virtual museum-literature of america's wars
TRANSCRIPT
Museum EntranceC
ivil
War
WW
II
War on Terror
Vietn
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Welcome to the Museum ofLiterature of America’s Wars
Curator’s Offices
War
Poe
try
Curator’s Office
Contact me: [email protected]
I am a student at Lewis University, pursuing a Master of Education, Curriculum and Instruction, Instructional Technology. I am also a Communication Arts teacher at Naperville Central High School. I also hold a position as a Digital Learning Leader.
I am married to my wife, Amy, and we have two children, Ricky, 5, and Olivia, 1 (almost). I reside in Aurora, IL, where I spend most of my time trying to explain things to my son who never stops asking questions and watching episodes of The Office on Netflix with my wife.
Richard Bain
Note: Virtual museums were first introduced by educators at Keith Valley Middle School in Horsham, Pennsylvania. This template was designed by Dr. Christy Keeler. View the Educational Virtual Museums website for more information on this instructional technique.
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Room 1
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Civil War Room
Room 3
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Vietnam Conflict Room
Room 4
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War on Terror Room
Room 5
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War Poetry Room
http://thomaslegion.net/americancivilwarcasualtiesfatalitiesbattlestatisticstotalskilledwoundedcasualtyfatalityfacts.html
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Civil War Infographic
This infographic displays information containing important statistics and
battles during the Civil War. It also contains key figures
of the war as well as comparisons to other
American wars.
http://oakmeadow887.corecommerce.com/American-Literature-Red-Badge-of-Courage-p2045.html
The Red Badge of Courage is a war novel by American author Stephen Crane (1871–1900). Taking place during the American Civil War, the story is about a young private of the Union Army, Henry Fleming, who flees from the field of battle. Overcome with shame, he longs for a wound, a "red badge of courage," to counteract his cowardice. When his regiment once again faces the enemy, Henry acts as standard-bearer. Although Crane was born after the war, and had not at the time experienced battle first-hand, the novel is known for its realism. He began writing what would become his second novel in 1893, using various contemporary and written accounts (such as those published previously by Century Magazine) as inspiration. It is believed that he based the fictional battle on that of Chancellorsville; he may also have interviewed veterans of the 124th New York Volunteer Infantry Regiment, commonly known as the Orange Blossoms (amazon.com).
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Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage
http://www.amazon.com/Battle-Lines-Graphic-History-Civil/dp/0809094746
Featuring breathtaking panoramas and revelatory, unforgettable images, Battle Lines is an utterly original graphic history of the Civil War. A collaboration between the award-winning historian Ari Kelman and the acclaimed graphic novelist Jonathan Fetter-Vorm, Battle Lines showcases various objects from the conflict (a tattered American flag from Fort Sumter, a pair of opera glasses, a bullet, an inkwell, and more), along with a cast of soldiers, farmers, slaves, and well-known figures, to trace an ambitious narrative that extends from the early rumblings of secession to the dark years of Reconstruction. Employing a bold graphic form to illuminate the complex history of this period, Kelman and Fetter-Vorm take the reader from the barren farms of the home front all the way to the front lines of an infantry charge. A daring presentation of the war that nearly tore America apart, Battle Lines is a monumental achievement (amazon.com).
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Graphic Novel (Non-fiction)
Linked citation goes here
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Artifact 4
http://www.ww2incolor.com/news/site-updates/15-astonishing-world-war-2-photos-that-bomb-your-sensesPicture of the American flag being raised on Iwo
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Flag Raising on Iwo Jima
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/92417.The_Thin_Red_Line
They are the men of C-for-Charlie company—“Mad” 1st Sgt. Eddie Welsh, Pvt. 1st Class Don Doll, Pvt. John Bell, Capt. James Stein, Cpl. Fife, and dozens more just like them—infantrymen who are about to land, grim and white-faced, on an atoll in the Pacific called Guadalcanal. This is their story, a shatteringly realistic walk into hell and back.
In the days ahead, some will earn medals, others will do anything they can dream up to get evacuated before they land in a muddy grave. But they will all discover the thin red line that divides the sane from the mad—and the living from the dead—in this unforgettable portrait that captures for all time the total experience of men at war (amazon.com).
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James Jones’s The Thin Red Line
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10058.Flags_of_Our_Fathers
In February 1945, American Marines plunged into the surf at Iwo Jima—and into history. Through a hail of machine-gun and mortar fire that left the beaches strewn with comrades, they battled to the island’s highest peak. And after climbing through a landscape of hell itself, they raised a flag.
Now the son of one of the flagraisers has written a powerful account of six very different young men who came together in a moment that will live forever.
To his family, John Bradley never spoke of the photograph or the war. But after his death at age seventy, his family discovered closed boxes of letters and photos. In Flags of Our Fathers, James Bradley draws on those documents to retrace the lives of his father and the men of Easy Company. Following these men’s paths to Iwo Jima, James Bradley has written a classic story of the heroic battle for the Pacific’s most crucial island—an island riddled with Japanese tunnels and 22,000 fanatic defenders who would fight to the last man.
But perhaps the most interesting part of the story is what happened after the victory. The men in the photo—three were killed during the battle—were proclaimed heroes and flown home, to become reluctant symbols. For two of them, the adulation was shattering. Only James Bradley’s father truly survived, displaying no copy of the famous photograph in his home, telling his son only: “The real heroes of Iwo Jima were the guys who didn’t come back.”
Few books ever have captured the complexity and furor of war and its aftermath as well as Flags of Our Fathers. A penetrating, epic look at a generation at war, this is history told with keen insight, enormous honesty, and the passion of a son paying homage to his father. It is the story of the difference between truth and myth, the meaning of being a hero, and the essence of the human experience of war (amazon.com)
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James Bradley’s Flags of Our Fathers
Linked citation goes here
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Artifact 8
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Casualty Breakdown
This spreadsheet details casualties of the conflict in Vietnam as broken down by branch of service (US only), race/ethnicity, and enlistment.
http://vietnamwar-database.blogspot.com/2010/11/vietnam-war-casualties.html
http://peoriareads.org/
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Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried
A classic work of American literature that has not stopped changing minds and lives since it burst onto the literary scene, The Things They Carried is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling. The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O'Brien, who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three. Taught everywhere from high school classrooms to graduate seminars in creative writing it has become required reading for any American and continues to challenge readers in their perceptions of fact and fiction, war and peace, courage and fear and longing. The Things They Carried won France's prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize; it was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award., A classic, life-changing meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling, with more than two-million copies in print Depicting the men of Alpha Company-Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O'Brien, who survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three-the stories in The Things They Carried opened our eyes to the nature of war in a way we will never forget. It is taught everywhere, from high school classrooms to graduate seminars in creative writing, and in the decades since its publication it has never failed to challenge our perceptions of fact and fiction, war and peace, and courage, longing, and fear., Tim O'Brien's modern classic that reset our understanding of fiction, nonfiction, and the way they can work together, as well as our understanding of the Vietnam war and its consequences (amazon.com).
http://www.amazon.com/Twenty-Days-May-Vietnam-1968/dp/1605638552
Twenty Days in May, Vietnam 1968 is the story of a light infantry company, A-4/31, with emphasis on the actions of the 1st platoon of Alpha Company during that period. The facts are documented, as well as they can be, by the S-2/3 Daily Staff Journal, daily Situation Reports (SITREPS), the unit history, radio logs and other documents from the National Archives, specific to the unit at that time. The crux of the story is then found in the e-mails, memories, recollections and sharing of experiences. These personal accounts take the reader into the field, into the foxholes, into the jungles and rice paddies and finally into the minds of the young men of Alpha Company. Theirs is a story that needed to be told, not just around the reunion table every other year, but to a broad audience of Americans to help them understand the service these men gave to their country and sacrifices they made and are still making today.
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John L. Mansfield’s Twenty Days in May
Linked citation goes here
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Artifact 12
http://www.scpr.org/blogs/news/2013/03/18/12962/visualize-war-10-years-and-1-trillion-of-iraq-war/
The picture shown here is a collage of infographics from scpr.org. For a more detailed look at each infographic, including explanations and commentary, please click on the picture, at right.
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Iraq War Infographic
http://www.teenink.com/reviews/book_reviews/article/178090/Sunrise-over-Fallujah-by-Walter-Dean-Myers/
Robin "Birdy" Perry, a new army recruit from Harlem, isn't quite sure why he joined the army, but he's sure where he's headed: Iraq. Birdy and the others in the Civilian Affairs Battalion are supposed to help secure and stabilize the country and successfully interact with the Iraqi people. Officially, the code name for their maneuvers is Operation Iraqi Freedom. But the young men and women in the CA unit have a simpler name for it:
WAR (from amazon.com)Return to
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Walter Dean Myers’s Sunrise over Fallujah
http://www.amazon.com/First-Officers-Opened-Terror-Afghanistan-ebook/dp/B000FCK4UE/ref=sr_1_15?ie=UTF8&qid=1438095664&sr=8-15&keywords=iraq+war+nonfiction
While America held its breath in the days immediately following 9/11, a small but determined group of CIA agents covertly began to change history. This is the riveting first-person account of the treacherous top-secret mission inside Afghanistan to set the stage for the defeat of the Taliban and launch the war on terror.
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Gary Schroen’s First In
Linked citation goes here
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Artifact 16
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done, The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won, The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting, While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring; But O heart! heart! heart! O the bleeding drops of red, Where on the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead.
O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells; Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills, For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding, For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning; Here Captain! dear father! This arm beneath your head! It is some dream that on the deck, You’ve fallen cold and dead.
My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still, My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will, The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done, From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won; Exult O shores, and ring O bells! But I with mournful tread, Walk the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead.
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“Three Hundred Thousand More” by John S. Gibbons
Lincoln’s death inspired Whitman to write one of his most memorable works—a simple, three-stanza poem of sorrow that bore little resemblance to his other, more experimental writings. "O Captain! My Captain!" was published in New York’s Saturday Press in November of 1865, and was met with immediate acclaim. The poem’s evocation of triumph overshadowed by despair spoke to readers throughout the shattered nation, and it was widely reprinted and published in anthologies. "O Captain! My Captain!" became one of the most popular poems Whitman would ever write, and helped secure for him a position as one of the greatest American poets of the 19th century.
Poem: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174742#aboutCaption: http://www.loc.gov/teachers/lyrical/poems/my_captain.html
Poem: http://www.unz.org/Pub/CommonGround-1945q2-00044Caption: http://beefycow.com/poetry-analysis-gwedolyn-brooks-negro-hero/
I had to kick then law into their teeth in order to save them.However, I have heard that sometimes you have to dealDevilishly with drowning men in order to swim them to shoreOr they will haul themselves and you to the trash and the fish beneath.(When I think of this, I do not worry about a fewChipped teeth.) It is good I gave glory, it is good I put gold on their nameOr there would have been spikes in the afterward hands.But let us speak only of my success and the pictures in the Caucasian dailiesAs well as the Negro weeklies. For I am a gem.(They are not concerned that it was hardly The Enemy my fight was againstBut them.) It was a tall time. And of course my blood wasBoiling about in my head and straining and howling and singing me on.Of course I was rolled on wheels of my boy itch to get at the gun.Of course all the delicate rehearsal shots of my childhood massed in miragebefore me.Of course I was childAnd my first swallow of the liquor of battle bleeding black air dying anddemon noiseMade me wild.It was kinder than that, though, and I showed like a banner my kindness.I loved. And a man will guard when he loves.Their white-gowned democracy was my fair ladyWith her knife lying cold, straight, in the
softness of her sweet-Sowing sleeve.But for the sake of the dear smiling mouth and the stuttered promise I toyedwith my life.I threw hack!—I would not rememberEntirely the knife.
Still—am I good enough to die for them, is my blood bright enough to bespilled.Was my constant back-question—are they clearOn this? Or do I intrude even now?Am I clean enough to kill for them, do they wish me to killFor them or is my place while death licks his lips and strides to themIn the galley still? (In a southern city a white man saidIndeed, I'd rather be dead.Indeed, I'd rather he shot in the headOr ridden to waste on the back of a floodThan saved by the drop of a black man's blood.) Naturally, the important thing is, I helped to save them, them and a part oftheir democracy,Even if I had to kick their law into their teeth in order to do that for them.And I am feeling well and settled in myself because I believe it was a good job,Despite this possible horror: that they might prefer thePreservation of their law in all its sick dignity and their knivesTo the continuation of their creedAnd their lives.
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“Negro Hero (to suggest Dorie Miller)”by Gwendolyn Brooks
Gwendolyn Brooks often portrays the injustice suffered by Blacks in an urban setting. Brooks being an African American poet herself, has been persistently subjected to the practice of Apartheid. Therefore, she comes across as a mouthpiece of the collective consciousness of the blacks. Her constant reference to the same in all her writings point to how it has entered the very core of their daily lives. Brooks once asserted that the most valid and significant art had direct relevance to the life of the people from which it derives .She reflects a similar theme in “Negro Hero”.
Poem: http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/vietnam.htm#VIETNAMESE%20MORNING
Photo: http://voiceseducation.org/content/curt-bennett
Before war startsIn early morningThe land is breath taking.The low, blazing, ruby sunMelts the night-shadow poolsCreating an ethereal appearance.
Each miniature house and treeSprouts its, long, thin shadowStretching long on dewy ground.The countryside is panoramic maze,Jungle, hamlets, hills and waterways,Bomb-craters, paddies, broken-backed bridges.
Rice fields glow sky-sheens,Flat, calm, mirrored lakesReflect the morning peace.The patchwork quilted earth,Slashed by snaking tree-lines,Slumbers in dawn's blue light.
Sharp, rugged mountain peaksSleep in a soft rolling blanketOf clinging, slippery, misty fog.Effortlessly, languidly, it flowsShyly spreading wispy tentacles outTo embrace the earth with velvet arms.
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“Vietnamese Morning” by Curt Bennett
Curt Bennett is a former US pilot on active service in Vietnam.
Poem: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/182821
Caption: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/kevin-c-powers#about
Photo: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/kevin-c-powers#about
I tell her I love her like not killing or ten minutes of sleep beneath the low rooftop wall on which my rifle rests.
I tell her in a letter that will stink, when she opens it, of bolt oil and burned powder and the things it says.
I tell her how Pvt. Bartle says, offhand, that war is just us making little pieces of metal pass through each other.
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“Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting”by Kevin Powers
Poet and novelist Kevin C. Powers was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia. He served with the US Army in Iraq from 2004 to 2005, where he saw combat as a machine gunner in Mosul and Tal Afar. Following his honorable discharge, he earned a BA at Virginia Commonwealth University and an MFA from the Michener Center at the University of Texas at Austin.
http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/wilfred-owen
This is a special addition to this exhibit. Wilfred Owen is not an American. He did not fight in, nor was he associated with any of the wars displayed in this virtual museum. However, Owen is one of my favorite poets. Please click on his picture, right, to learn a little more about Owen and to read some of his poetry. Two of his most famous poems are “Dulce et Decorum est” and “Anthem for a Doomed Youth,” however, all are worth a read.
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Wilfred Owen
http://wheretheclassroomends.com/war-literature-images-and-videos
Picture of soldier
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Picture of Soldier
This is a picture of a dignified transfer of the remains of a fallen soldier at Dover Air Force Base.
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Dignified Transfer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSLDUqPLe4s
When thinking about our country’s history in war, we must also think about how it goes hand-in-hand with our history in literature. One does not exist without the other.
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The Pen and the Sword
http://thomaslegion.net/americancivilwarcasualtiesfatalitiesbattlestatisticstotalskilledwoundedcasualtyfatalityfacts.html
http://oakmeadow887.corecommerce.com/American-Literature-Red-Badge-of-Courage-p2045.html
http://www.amazon.com/Battle-Lines-Graphic-History-Civil/dp/0809094746
http://www.ww2incolor.com/news/site-updates/15-astonishing-world-war-2-photos-that-bomb-your-senses
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/92417.The_Thin_Red_Line
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10058.Flags_of_Our_Fathers
http://vietnamwar-database.blogspot.com/2010/11/vietnam-war-casualties.html
http://peoriareads.org/
http://www.amazon.com/Twenty-Days-May-Vietnam-1968/dp/1605638552
http://www.scpr.org/blogs/news/2013/03/18/12962/visualize-war-10-years-and-1-trillion-of-iraq-war/
http://www.teenink.com/reviews/book_reviews/article/178090/Sunrise-over-Fallujah-by-Walter-Dean-Myers/
http://www.amazon.com/First-Officers-Opened-Terror-Afghanistan ebook/dp/B000FCK4UE/ref=sr_1_15?ie=UTF8&qid=1438095664&sr=8-15&keywords=iraq+war+nonfiction
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174742#about
http://www.loc.gov/teachers/lyrical/poems/my_captain.html
http://www.unz.org/Pub/CommonGround-1945q2-00044
http://beefycow.com/poetry-analysis-gwedolyn-brooks-negro-hero/
http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/vietnam.htm#VIETNAMESE%20MORNING
http://voiceseducation.org/content/curt-bennett
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/182821
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/kevin-c-powers#about
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/kevin-c-powers#about
http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/wilfred-owen
http://wheretheclassroomends.com/war-literature-images-and-videos
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References