Yesterday we repeated the exercise of writing dates down on cards — 1492, 1776, 1860, 1865, 1900, and 1918 — and added a new date, 1941, for the attack on Pearl Harbor and the U. S. entry into World War II.
(I'm not neglecting 1929, but I'm doing some things out of order. I want to do all the wars and foreign policy straight through and then backtrack and talk about the economy.)
After talking about the dates, we read through the first three chapters of a Landmark book by Blassingame called Combat Nurses of World War Two. It's a really great book because it covers many of the major battles of WWII, only the perspective is mostly that of the nurses — which means you get a picture of the support staff in a military campaign, and we are getting a perspective of women who (despite not being "combat troops") spent time under fire in foxholes, were taken prisoner, were killed in battles, and occasionally did have to fight. This is an awesome book. I can't recommend it enough. And so far, the only on-the-fly redacting I've had to do is say "women" instead of "girls" and occasionally replace "Miss so-and-so" with "Lieutenant so-and-so" — in my opinion, these women deserve to have their ranks attached to their names.
Another bonus of using this book is that it has plenty of emphasis on the Pacific theater. I don't know about you, but did you come away from U.S. history with much more of a sense of how the European theater went than how the Pacific theater did? I sure did — I didn't remember anything about the battles that occurred when the Japanese took the Philippines, for example. (Except what I re-learned a couple of years ago by reading the novel Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson.)
I assigned the kids to read some chapters out of a textbook (volume 9 of Joy Hakim's History of US) today, to give some necessary background on the period before the U. S. entry into WWII, and on the rise of Nazism in Europe. We will cover WWII again in world history, so I am just focusing on the United States right now.
On a slightly different note, Simcha Fisher has a great post about teaching the "myths" and "heroes" of history to kids. The comments are just starting to get interesting. Check it out.
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