Unit 7: Part 1

1. Unit 7: Part 1 Remembering the Wars

2. Catastrophe of Epic Dimensions: WWII • Never before had so many fought • Never before had such whole-sale slaughter occurred. • Ends in 1945 • 78 million had died

3. Nazi’s • Rose to power during the Great Depression • Targeted certain groups • During this time approximately 6 million Jews were systematically murdered. • Known as the Holocaust

4. Literature • Explains roots of racial hatred • Unsatisfactory and temporary truces • Recalls men who died • Recalls the US reaction: fearful • Terror of different types of warfare • Speaks of the sympathy for the common people, and reflects the POV of the fighting soldier

5. Vietnam • At the start of WWII, Americans were mostly supportive. • Twenty years later… • Vietnam split the American people apart • It bred domestic conflict unseen since the Civil War. • People marched in the streets demanding and end to the war

6. Literature After Vietnam • Literature of the time reflects the conflicts within the country and the ranks of the military • Certain poems and short stories really introduce troublesome issues plaguing the people who were involved in the longest war in American History

7. At the Justice Department November 15, 1969BY DENISE LEVERTOV Brown gas-fog, white beneath the street lamps.Cut off on three sides, all space filledwith our bodies.       Bodies that stumble in brown airlessness, whitenedin light, a mildew glare,      that stumblehand in hand, blinded, retching.Wanting it, wanting to be here, the body believing it’s dying in its nausea, my head clear in its despair, a kind of joy, knowing this is by no means death,is trivial, an incident, a fragile instant.   Wanting it, wanting     with all my hunger this anguish,         this knowing in the body the grim odds we’re up against, wanting it real. Up that bank where gas curled in the ivy, dragging each other up, strangers, brothers and sisters.  Nothing will do but to taste the bitter taste. No life other, apart from.

8. What do you make of this? Denise (the author) is uses the images that describe the effects of tear gas to illustrate the speakers resolve to end the war in Vietnam. She even mentions that she wants to taste its bitterness in order to experience the odds they are against.

9. Unit 7: Part 2 Integration and Disintegration: Postwar Society

10. Integration and Disintegration • Integration: • Of African Americans, Latinos, Women, and other groups previously excluded • Civil rights movement • Brown vs. Board of Education • Disintegration: • Of structures and values that had been long upheld in the nation. • Men striving to obtain “The good Life” were sometimes forced to suppress individuality and work for impersonal cooperation's • Do your own thing

11. Literature • Integration: Works that showed particular cultural identities. • Works that called for inclusion • Schools, work place, equal opportunity • One work we will read “Straw into Gold,” really shows the writers success exemplified in the dramatic social changes in America during the last half of the 20th century. • Disintegration: works that emphasize the prosperous, consumerist, and conformist society • Sacrifice for money • “Do your own thing” • Family institution weakened: parents lost authority over children and families start to break-up (divorce sky-rockets) • Acts of violence