#All stories have a basis in truth

Every story that has ever been written has some basis in fact, which is inevitable. All authors understand that all the best stories come from their own experiences or another’s to make the best novel and to make the novel seem more realistic. It is important for us to realize that although a story may have many fictional aspects it is important to discern the fiction from the truth because the truth is where the message lies. In Maus we have seen the countless times in which Art Spiegelman uses his metaphor of animals in order to show that the Holocaust demonstrates the relationship of between predator and prey. In Volume 2, Chapter 2 Art Speigelman makes the creative decision of using masks to depict each character’s animal rather than just drawing them as the animal itself. It makes one wonder why he chose to do that. Countless times in class we have gone over the fact that, every single that is contained in the author’s book is on purpose none of it can be considered accidental. So it is safe for us to assume that Speigelman’s choice to uses animal masks rather than actual animals was done for a reason. So understanding that, I came up with my own conclusion for his choices. Like I said before, every story has a basis in fact; Speigleman’s fact comes from the history of the Holocaust. We have passed the point of the story in which he has established the basis of the story and here on out he is just telling the story. Here he decides to use the mask to remind us that the root of this story doesn’t come from fiction, the basis of this story happened to real people and it should be remembered as a genocide of an innocent group of people. Whether or not you like a story it is important to remember and honor the truth of it. 

#An Interesting Experience to Say the Least...

For someone like me with very little video creating experience, doing this project was an interesting experience. The first step in the process of creating my video was developing my question and getting a rough sketch of the things I would have to look for in order to answer my question.  After researching some background into my subject, Muhammad Ali and the Draft, I created my question. Next I proceeded to create a list of things that I need to research to answer my question. After realizing that was focusing way too much on his religious reason for evading the draft, I searched the more on his strive for civil rights. This led me to rewrite my research question. Once I collected my data, I was really confused because my research was all over the place; so my second step was creating a document and placing everything in chronologically and by drawing connection from my data come up with a conclusion for each part of the question as well as having a sufficient amount of background information in order to help the viewer’s put the event into perspective. The third step was filming the video, after a lot of stress and frustration I finished filming. I am going to honest and just say that I suck at filming; and doing a whiteboard which I have only seen done by professional camera people and never having done one myself it was challenging. It took me about a total of 5 hours to film my video because of my lack of experience. Then the final step was putting it all together. I had to familiarize myself with a new movie editor I had to download because I didn’t have iMovie, which at this point was the only editor I had used. The editing was pretty self-explanatory, and creating the detailed document linking all my data together really helped. The last challenge I faced was matching my voice overs with the videos because I did them at separate times. It did work out in the end, and I happy with the end product.

#Think about Perspective

        The Cold War is all about perspective. Not in the sense of who started it or who is at fault but considering the American containment policy. The American Containment Policy was enforced in order to stop the spread of communism to the rest of the world. There were many plans within the containment policy to stop communism, such as the Truman doctrine and the Marshall Plan. These two plans were focusing on rebuilding countries which have suffered greatly from WWII. These countries were easy targets for communism because they were economically suffering and so accepting communism would be an easy solution to fix their problem. Remember there is also a flipped side to the Containment Policy. So on the flipped side America made sure to make it known that if countries made the decision to become communist then they would be swiftly greeted by American Force. That being said we can see the desperation of America to end communism. Once again we see this idea of perspective up front it may seem like America s fighting communism, but in reality they are fighting to guarantee we remain the strongest influence in the world.  In the Cold War it is important to understand that many aspects of the war can be looked at from different angles, the Containment Policy and America’s motive to fight communism are just two examples.

#If You Don't Like It Change It

Maya Angelou once said, "If you don't like something change it". During the 1920’s this was the exact mentality White Americans had. During WWI it was encouraged that foreigners come to America because Americans were in dire need for soldiers and laborers to support the war efforts. However, after World War I many people were very uneasy about the wave of immigrants that were flooding into the States and so they decided to change it. Although America was a place for people to be free, many immigrants were treated unfairly because people didn't think they had the right to be American, as they looked, talked different than “normal”  Americans. This was the main reason that in 1924 the Immigration Policy of 1924 was instated. This policy put a quotas on the number of people from each foreign country was allowed in the state. The exceptions to this policy were Mexicans because California needed lots of laborers on the farms so no quota was placed on those people.  Also during this same time period Warren Harding ran for presidency and won by the first ever landslide. This landslide was a result of Harding reassuring the voters that he would return America to the land it used to be. At this time the idea of civil liberties belonging to everyone and everyone can be American was unnerving. Like Maya Angelou said, they didn’t like it so they attempted to change it.