Grade 10 World War II Interdisciplinary Unit (I&S and English): English A

"Like Lot's wife, he looked back--at the destruction of Dresden and 135,000 dead."

By Kevin Powers
March 6, 2019
When I was 24, I watched a small white car through the 4X scope attached to my M240B machine gun. The weapon rested on the wall of a rooftop on the outskirts of the city of Tal Afar, Iraq. The street down which the car drove was otherwise empty, the United States Army having previously informed the citizens of Tal Afar to evacuate their city or find themselves caught between military-strength deadliness and the people toward whom that deadliness was meant to be applied.

By Salman Rushdie
June 13, 2019
Ifirst read “Slaughterhouse-Five” in 1972, three years after it was published and three years before I published my own first novel. I was twenty-five years old. 1972 was the year of inching slowly toward the Paris Peace Accords, which were supposed to end the war in Vietnam, though the final, ignominious American withdrawal—the helicopters airlifting people from the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon—would not take place until three years later, at which point, by way of a small footnote to history, I had become a published writer.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born on November 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, Indiana, a city he would later use in his novels as a symbol of American values.

April 11, 2007
Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Cat’s Cradle” and “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died Wednesday night in Manhattan. He was 84 and had homes in Manhattan and in Sagaponack on Long Island.

When you write an extended literary essay, often one requiring research, you are essentially making an argument. You are arguing that your perspective-an interpretation, an evaluative judgment, or a critical evaluation-is a valid one.

Make this your starting point for any academic research.

By Malcolm Jack
March 21, 2019
DRESDEN, Germany — Last month, 74 years to the day since the bombers came, the late winter sky was gray as German tour guide Danilo Hommel called a halt before a short, dark green door in a large terracotta-roofed building that today forms part of an events and conference complex. One among several structures like it are laid out in neat rows in a bend of Germany’s River Elbe, two miles from Dresden’s historically reconstructed center.