After seeing the Germans in Belgium and Crete, the Americans were quick to develop their own airborne forces. By the time of Normandy, June of 1944, there were two whole divisions trained in this special art. One of them, the 101st, was brand new to combat. Prior to combat, they had access to new technology and equipment that changed how they fought in combat. My research proposal is in regards to this equipment and how it changed during the Normandy campaign. Using AHEC and my own personal collection of primary and secondary sources, I am going to attempt to explain the average soldier was geared and his thoughts on the equipment he had as part of the evolution in airborne doctrine.
Category Archives: HIST204-Archive
Vive la mort, vive la guerre, vive le sacré mercenaire
Mercenary soldiers are hardly a new phenomenon on the world stage, but in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries they’ve acquired a new notability, starting with the large operations in the Congo and today with the booming private military contractor industry. My paper aims to take a look at the driving forces behind this resurgence of mercenary work, analyzing the evolution of modern mercenary soldiering from large-scale warfighting to more technical, consulting and security work, along with the motives and politics behind mercenary work.
My work will include primary sources from the Congo, Biafra, Angola, the Sierra Leone Civil War, and several other coups and operations. These sources are all easily attainable, and this paper ought to prove quite fun to write.
McCarthyism and the American People: A Paper Proposal
My paper proposal centers around McCarthyism. Inspired by Senator Joseph McCarthy, this was a movement which swept through all levels of American society in the 1950s, including academia, Hollywood, the military, and the government. People feared Communism and the atheism it threatened. McCarthy began this movement with his speech “Enemies from Within” on February 9th 1950.
My paper will not focus on the morality (or immorality) of Senator McCarthy or McCarthyism. Instead it will focus on the effects that this movement and his actions had. I will research the central Pennsylvania area and Washington DC to see how McCarthyism affected the average American and also the political spectrum. The central question to this paper is this: What did McCarthyism mean for the 1950s American?
A proposal: American missionary women in Asia
In previous assignments, I in part explored how North American women contributed to the U.S. project of economic and cultural imperialism in the Panama Canal Zone during the canal construction period. For our final project I’ve unwittingly fallen into a similar topic: I will be looking at the experiences of Protestant missionary women working in East Asia. I hope to contribute to the ongoing debate about whether or not these women were agents of U.S. cultural imperialism abroad by pulling from the letters of Dickinson graduate of 1911 and missionary doctor Julia Morgan. However, I am still struggling to limit the scope of my project and examine this popular topic from an original angle.
Paper Proposal
For my research topic I have decided to focus on United States Army medics in both World War One and Two. I plan on comparing and contrasting the training, equipment, and their effects on the combat experiences of Army medics in both World War One and World War Two. Medics were an integral part of the medical evacuation system and the first line of care for casualties prior to being sent to the rear field hospitals. For World War Two accounts I will be researching accounts from all theaters of combat the army medics were involved in. This is important for my research as the three theaters of World War Two are integral to the application of different adaptations the medics had to make, and the utilization of new medical technologies in relation to casualty rates. Relating to the combat experiences of the medics I will research the new innovations in both weaponry and medicine. Advances in medicine such as sulfa drugs and penicillin were both developed and mass produced in the 1930’s and 1940’s, and helped to decrease casualty rates due to bacterial infection and venereal disease. Through researching the different experiences of Army medics in both World War One and Two, I will be able to trace the evolution of the medics’ importance in the Army and changing experiences due to the differing warfare styles and medical innovations in both time periods.
Paper Proposal
For my final paper I have chosen to learn more about the Trout Gallery and how it has evolved since it was founded by Helen and Ruth Trout in 1983. The Trout Gallery currently owns over 6,000 pieces in its permanent art collection, as well as it loans art pieces to place on exhibit. The exhibits rotate on a frequent basis, which allows more opportunities to explore different types of artwork. The Trout Gallery is utilized by professors and students from Dickinson as well as regional schools. There are numerous opportunities to explore the exhibits that are displayed throughout the years.
I am specifically interested in comparing the economic status of the Trout Gallery. I would like to know how the Gallery handles its finances. Along with the finances, I am curious to know how they select pieces to be displayed in exhibits or to be apart of its permanent collection. I want to focus on the guidelines and requirements the Gallery has in the selection process.
Paper Proposal
For my final paper, I will be writing about the Dickinson Health Center, how it began, and how it has evolved into what it is today. It began in 1944 as the “Fink House”, which was purchased as a residence and turned into an infirmary.The Health center was unofficially named the Fink House after the long time director Oneta Fink. A few years later, the house was split into two sections, one for faculty residences, and the other as the infirmary. It was then moved into Drayer Hall, which at the time was an all women’s dormitory. It was stocked and able to respond to any students need, to include flu outbreaks which had broken out. As time progressed and the college continued to develop, I was very curious as to how the birth control and contraception were viewed, used, and distributed by the college to their students. Officially, in 1987 condoms were given out free of charge to both male and female students. In 2009, an article was published in the school paper, The Dickinsonian, which discussed the other types of contraceptives that would be available for students in the Health Center. In my opinion, this topic is very important and interesting to discuss because the Health Center is a place where students can go and discuss anything pertinent without their parents ever having knowledge if the student chooses. Students are actually required to sign a form to allow the Health Center to share information with parents. To see the progression and the development of the Health Center and the easy accessibility for students to get medicines, among other types of care, can make life much easier for college students.
Thinking about time….
Since reading E.P Thompson’s piece and discussing it in class today, along with the recent academic crunch, I have been feeling the pressure of time and to get things done. For me, time seems to be an artificial construct, something outside my person controlling me in a way that I want to resist, defend against, act outside of, but inevitably have to conform to its powerful tick tick ticking, like a beat to a metronome. We discussed how time changed, how humans conception of time changed with the industrial revolution and it became associated with a heightened sense of productivity and money. People internalized time, changing their behavior and their lifestyles. It has become so embedded in our beings, it is hard to imagine living outside of it, if that is even possible. The pressure to be always doing something with your time is more acute in the United States, at least how I see it. My experiences in Costa Rica, Argentina, Mexico and Cuba have offered me another perspective towards time. When you set a time to meet someone, often people show up anywhere from fifteen minutes to an hour later! In Costa Rica, we joked, there was “Tico time” – another perception of time. People show up “late” or aren’t so worried about being their “on time”. People enjoy coffee or mate in Argentina, converse for hours on end and are not rushed like Americans, grabbing starbucks on their way to the next thing.
Personally, I enjoy the more relaxed nature of these Latin American cultures and not the rushed, manic rat race that takes over our lives. I think there is something important to be said about taking time to reflect about our lives, relationships, world problems, philosophical problems, or just to shoot the shit. Even faff about, read the paper over a cup of tea. In the end, I think it boils down to how we perceive time individually. Obviously, society’s perception of time as a whole effects us, how advertisements and structures such as school and other external factors shapes our lives. However, one can escape this tick ticking of the dictator clock- if not escape it, then not be dominated by it, or controlled by it. Anyways, food for thought.
I was talking with my friend, and he sent me this opinion article, relevant to our discussion. Take a look: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/on-modern-time/
Reflections on Reading
I want to start with the Past and Present reading on Time. The theme that seems to be running through this class most often is that of relativity. In this article, Thompson is arguing many things, one of which is that even time is relative. He uses the example of a group of people who do not have any notion of the word time, and simply go about their day without it. Thompson also proves that with the development of industrialization, time began to equal money, which lead to the importance of time.
I thought this article was fascinating because in my previous semester spent in England, the biggest difference I noted in cultures was the relationship to time. In England, the streets were crowded with business people all hours of the day, every day of the week. My friends and I joked that no one seemed to work in England. American’s always need to have three things to do, they cannot simply sit and enjoy: this would be considered wasting valuable time. Thompson addresses this by noting how American’s perfected working with time long ago with Henry Ford. Why is it that the English seem so ambivalent to the passing of time (they can sit in a crowded park for hours just sitting or talking), while American’s still rigorously believe that time is money?
While I could not relate to the second article as much as to the first, I did still find it interesting. Holquist makes a point to differentiate between policing and surveillance, two words that I previously assumed meant the same thing. I think the stigma in the United States and Europe is that surveillance, especially by the government, is a horrible thing. In this article, however, Holquist argues that in Soviet and pre-Soviet Russia, the point of surveillance was not to monitor, but rather to figure out the moods of their citizens, as well as to help shape their citizens into better people. Holquist also argues that information moved in two separate ways in Russia. He says not only did information move from the people to the government, but also the other way around. I think this is an interesting opinion and one that we do not get usually in America.
Holquist’s final point that he makes in this article is that the use of mass surveillance really blossomed in the Second World War for many reasons. Holquist says one of the main reasons was because governments (not just Russia’s) wanted to see how their soldiers on the front lines were feeling about the war and in general. This mass surveillance shifted after the war, however, and moved from not just soldiers but to every citizen in the country as far as Russia is concerned. This second article left me with many questions, but they are all due in part to my lack of knowledge in Russian history. I was impressed with both author’s obvious enthusiasm for their topics, and found new, interesting topics discussed in both.
Surveillance in Russia
Holquist takes his argument and focuses on USSR and their plans to monitor the mood in Russia. His organization was very solid, keeping the flow and had breaks in the different thoughts, but how he views his sources presents a little concern for me. I personally did not notice any vetting of the sources because in Mother Russia (like anywhere else), there is a tendency to either emphasis or ignore particular aspects of what was going on. For example, there are issues of validity in countries such as Russia where there is censorship and even self-censorship on the management (and surveillance) levels.
Holquist continues on to revisit that idea of Imperial Russia compared to the other powers during World War I. In my World War I class with Professor Sweeney, we discussed ideas such as these, especially regarding communication home. For example, the troops would often be issued form letters to send home just to let their parents know they were alive, which they would sign and send; which in turn, alleviated some of the burden on the censors. The French, on the other side, used imported laborers to help keep their factories in production. These laborers would send letters home describing their working conditions in some of the most risky jobs and the chance that the stories of people being sent to the front (for one reason or another). It wasn’t until they tried to draft 25,000 Algerians to work in France that they realized the letters being sent home by the workers needed censored or they would never find enough workers in the colonies volunteering to come work in France. As a whole, the idea of censorship seems to be both beneficial (for the controlling state) but at the same time, a waste of resources and manpower because it is obvious when citizens become unhappy with the state, just like they did with the Revolution of 1905 and again in the Russian Revolution.