Essay Prompt:
One of the purposes of the GE core is to introduce students of different majors to the academic disciplines, or, as one of my colleagues often says about the history GE, “to teach students to think like a historian.” At the most basic level, thinking like a historian requires that we treat artifacts like film and literature as windows onto the ages in which they were produced, rather than as objects of transcendental aesthetic beauty (which is the realm of literary analysis and criticism) or as moral and political signposts (which is the realm of philosophy, religion, and politics). Your job is to use We Wish to Inform You, Manual for Survival, White Teeth, and the film “The Battle of Algiers” to think like a historian. What do these artifacts tell us about human preoccupations and concerns during the latter part of the twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries? Are there commonalities in the outlooks, concerns, and/or ideologies of Gourevitch, Brown, Smith, and Pontecorvo?
