Course Information

2009 Fall Workshop

We met for one day to touch base with participants on how they continue to incorporate the themes of the grant into their classrooms and to discuss the nuclear west.

Saturday, November 14

Dr. Bruce Hevly, Professor of History at the University of Washington and co-editor of The Atomic West, shared some of his teaching strategies for nuclear weapons and power, including recommendations of the following ideas and resources:

1) Begin with the Enola Gay controversy or ask students to explore the decision to drop the atom bomb on Japan at the end of World War II (using sources from 1947 or earlier).

2) Explore the affects of atomic weapons through sources like John Hersey's Hiroshima or David Bradley's No Place to Hide.

3) Use movies like The Beginning or the End or On the Beach or other sources from Atomic Bomb Cinema.

4) Draw from new biographies of key figures in the development of the bomb, such recent biographies of J. Robert Oppenheimer like Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin's American Prometheus and Charles Thorpe's Oppenheimer: The Tragic Intellect.

Rey Waltz mentioned the movie Testament (1983).