BEGINNING IN THE LATE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, Europeans endeavored harness nature's energy. The invention of the steam engine in the late eighteenth century heralded the dawn of the industrial revolution, and was quickly followed by advent of electric power and the internal combustion (gas-burning) engine in the late nineteenth century and atomic power in the early twentieth century. The possession of this new knowledge and these new sources of energy transformed Western Civilization, and not always for the good. In this unit will examine the history and outcomes of this transformation, both the marvels and the challenges, from the bright light of modern medicine to the dark horrors of industrialized warfare and scientific genocide.

Please begin this week by reading Chapters 18-22 of your textbook, focusing especially on those sections that deal with science, technology, industry, and their effects on society. Please also watch videos number eight ("The Industrial Revolution"), nine ("The Turn of the Century"), and twelve ("World War I, the Interwar Years, World War II, and the Holocaust").

Your online assignment for this week is something I adapted from my friend and colleague, Mills Kelly, the head of the Western Civ. program at Mason, and it is designed to start you thinking about our visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on November 5th.

You will remember that early in the semester we discovered that historians often confront a particular historical problem with many questions that cannot be answered by the secondary literature (works written by other historians) and so they have to go to the archives to find the answers they seek. Often they are not sure exactly what those archives contain, so they have to do some poking around before they even know if they can answer their questions in a particular archival collection. Your task this week is to do just that: to poke around in the online collections of the Museum.

Your assignment has three parts. The first part is to formulate a question that you want to answer about the Holocaust. What is it that you really want to know, understand, or grapple with? Then decide in advance what kinds of sources you think might help you with your questions. Jot your question and early thoughts down in a notebook. Second, once you have done your preparation, begin your search of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website. In the Museum online archive you will find texts, images, music, art, video clips, statistics and many other kinds of primary sources. Spend some time poking around these materials, making sure not to limit yourself to any one kind of source. In the same notebook, take some notes about the sources you examined and any answers you are beginning to glean from your research. Finally, bring your notebook with you on our trip to the Museum on Saturday, November 5th. As we walk around the gallerys, take some additional notes on sources you find there and continue to speculate on possible answers to your question. At the end of the day, I will ask you will to hand in your notes from all three phases of your investigation.

As you are working on this assignment over the next couple weeks, please keep in mind that I'm not expecting more than some rough thoughts and pointers to sources. This is not a paper, it's just notes, and I will assess your work not on your writing or on correct answers, but on how deeply you delved into the sources and how much you thought about how these sources might answer your question.