Kulturraumstudien USA, Homework for April 15th

For homework for next week's session, please:

- compare the presentation of WWII on the English and German Wikipedia sites using Critical Discourse Analysis and jot down some details on how this information is presented (take the same approach with the two articles on the California moratorium: word choice, who is quoted as a source, who is metonymic of the context, how the presentation is structured and outlined, etc.)

- compare the presentation on Wikipedia with artifacts you see in US and German culture that represent WWII (for example, the celebration of Veterans Day and Memorial Day in the States, the notion of "Gedenkstätte" in Germany, what date is considered the end of the conflict, etc...another way of looking at this is to again ask yourself the question, if I were to curate an exhibition of the conflict in both Germany and the US, what objects/topics would be employed in both and which would be tailored to each respective country)

Next week we'll be looking at important episodes in the period of time known as WWII as it manifested in the US, including the internment of the Japanese, the Manhattan Project, FDR and Truman's presidencies, and the German-American experience in the first half of the twentieth century.

My apologies for my misrepresentation of the year the US enters WWII in class. The US declares war on Japan on December 8th, 1941 and on Germany on December 11th, 1941. (The attack on Pearl Harbor occurred on December 7th, 1941.) US participation escalates in 1944 (particularly in the "European Theater") with the Invasion of Normany (otherwise known as D-Day).