Tier III plus required books

Folks, computer hell is continuing here, I am deep in about the 7th circle, and so will surrender and get a new machine today. Meantime, here's the required books: Martin Gilbert, The First World War(text) The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry Peter Englund, the Beauty and the Sorrow. You can get Gilbert from Amazon or Powells or interlibrary loan in hard copy; the other two you have the option of getting for Kindle/Ipad/your tablet of choice. Here's the garbled info for the tier III assignment: Evaluation: History 455 is a tier III course. This means in part that you have to undertake a significant project covering one or more topics related to the course content and ideally reflecting a diversity of disciplines. This should reflect your interests and strengths, because it will require a lot of effort. You have two options: a bricks-and-mortar term paper, using a variety of sources, or a work using other forms, other media. This might be a website spotlighting an important aspect of the war, an oral presentation on someone you feel deserves more attention, a concert of relevant music if you are a musician, an illustrated talk on innovations in warfare. I particularly remember two presenters: the student who did a remarkable powerpoint covering the development of air warfare and airplanes in the war, and a talented musicianwho researched and presented a concert of Great War popular songs in which she played piano and her granddaughter sang. We even brought in seniors from the local assisted living facility for that! Whatever you do, I want everyone in class to present this work, or a part of it, to the Student Liberal Arts symposium in December, because people do not know this war. You have three weeks to think about it, after which you must submit to me a description of what you want to do and a preliminary list of sources. A listing of possible subjects might include the following: the changing nature of warfare in the Great War, WMD in WWI, theory and practice of trench warfare, role of women in the war, propaganda, film and the Great War(then and now), commemoration, colonial or Dominion soldiers and the Great War, America’s impact on the war, the war on the American homefront, the making of new nations(Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Iraq), impact of the Russian revolution, accounting for and memorializing the missing, shell shock, “shot at dawn” cases, battlefield medicine and plastic surgery, the origins and history of the “unknown” soldier, poetry and poets in the Great War, Balfour declaration and the making of the postwar Middle East, the Armenian genocide(for example, how was this covered in America?) Aside from this, we will have one midterm, in early October and another just before dead week. You will always know all the possible questions and items at least two weeks in advance; what you do not know is which ones will appear on the exam paper, so you should prepare everything.