African Independence

African Independence refers to a time period from 1955 to 1975 when many African nations gained their independence from European countries that previously held political power over them. When the African colonies became nations of their own, they underwent many changes. Citizens of Africa were free to enroll in college, so many young men became educated and a steady middle class began to emerge. When Europe was controlling the African colonies, they were mostly there for the natural resources that come from African land. In turn, when they gained their independence, they were able to use their own resources, make their own merchandise, and sell it to their own people for more fair prices than the Europeans gave.

Film Lesson: "The Right Stuff"

The Right Stuff is a 1982 production about the competition between the US and the USSR during the time of the Cold War. The US and Russia were allies during WWII, but when that war ended, they went back to hating each other - democrats against communists. There was constant competition between the two nations.

The US was the first country with nuclear weapons, but the USSR was far ahead of the US in terms of space travel. US officials were shocked when they discovered that Russia had been first to send a satellite into space, and afraid that they would be able to drop nuclear bombs from their satellite location. The United States decided they would have to get ahead, so they spent loads of money, time, and energy on building up their space program. However, Russia sent a man into space first -- around the same time that the US sent up a monkey. In the end, the United States ended up sending a man to land on the moon, and we made it before Russia did.

NATO and The Warsaw Pact

NATO is an organization compiled of countries located in North America and Europe. The name stands for North Atlantic Treaty Organization. NATO was formed because the countries involved wanted a mutual defense alliance so that if one of them were attacked all of the other countries in NATO would come to their aide. NATO was officially established on April 4, 1949.

The Warsaw Pact was an organization of communist states in Central and Eastern Europe. The Treaty was signed in Warsaw, Poland on May 14, 1955, six years after NATO was established. It was formed with the purpose of becoming another mutual defense alliance, but when communism fell, the need for military alliances diminished.

Schindler's List

Schindler's List is a very powerful film that illustrates the Holocaust from beginning to end. The start of the war is shown--when Jews were put into ghettos, banned from certain commodities, and overall treated differently than other religions, and very unfairly. Then the transition into the concentration camps is shown. Thousands of people are crowded into small trains and taken against their will to a foreign place, and are separated from their families. We see the hardships that take place all throughout World War II, until the very end, when the Russians invade and finally win, and the Jews and other prisoners are liberated from the captivity of the Nazis.

For me as a viewer, the scene that struck me the most powerfully was when the thousands of dead bodies were shown, naked and horribly thin, being thrown, carried, and shoved around carelessly and without any remorse.

Night and Fog

Night and Fog is a documentary film released in 1995 about the Nazi concentration camps. Compiled mostly of video clips straight from World War II, it truly captures the horror of World War II. I was shocked to see the actual videos that the Nazis filmed themselves of such terrible things that occurred at the camps. It was like the prisoners of the concentration camps were not real people to the Nazis - they carried around their lifeless skeletons and threw them into massive ditches in the ground with ease. The victims were taken from their hometowns and stuffed into trains and driven to unknown destinations for days with almost no air to breathe, water to drink, or even the smallest bits of bread to satisfy their hunger. Most of them died of suffocation, hunger, or thirst on the way to the camps, and the ones that survived had to go through selection. Selection was based on who was fit enough to do slave labor for the Nazis, and more people were killed than passed through to live in the horrible conditions of the concentration camps and do work for free. All in all, the movie was very hard to watch, but was very eye-opening to the truth of the Holocaust. In my opinion, Night and Fog was able to portray the Holocaust better than Schindler's List because there were no paid actors trying to recreate it - it was real footage and we knew that there was no exaggeration.

Film Lesson: Mountains of the Moon

Mountains of the Moon is a film based on the discovery of the source of the Nile River - a lake now known as Lake Victoria. In the film, John Speke and Richard Burton face many hardships as they travel up the river in search of the source of the great river. On their first voyage, they must stop and return halfway through because they are unprepared. Burton takes a spear through the face at one point, an example of how they were treated by the native African people, who saw them as unwelcome intruders, which technically, they were.

Upon Speke and Burton's 'discovery' of the source of the Nile, it was named Lake Victoria, a tribute to the Queen that ruled England at the time. It's strange that the lake, the third largest in the world, would still be name after an English queen after all this time, especially since it is located in the middle of Africa.

The English conquerors were able to invade and take over so much of Africa so easily because of their technological advances, primarily guns and compasses, as well as other essential tools. The African natives fought only with their primitive weapons, such as bows and arrows and spears, which were obviously no match against machine guns.

Karl Marx and Communism

Karl Marx created communism to replace the time's current capitalistic society, which consisted of two parts - the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, or the workers who sold their labor to whoever was willing to pay them the most, and the factory owners who offered jobs and paid workers. Of course, the proletariat greatly outnumbered the bourgeoisie, and because of this Marx believed that if the workers united, they obviously would be able to overthrow the landlords.

Marx and a friend who shared his beliefs, Friedrich Engels, distributed pamphlets that introduced the public to their idea of communist society. Many agreed with the idea of communism, and joined Marx and Friedrich in the journey to a "perfect society".

Marx and Engels' idea of a perfect society was one in which everybody lives equally, is paid the same amount of money, and where social classes and private ownership don't exist. Everything belongs to the government, and workers share the wealth, it being distributed according to each person's ability and needs.