Prof. McClurken’s HIST 329 — Fall 2008
Archive for 2008hist329
Posted by awilkins November 6, 2008 at 2:57 pm · Filed under 2008hist329
In the end, I decided to go ahead and post my project today. I was leaving for the weekend and wont have much of a chance to work on this project after today. I have spent many days writing up the history of the event and then coparing the movie to that history. Every day I added something new and took away other stuff. I’ve grown very tired and decided that enough is enough, I will go ahead and publish the project. Besides, now Booger (my kitty) and I can take a snooze together. 
I feel I put a lot of good hard work into the project, and even though I’m not all that creative I tried to spice it up to the best of my ability. Hopefully I’m not in error in posting the project already, but I feel it is the best I will be able to do for now.
Its Been Fun and Stressful,
Ashley Wilkins
Posted by agrussell November 5, 2008 at 10:16 pm · Filed under 2008hist329, Uncategorized
I wanted to start my post on “Best Years” before the discussion, partially to have time to round out my thoughts and partly because I wanted to write my initial thoughts before hearing the thoughts of the class. Not that I think that my thoughts are really different than anyone else’s, it is just easier to identify mine at this point.
I have to say that I think the movie being made in the time of its subject was very effective. It is harder to judge it as representing ‘history’, as it wasn’t exactly considered history at the time. However, it seemed more realistically emotionally affecting and honest than a good deal of the movies that we’ve watched this semester. Of course, a lot of this could be the fact that we have grown up with many of the recurring faces in the movies that we’ve seen, whereas there is a further distance between us and the stars of this movie and even the subject matter of the movie itself.
Unfortunately, as representative as it seems of a general feeling of the time, it is restricted to a general white, relatively well-off feeling of the time. Its small town setting is not uncommon in movies from any period and is a handy way to represent the entire country by example (is it synecdoche? one of those fancy English major words describes this, I believe). However, it is also a handy way to leave out African-Americans, Japanese-Americans and Mexican-Americans. This, I believe, is where the movie and subject matter suffer the most from coming out of its own time period.
I’ll write more about this after class tomorrow.
Posted by jmcclurken August 26, 2008 at 8:00 pm · Filed under 2008hist329, HIST329
If you include the following tag: “2008hist329″ in the tags section when you create a post (it’s just below the box you compose your blog text in), then it will show up here in the course website. This is true for any UMWblogs.org site, even if you’re using that blog for other classes. Give it a try.
Posted by jmcclurken August 26, 2008 at 12:08 pm · Filed under 2008hist329, Uncategorized
Film class test
Posted by jmcclurken August 1, 2008 at 1:59 pm · Filed under 2008hist329, HIST329
This is the course blog for HIST 329 for Fall 2008. Do you know which films the above images come from?
