: “I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs.” Stephen King);

6.     1960s is correct. There is not apostrophe there (1960’s is incorrect);

7.     Fragments are basic writing errors. Fragments sometimes occur unexpectedly in history papers because of the misuse of colons or semi-colons. For instance, check out the following:

The subjects I will study will be: art, history, and music. (that is a fragment)

The subjects I will study will include: art, history, and music. (this too is a fragment)

The subjects I will study will include the following: art, history, and music. (NOT A FRAGMENT)

8.     Run-ons. These are not as grammatically serious as fragments, but you should be slowly excising all run-ons from your written world.

Finally, since we do not have class next week, you have ample opportunity to get help.

YOU ALREADY PAY FOR IT. So use it.

GRAMMAR SUPPORT

You pay to have access to mywritinglabsplus. So use it! This is a program that will help you identify and target your specific grammar flaws.

Also, through this program you can send someone your essay and have it revised. It can be a great resource. Here is the contact info:  http://www.csub.edu/mwl/

RUN-ONS: Finally, one common issue at this level is the run-on sentence. Here is a way to understand it and fix it:  http://depts.dyc.edu/learningcenter/owl/run-ons.htm

Finally, feel free to email me next week as you go through the writing process. I will have access to email all week long.

WEEK EIGHT CLASS WORK

For the week that I am gone, I have devised a plan for you to be fully enveloped in historical thinking, so that you do not miss the class too much. Here is what you get to do during that week:

1.     WATCH ONE CRASH COURSE VIDEO:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9HjvHZfCUI

USA vs USSR Fight! The Cold War: Crash Course World History #39.

ANSWER THIS QUESTION AND BRING IT TO CLASS WITH YOU: While watching this video, answer the following question: How was Germany a battleground during the Cold War?

2.     WATCH ONE VIDEO ABOUT THE BERLIN WALL:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=KQ88UEOxtZc

ANSWER THIS QUESTION AND BRING IT TO CLASS WITH YOU:  Who is Robert Lochner? Who is Brigitte Flunker? Write one sentence about each.

That is it.  Bring these answers with you to class, typed or written out. 

POST TOTAL WAR EUROPE: Total War and the remaking of the Nation State

“This was no slow decadence that came to the Europeanised world—other civilizations rolled and crumbled down; the European civilization was, as it were, blown up.”       HG Wells, War in the Air

I. PROBLEMS OF THE POST WAR WORLD:

A. REDIRECTED ECONOMIES:

Czechoslovakia , Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Bohemia-Moravia, and France all contributed to the German war effort

B. CHAOS:

1. DEATH:

36.5 million deaths from 1939-1945…no conflict killed so many so fast.

1 in 5 dead in Poland,

            1 in 8 dead in Yugoslavia,

1 in 11 in USSR,

1 in 14 in Greece

(just by contrast, 1/15 in GR, 1/77 in France, 1/125 in GB)

2. DESTRUCTION:

Of 12,000 train engines in pre-war France, only 2800 were in service after the war.

Yugoslavia lost 25% of its vineyards, 50% of its livestock, 60% of its roads, 75%  of its bridges, 35% of its industrial wealth.

25 million were homeless in the Soviet Union.

20 million homeless in Germany, 500,000 in Hamburg alone.

3. RAPE:

87,000 women in Vienna …more in Berlin

Milovan Djilas, a fervent Communist who worked with Tito in Yugoslavia, reported the atrocities to Stalin..

Stalin replied, “Does Djilas, who is himself a writer, know what human suffering and the human heart are? Can’t he understand the soldier who has gone through blood and fire and death, if he has fun with a woman or takes a trifle?”

200,000 “Russian babies” were born between 1945-1946.

II. SOLUTIONS IN THE POST WAR WORLD:

A. ORGANIZATIONS:

1. United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration

(UNRRA)

1945: 227 UNRRA camps in Germany, 25 in Austria, a handful elsewhere.

1947: 762 camps caring for 6,795,000 people…

2. International Refugee Organisation (IRO)

            U.S. share=46%

            U.K. share=15%

            France share=4%

3. Moving people…

WORLD WAR ONE=MOVING BORDERS

WORLD WAR TWO=MOVING PEOPLE

Ancient diasporas of Europe shriveled and disappeared—Greeks and Turks in the south Balkans, Italians in Dalmatia, Hungarians in Transylvania, Poles in Volhynia(Ukraine), Lithuania and Bukovina, Germans from the Baltic to the Black Sea and from the Rhine to the Volga all either back home or dead.

Can you imagine any problems with moving all of these European peoples back to their homelands after the war?

By the end of May, 1945, the British Army turned 10,000 Slovenian soldiers and civilians who had fled to Austria over to Yugoslav authorities…they were put in trucks, driven south to the Kocevje forests and shot.

III. UNTANGLING ALLIANCES:

The Baltic…many had welcomed the Wehrmacht

The Balkans…WW II was experienced as a civil war.

Croatia: Ante Pavelic’s Ustase Regime in Croatia…murdered 200,000 Serbs and Muslims

Mihajlovic’s Serb Royalist Partisans also killed Muslims.

All of the different types of war in WW Two meant that the war in Europe did not end in 1945…

IV. REMOVING THE NAZI WITHIN:

A. Punishing collaborators (real and imagined):

1.  Punishing Political Traitors…

Edouard Herriot: “France will need first to pass through a blood bath before republicans can again take up the reins of power.”

Emilia-Romagna and Lombardy: 15,000 killed

Belgium: 265 were lynched

Norway: Nasjonal Sammlung party was tried: 17,000 guilty

10,000 were killed in France in extra judicial proceedings.

Courts in France sentenced 6762 people to death.

791 death sentences were carried out.

The main punishment for the French was called “National degradation.”

The sarcastic writer Janet Flanner quipped, “National degradation will consist of being deprived of nearly everything the French consider nice—such as the right to be a lawyer, notary, public school teacher, judge or witness and above all the right to be a director of an insurance company or a bank.”

49,723 people received this punishment…11,000 civil servants removed from office…a civil service purge (epuration)

International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (1945-1946)

TWO MAJOR FAILINGS:

1.      Soviet presence…

George Kennan: “The only implication this procedure could convey was that such crimes were justifiable and forgivable when committed by the leaders of one government, under one set of circumstances, but unjustifiable and unforgivable, and to be punish by death, when committed by another government under another set of circumstances.”

2.      Overly personal nature of the charges…

2. Punishing the Feminine Traitor:

Thousands of women were accused of "collaboration horizontale."

“Ugly carnival”…the desexualisation of the victim

Many women were falsely accused of being a “mattress for the boches"

Others did indeed “collaborate” sexually with Germans…

Why might that be an appealing choice?

German writer Ernst Jünger: "food is power"

20,000 women had their heads shaved…80,000 children fathered by Wehrmacht soldiers.

B. Punishing “Resistance”

            Poland and Ukraine

C. De-Nazification

Germans were categorized as Major Offenders, Offenders, Lesser Offenders, Followers and Exonerated Persons.

Americans took over 37 newspapers, 6 radio stations, 314 theatres, 642 cinemas, 101 magazines, 237 book publishers, 7384 book dealers and printers.

30,000 books were banned.

In Italy, the questionnaire read “Were you a Fascist?”

394,000 government employees investigated…most claimed “gattopardismo” (leopardism or changing spots)

IN CONCLUSION…

History 206 Paper Assignment

WARNING!!! This is not intended to be a re-telling of the books. I have read them both many times, so instead of describing “what” happened, analyze the meaning of what happened.

In a well-crafted 3-5 page essay (typed, double-spaced) you have the opportunity to answer one of the following questions.

For each question, you may want to consult some sources other than Levi, Solzhenitsyn, and class notes. You should feel free to read scholarly journals, other books, magazines, or even movie interpretations of this time period.

This essay will be uploaded to turnitin.com. (class id 9934682, password history)

DUE DATE: Friday, May 22

1.     FOOD: How important was food in the holocaust and in the gulag? Use Survival in Auschwitz and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, as well as any other relevant source, to explore the role of food in detention and death.

2.     RULES: Consider the rules of the Gulag and the rules of Auschwitz. Was resistance possible in such dominating systems?

3.     ATTITUDE: Holocaust survivor and renowned psychologist Victor Frankl said, "We who lived in the concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man or woman but one thing: the last of human freedoms to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's way."
Considering the experiences of Primo Levi and of the story of Ivan Denisovich, evaluate the validity of Frankl's statement. Would Primo Levi or Alexander Solzhenitsyn agree that certain shreds of human dignity might remain even in something like the Holocaust or the Gulag?

4.     RESILIENCE: Levi writes, “Man’s capacity to dig himself in, to secrete a shell, to build around himself a tenuous barrier of defence, even in apparently desperate circumstances, is astonishing.” (56) Considering the experiences of Primo Levi and of the story of Ivan Denisovich, evaluate the validity of Frankl's statement.

5.     YOUR OWN: Create your own theme, comparing some element from the two books. Clear this topic with me before moving forward.