The 2011-2012 school year has begun for students, and the National History Day program is making its appearance in classrooms in Louisiana and all around the country. All fifty states participate in this program which culminates in a National Contest at the University of Maryland. This year’s theme, Revolution, Reaction, Reform in History offers many possibilities. As I’ve made a few rounds to classrooms around Louisiana, I’ve encountered many topics that demonstrate the creativity of our students.
One group of 7th grade students has decided to focus on the revolutionary Po-Boy sandwich. The students are planning on attending the New Orleans Po-Boy Preservation Festival to listen to the lectures and panel discussions that accompany the festival. Changes in popular music or clothing seem to be appealing topics this year. Students in several parishes have mentioned these. Studying these changes will lead students to analyzing changes in American society in the 1920s and 1960s.
As always, World War II projects will have a significant presence at all History Day contests this year. Students that I’ve heard from are looking at the transformation of Germany from Weimar Republic into Nazi totalitarianism. Others are looking at the development of nuclear weapons and how their presence has revolutionized diplomacy and military strategy. Higgins Boats as a topic has been an intriguing topic by students in the past, usually after a visit to the National WWII Museum.
Here’s what our victory garden looks like today. In less than two weeks it will be teeming with volunteers, plants and seedlings!
We are less than two weeks away from planting a victory garden on site at the museum! During World War II when 40% of the nation’s vegetables came from victory gardens, magazines and periodicals were full of recipes to use that garden produce. Check some out below! (more…)
The National WWII Museum is a terrific resource for teachers. In addition to our teacher workshops and lesson plans, we have many programs for teachers both local and nationwide. We would like to hear from you about what lesson plans, programs, and Virtual Field Trips you want the Museum to create for you and your students.
When you take our survey, you’ll be entered to win a FREE Virtual Field Trip or Operation Footlocker artifact trunk (your choice) for your class. With our Virtual Field Trips, students connect with one of our Museum educators via web to discuss topics like D-Day, science and technology in the war, or life on the Home Front. With an Operation Footlocker artifact trunk shipped to your classroom, your students don white gloves and learn how historians piece together the story of WWII. Don’t forget to check the survey thank you page for a way to earn extra entries in the drawing and increase your chance of winning!
The philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote that Churchill was “the largest man of our times,” and a brief acquaintance with Churchill’s long life and career bears out this claim. In his lifetime Churchill was a heroic war leader and Prime Minister, a foot soldier and a First Lord of the Admiralty, a Member of Parliament and a Chancellor of the Exchequer. He played polo, hunted big game in Africa, and gambled in Monte Carlo; he was a loving husband and an indulgent father. Before he was forty he saw war as a journalist in Cuba, as a cavalry officer in Sudan, and was a POW in South Africa. He modernized the prewar Navy and served as an officer in the Great War trenches in France. He was a noted historian and won the Nobel Prize for literature.
But politics and writing were ultimately serious work and business for Churchill. Writing served to promote and support his political life; it was an extension of his career and influence. While he proliferated in both pathways, success did not always come easily. In particular, writing extracted effort on his part, and was a necessary employment for the financial support of his family. He enjoyed the delights of conversation and the dinner table, but these were also tied to his career interests. Being passionately devoted to his career, he did not engage in hobbies which appeared to have little utility in promoting his career efforts.
After the failure of the Gallipoli campaign appeared to have ended his political career in 1915, the “Muse of Painting” appeared to rescue Churchill from his deepest bout of “Black Dog” (the nickname he gave his deep depressions). His cousin introduced him to watercolors while in the garden at Hoe Farm. Churchill at first timidly attempted to apply paint to the canvas; when he realized that the canvas would not strike back, he entered whole-heartedly into the effort. Being Winston Churchill, a man who did things for history, naturally he early began to paint in oils. Painting was the one activity which he did for the sheer pleasure, enjoyment, and challenge of the art, and without a political motive. It claimed his attention for the rest of his life, and was perhaps the surest method he had of relaxation.
Churchill's Study of Boats
Painting was not a frivolous delight to Churchill. Painting appealed to a very deep element in his personality, a serious and meaningful key to his being. Painting connected Churchill to the pursuit and creation of beauty in the world. Churchill the painter was a different man than the world had become accustomed to know. In this field, he eagerly sought advice and consultation, and was willing to take direction from others. In his political and literary talents, he was the supreme judge. But in his attitude towards painting, Churchill not only subordinated his will, but submitted to an inner light and higher power.
In the opinion of this writer, Churchill the painter communed and connected closely with an inner religious or philosophical spirit. He was not a practitioner of any orthodox religious faith. However, as a young man he had become aware of gaps in his knowledge and education which he had assiduously set out to correct. As a young subaltern in India, he had spent long hours reading in ancient history and philosophy. His readings in Gibbon and the Greek philosophers exposed him to the classical ideals of truth, beauty, and the good. These he sought in his painting through his explorations of colors and nature.
Churchill's goldfish pond at Chartwell
Churchill the painter became quite committed and accomplished in his hobby. He eventually built a painting studio on the grounds of his home. In the mid-1920s, Churchill anonymously submitted some of his work to a public exhibit, where he gained recognition from some of Britain’s leading art critics (who were surprised when they learned the identity of the artist). One of the critics observed that Churchill painted from a deep, calm part of his soul.
This was an accurate insight. Painting was the one activity that he performed completely in silence, and it melted away his anxieties, allowing him to lose himself in the study of colors and nature. Churchill did not paint pictures which connected to his political or military life, such as portraits of his contemporaries. With the exception of a few early canvases from his wartime service at “Plug Street” in France, as his troops referred to their headquarters, he did not paint scenes of violence, death or war. He preferred landscapes and seascapes, full of color and natural life. He painted nature: mountains, seas, sunsets, forests, rivers. When man did intervene in Churchill’s paintings, it was usually in the form of an artwork: a china Buddha, a stone sculpture in a windswept garden, ancient Roman aqueducts and Greek ruins, bridges spans crossing waters, boats awaiting to set sail. And he painted the personal things which adorned the central pleasure of his life: his home. He painted few portraits, but painted those he loved, such as his wife Clementine. He painted the flowers, bottles, and vases which adorned his beloved house, Chartwell, especially the landscapes surrounding the house and overlooking the weald of Kent.
Chartwell in the 1930s
A man in a hurry most of his life, the muse of painting stilled and becalmed Churchill’s sense of the passage of time and life, of the movements of history. It centered and brought out his spiritual conviction of the immutability of nature, and the joy of living in the natural world. And it reinforced the moral structure in his nature that compelled him to stand firm in his ultimate contest against the failed painter who wished to create a new world through destruction and death, Adolf Hitler. Winston Churchill’s hobby gives us a remarkable and clear insight into the man himself, and into the nature of how truth, beauty and the good lie within all.
Dr. Keith Huxen is the Senior Director of Research and History at The National WWII Museum.
National History Day is an academically proven program that reaches more than 600,000 students a year. Students can research any topic they chose in any area of history. They produce papers, documentaries, exhibits, dramatic performances, and web sites. The National WWII Museum is proud to serve as Louisiana’s official state sponsor and offer guidance to students from all across the country on WWII-themed projects. Students can access the Museum’s resources through the Museum’s NHD Assistance Page and receive guidance from Museum educators on their topic.
This year’s NHD theme, Revolution, Reaction, Reform in History, offers students a range of options for WWII topics. Sample topics listed on our web site include major changes to the Olympics made by the planners of the 1936 Games in Berlin and the changes to warfare enabled by the Higgins Boats. In addition, students could choose to look at how naval battles were forever changed with the use of aircraft carriers in the Pacific. A student less interested in battles could focus on revolutionary changes in American industry during the war or FDR’s Executive Order 8802 which forbade discrimination in industries with defense contracts.
Picture this scene: a man stands up to speak his mind at a community meeting. He’s not a town leader or a wealthy businessman. He’s a farmer, or a truck driver, or maybe a factory worker. But at this civic gathering, he delivers his opinion with the knowledge that his right to speak his mind is ingrained in the law of the land. It’s a simple scene, but one that Norman Rockwell seared into the American consciousness as part of his 1943 “Four Freedoms” series.
Today, the Museum opens a special exhibit titled Roosevelt, Rockwell, and the Four Freedoms: America’s Slow March from Isolation to Action (September 2—November 13). This exhibit explores a lesser-known side of WWII history—the time period before Pearl Harbor, when Americans debated what to do about the wars in Europe and Asia. From the Neutralities Acts passed in the mid 1930s to “Cash and Carry” to the Lend Lease program, American politicians, newspaper editors, community leaders, and everyday Americans argued between isolation and intervention, between staying out and helping out. As President Roosevelt became convinced that the United States must aid Great Britain in its solitary fight against Nazi Germany, he knew he needed to provide a moral justification to persuade his fellow Americans to go along. In his January 6, 1941, State of the Union Address, he spoke of a post-war world where four freedoms reigned: Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear. That speech and the ever-more frightening realities on the ground in Europe helped usher in a more aggressive anti-Nazi, pro British foreign policy. Two years later, with the United States in the war, popular American artist Norman Rockwell turned Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms into four iconic paintings, which in turn were turned into four of the best known American propaganda posters of WWII.
Come see these original posters, a timeline of pre-war American foreign policy, and a provocative audio-visual presentation that will get you thinking about whether Mr. Roosevelt’s vision has come true or not.
German troops march through Warsaw, September 1939 (Photo courtesy of the National Archives)
72nd Anniversary of The Invasion of Poland — 1 September 1939
War in Europe began with the German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, followed by the Soviet invasion on 17 September. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had attempted to avoid war with Germany through the policy of appeasement. He believed that in giving Hitler certain—and one might add very generous—concessions regarding German expansion and annexation, particularly regarding the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia, that he would stop where he was.
Once again– it’s Worker Wednesday! This light-hearted report from the June 16, 1944 issue of The Higgins Worker describes an embarassing shop floor incident and shows that the workers can handle anything that comes their way.
The article reads:
In the face of all sorts of nearly disastrous difficulties, production goes on at Higgins Engine Company! We offer the above photo as proof. When George Damore met with an accident on his job― namely, the ripping of his trousers in a most embarrassing place, George nonchalantly backed up to the receptacle containing rags, resurrected the remnants of a tattered old bedspread from it and draped it, sarong-style, about the exposed portions of his anatomy.
Having lost but a few seconds, he returned to his machine and continued with his job while Louis Pechon, alias “Louis the Tailor” sat nearby and mended his pants.
We don’t know exactly how George managed to get the trousers back on without losing a little productive time―but when we passed the Tool Crib a few minutes after this picture was snapped, there was George working at his machine, and he was most conventionally garbed again. Louis was busily checking tools, minus thimble, needle and thread. The ragged bedspread, so lately a prop in “cheesecake” photography, was once again reposing in the rag container―forlorn and forgotten!
Here’s a sampling of stories featuring World War II references, veterans and more from today’s news. Almost 70 years later, it’s amazing to see what a big part of our daily lives the war is today.
A young boy and a bulldozer operator with the 64th Seabees drinking cokes in Tubabao, Samar, the Philippines. Gift of James L. Dale, The National WWII Museum Inc., 2003.083.059
Coca-Cola and the American Fighting Man in World War II
By the time the United States entered World War II in December 1941, Coca-Cola was already established as a symbol of the American way of life. In countless letters home, soldiers serving abroad spoke of fighting for the little things, like an ice cold Coke, rather than politics or ideology. In a mutually beneficial edict, Coca-Cola Company president Robert W. Woodruff declared that any American in uniform could get a Coke for 5¢, regardless of the listed price or cost of production. For the men serving overseas, however, a soda fountain had become a foreign concept; foreign, that is, until 1943 when Gen. Dwight Eisenhower sought to make the soda available to his soldiers as close to the battle front as possible.
