CORE 177: WAR AND OUR WORLD
SPRING 2009
THIRD BRIEF WRITING ASSIGNMENT

At the year’s beginning, we listed five learning goals.  Here is the fourth one:

4. Clarify purpose and perspective. The course's focus on war in our world will engage us in developing informed perspectives and a sense of responsibility and power as citizens to influence decisions related to war.

For your last writing assignment, we’d like to hear from you about how/whether the course has affected your views of war and your sense of your role as a citizen in decisions about war. Tell us how you see that responsibility transformed into citizenship or action—from enlisting to protesting, from supporting to opposing, war and specific wars.  From the list below, choose two or three readings or presentations that have had an impact on your thinking; use these to address this question.  You may also return to materials from the first semester. (The point is not to discuss the works in an objective way, but to use them to respond to Goal 4.  YOU are the topic of this paper.)

Your essay should be at least two, but not more than three double-spaced pages.  It is due Friday, May 15, by noon, but you may submit it earlier.  Electronic submission permitted: email your paper as an attachment either to kaiken@uidaho.edu or jgw@uidaho.edu WITH A COPY TO gmachlis@uidaho.edu .  This essay, combined with your response to Dr. Brundtland and your Frayn/Rhodes paper, counts as 25% of your final grade; you must have handed in all three to receive credit.

Chimamanda Ngoze Adichie. Half of a Yellow Sun
Dan Smith, Atlas of War and Peace, Ch 3: “War and People”; Ch 7: “Africa”
Propaganda: home front, Riefenstahl, posters
Guest speakers: Joy Passanante, Leonard Johnston, Rich Wekerle
(## Iliad, Bhagavad Gita, war poetry)
Henry David Thoreau, “Resistance to Civil Government”
Michael Frayn, Copenhagen
Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb
1960s anti-war movement
John Keegan Ch 5: “Will There Be an End to War?”
research paper