 So what's the agenda here? Was it Revision? I don't know. OK. She's not going to be here. I'm going to direct her education here at the National Archives in the William G. McGowan Theater. I just want to give a warm welcome to everyone here and those viewing online. Before I introduce tonight's program, I'd like to briefly highlight a few of the National Archives upcoming programs, both virtual and in person. Perspectives in History, AAPI Voices in the American Story will be held May 1st at 7.30 PM in celebration of Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month. And join us for a new conversation about the role of historians and the media have played in our nation's cultural storytelling and the impact AAPI Voices have and will continue to have on the narrative in the future. The National Archives comes alive young learners program meet Lewis and Clark in a family friendly program that will be held May 16th at 11 AM. The legacy of Brown versus the Board of Education 70 years later will be held on the evening of May 16th at 7 PM in celebration of the 70th anniversary of the decision. Join us for a new conversation with the former law clerks of the Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. And finally, a program that has decorated tonight's event, Remembering the Great Crusade 80th anniversary of D-Day discussion on May 22nd at 1 PM in partnership with the US Army Heritage and Education Center and in collaboration with the Army University Press and the Imperial War Museum of London Weepers for a controversial discussion about this momentous event. This spring marks the 80th anniversary of D-Day, the World War II Amphibious Assault on Nazi-occupied France on June 6, 1944. The National Archives is home to over 16 billion records, many of which talk about the event we're going to have tonight. The National Archives is really pleased to present this program. During tonight's event, Speakers Alex Kershaw, resident historian of the Friends of the World War II Museum, I'm sorry, the National World War II Memorial, and Katelyn Katrona, a National Archives Education Specialist, will highlight national archives records related to D-Day. The important story is connected to the events and the strategies on how educators can use these and other NARA primary sources in the classroom to help students dig deeper into D-Day content. Towards the end of the program, Emily McDermott, a Maryland-based social studies teacher, will join Alex and Katelyn in a moderated panel discussion in which we will open the floor to audience questions. It is my honor now to introduce the presenters. Educated at Oxford University, Alex Kershaw is the author of numerous books on World War II, including the National Belceler work, The First Wave, the D-Day Warriors, who led the way to victory in World War II. And since 2012, Mr. Kershaw has led many battlefield tours of Europe in conjunction with D-Day's 80th anniversary. This spring, he will be leading tours to London, Normandy, Paris for the Friends of the National World War II Memorial. His forthcoming book, Patent's Prayer, will be released next month on May 21, 2024. Katelyn Katroni is an education specialist at the National Archives, where she leads in-gallery education programs and teacher professional development. She began her career as a middle school teacher teaching in Nairobi, Kenya before becoming a public historian. Please join us now to welcome Mr. Kershaw. How are we today? Can you hear me OK? Great. I guess we'll move to this photograph here. Do you mind if I move over here and get a little bit excited about this photograph? I love this photograph for many reasons, and please throw something at me if I go on too long. Number one, this is a photograph of grace under enormous pressure. I think it's hard to think of a man with more weight on his shoulders in history that's actually photographed at a critical moment in history. This is obviously Dwight Eisenhower. At 5 o'clock, 5.30, it's debatable exactly what time he has given on the morning of the 5th of June, he's given the final command, let's go. The invasions have been postponed until tomorrow, the 6th of June. But this photograph is taken around about 8.30 in the evening at Greenham Common. He is surrounded by members of e-company 502nd PIR. That's not the band of the brothers. They belong to the 506th, but this is the 502nd PIR. They've gathered around, and there are some funny stories about why there were so many paratroopers that turned up for Ike. Was it for Ike or was it for Betty Gravel? Because there were actresses in the area, and one story goes that all these paratroopers gathered very quickly because they thought they were going to see a really beautiful actress and not their Allied Supreme Commander. Interestingly, there's no name to the photographer. One of the wonderful things about the National Archives is that all these photographs are in the public domain. You don't have to pay for them. I have a limey accent, a British accent, and if you wanted to use an image like this, you'd have to pay for it. The difference between a republic and a kingdom. Thank you very much. It's a kingdom now. So just a little bit about a couple of the people in the photograph. If you see if I can get, can you see this guy here? This is Lieutenant Wallace Strobel. He comes from Saginaw. Is that right, Saginaw, Michigan? Did I pronounce it properly? I've been here 30 years, so I should be able to. He is number 23 around his neck. He's a jump master. And he is talking to Ike there. And the story goes that, and Strobel told this many times after the war, that Ike comes over and he asks each guy where he's from, what state, because he's a politician in making. And he asks Strobel where he comes from. He says Michigan. And then they start talking about fishing, because Ike had fished in Michigan, and Strobel was a very keen fly fisherman. And there's an addendum to that, which is that in 1952, when Ike runs to be president, he visits Michigan, and meets Strobel on a whistle-stop tour. And Strobel said that it was the quickest handshake in history, but at least he did get to say hello again. The guy over here is Bill Hayes, corporate Bill Hayes. He had initially thought when he joined up that he wouldn't be able to make it into the paratroopers, because he was small and he was light. But he did. Strobel and Hayes would drop into Normandy in the early hours of the 6th of June, 1944. Strobel and Hayes, the two guys, would be stuck in trees that have to cut themselves loose before they got on the ground. Strobel would fight on for almost a week of the 800 odd paratroopers in their battalion. Only about 180 were still able to stand and fight after about a week. Hayes would be badly wounded on D-Day. Strobel would go on to fight not only through Normandy, but also in Market Garden in September 1944, and at the Battle of the Bulge, without receiving a scratch. Hayes was, as I said, badly wounded. This is perhaps the most iconic photograph of Eisenhower in command in World War II. It's an extraordinary photograph. I'm a huge fan of Ike. I like Ike. I love Ike, because I can imagine what it was like. I'm 58. I know I look much older. That was a bad joke, by the way, but anyway. He's 54 here, and the stress is absolutely unimaginable. He literally is the only man, only person who can give the order to go for the most important amphibious invasion in history. Countless millions of Europeans depend on the success of this operation. He has been smoking at least two packs of filterless cigarettes for several weeks. He's not a very heavy drinker, but he likes to tiple every now and again. He only every now and again. Very rarely gets to play a little bit of golf. It's probably his only belief, apart from a pile of cheap, or rather pulp, Western novels that he has beside his bed and his camper that he reads religiously. His driver, K. Summersby, and we won't go into the exact nature of their relationship, but his longtime driver and aide, K. Summersby, a beautiful Irish woman, was with him throughout the day. And she said that Eisenhower was extremely worried about the fate of these young men. After 5.30 in the morning, when he finally gives the order to go, let's go, there's nothing he can do. He's powerless. The operation is going on. So to try and kill time, to try and calm his nerves, he decides to go and visit the troops. So under enormous stress, has been for an awful long time, has taken a decision earlier in the day, a momentous decision, one of the most important decisions in all history. He's also, you should know this, he's also extremely worried about these young men that he's looking at. He looks him in the eye. He's got very, he's a very charming man. He has blue eyes, a fantastic smile. He's very personable, very approachable. But as he looks into these young men's eyes, he's thinking that most of them will be killed. A Brit, Lee Mallory, head of the Allied Air Forces on D-Day, has told Eisenhower, very unsubtly, rudely, arrogantly, I believe, that three quarters of all these men will be killed or wounded on D-Day. It's a terrible shame and a waste of elite talent to send the 82nd Airborne, American 82nd Airborne and 101st Airborne into combat on D-Day. They're just all gonna get killed or wounded. And that's exactly what Eisenhower's thinking at certain moments as he walks around Greenham Common, that he's been warned by the head of Allied Air Forces on D-Day that most of these kids will be killed. And therefore, he's wanting to wish them luck. He talks to Strobel, asks him if he's ready, and Strobel assures him that he is ready. And Eisenhower later on remembered this day and said that my spirits were lifted by the confidence of these young men. And I should stress that these guys are really confident. They're supremely well trained. Strobel said that later on. We were an elite unit. We knew we were elite. We had been trained extremely well. We had the best weapons. We knew what we had to do. We were raring to go. We wanted to get this job done and we couldn't wait. Shortly after the photographs taken, the guys in the photograph go to their C-47s. So that would make it nearly nine o'clock in the evening on the 5th of June. We know that the, I know anyway, that the first American C-47 to take off from England when it was still dusk. You can find the footage, I believe the National Archives might even have this film. You can see the footage. It's the Pathfinders for the 101st Airborne 947 PM takeoff. And there's a beautiful color film. It was a color film at the time taken of a plane C-47 taking off into the dusk in England. And that's the first American plane to take off for D-Day. So these guys here, after speaking to him around 8.30 to get into the planes, maybe about nine o'clock, they would have taken off after about 10, 30, 11 o'clock that evening and would have dropped into Normandy around about 1.32 o'clock in the morning. So a momentous moment, a beautiful photograph. It shows courage. It shows grit. It shows the nerves of steel that you had to have to be an Allied Supreme Commander at that moment. And I think it's the most impressive photograph taken of Eisenhower in his long storied career, both as a general and as an American. So my second image here, again, it's another hugely iconic photograph of D-Day. It's taken at 7.40 a.m. around 7.40 a.m., we know that because the man who took the photograph, a 20-year-old, called Chief Photographer's Mate, because he's in the Coast Guard, Chief Photographer's Mate, Robert Sargent, he wrote later on and was interviewed about this image that he took. These are members of the 16th Infantry Regiment. There is some debate as to whether they're E-Company. We don't think they belong to E-Company because E-Company landed in the first wave around about 6.30 a.m. on Omaha Beach. This is taken at 7.40, so it may well be a company of the 16th Infantry Regiment of the big red one. If you look at the top of the photograph here, you'll see bluffs. And that's where the American graveyard is today. So this is part of, it is believed, easy red sector. Eight sectors on Omaha Beach. Second deadliest place you could be on Omaha Beach was right where those guys are walking toward there. Easy red sector. Second highest casualties. Highest casualties were Dog Green, which is the furthest west to the right that way. The furthest west along that five and a half mile arc of Golden Sand, that's Dog Green Sector. That's where Company A from Bedford, Virginia, a National Guard unit, landed. Only unit on D-Day on Omaha Beach to land in the right place at the right time. 6.30, 2.00 a.m., H-H hour, and slaughtered. Out of 100, I think almost 190 guys, 102 were killed at Dog Green Sector. You're looking at the second deadliest place you could be on Omaha Beach where there were over 900 KIA Americans. Compare that to Utah, where you have less than 200 casualties. So it's called taxes to hell. It was captioned taxes to hell into the jaws of death. And the words into the jaws of death come from a Tennyson poem about the charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War when a whole bunch of Brits basically committed suicide by charging toward death. So Sergeant was 20 years old. Average age of an American killed during the Normandy Campaign was 22, young. And for a 20-year-old, he'd already seen a lot of action. He doesn't get off the landing craft. He stays on it. That's why you can see the photograph how it appears is because he's at the back of the LCVP, which was under fire by the way as it came toward the shore. They managed to unload all of the troops here while under fire. And then he returns to the Samuel Chase, USS Samuel Chase, which was the mothership for the 16th Infantry Regiment of the Big Red One. He'd already seen action in Sicily, July 1943, and Salerno in September of 1943. So this is the third time that a 20-year-old has been in a landing craft, taking photographs of a momentous amphibious invasion. Sergeant passed away in 2012. So he got through this horrific ordeal without being wounded. What I think this photograph shows you is courage, sacrifice, and the most important event of the 20th century. Certainly the losses there that were sustained on Omaha are symbolic of American sacrifice during the liberation of Europe. 138,000 Americans killed during the liberation of Western Europe, and there was no bloodier place, no bloodier day for Americans than Omaha Beach. And it's fitting that they are moving toward a section of the beach, which is just below the graveyard that we're about to visit in a few weeks with the Friends of the Wilburton Memorial. It's a really, really iconic photograph. I'm about to end now. It's been used countless times, and it shows you what it really took to liberate Western Europe from untold evil. Young men literally walking towards death. E Company, that landed in the first wave, suffered over 60% casualties. Most of the men that you're looking at in this photograph will be, within a week, killed or wounded. Very, very few will survive unscathed, the Battle of Normandy, in which 20,000 of their fellow Americans were killed around about, just under half of them, buried at the top of the photograph there in the Colville Somare American Cemetery in Normandy. A picture of heroism, courage, and immense American sacrifice to liberate others. So I have finished my rambling description of these two amazing photographs that the National Archives have, thankfully. And now I'm going to introduce Caitlin, who's going to talk about some more images. Thank you. Welcome, everyone, and of course, thank you so much, Alex, for that terrific presentation. And so I'd like to discontinue our conversation this evening by emphasizing that archival records are really great primary sources to help students dig deeper into and make personal connections to historical moments, such as D-Day. And of course, the National Archives holds thousands of records created or received by the US government related to World War II. And when we think about teaching the history of D-Day with primary sources, really an important part of teaching this history is to help students understand that even well-known moments associated with World War II, such as D-Day, are often more complex than they initially appear. And that the D-Day invasion was really the combination of multiple groups of people working together in varied roles. And so with this in mind this evening, I'd like to talk a little bit more about how educators can use National Archives records to highlight often overlooked D-Day stories, specifically spotlighting stories related to women cryptographers and male African-American soldiers. And so one of the lesser known D-Day stories comes from the 320th Barrage Bloom Battalion, which was an all African-American unit. Now the 320th Barrage Bloom Battalion was specifically the only African-American combat unit to land on the Normandy beaches during the D-Day invasion. The over 600 members of this battalion who took part in the invasion were among the many thousands of men coming ashore that day. But this African-American unit had a specific mission. Their job, unlike many other fellow soldiers, was not to advance off the Normandy beaches but to provide aerial protection on those beaches. And so to do this, the 320th positioned low-lying balloons. So these were very low-altitude balloons that usually only flew up to a maximum of 2,000 feet in altitude. And they were anchored by reinforced steel cables on both the Omaha and Utah beaches. And their goal was to protect troops and supplies from enemy strafings and bombings. Now despite facing fierce enemy fire, the 320th managed to emplace 12 balloons on Omaha Beach by the morning of June 7th and then 13 balloons on Utah Beach by that evening as well. So certainly there's a lot more information that can be shared about the 320th, but I want us to shift our focus at this point to how educators can use National Archives resources to highlight the 320th story. Now how would one even go about introducing this topic? Well, it just so happens that one specific resource that educators can use to introduce their students to the 320th Brogd Balloon Battalion, excuse me, is this comparison activity from Doc's Teach that helps to highlight the unit's contributions to the D-Day invasion but also encourages students to consider questions about perspective and what information is and isn't captured by a photograph. So before diving into the specifics of this activity more, I'd just like to take a moment to introduce Doc's Teach, which is the archives online tool for teaching with documents. So Doc's Teach provides access to thousands of digitized documents and related student activities. When you register for a free account, you can save primary sources, browse activities created by other educators, and even create your own teaching activities using National Archives records. So I would encourage you to go to docsteach.org to just explore the different activities that are available there. Some of these activities are designed to help students focus on details, others to help students make connections between documents. There's one for sequencing, another to help students consider how documents support different historical interpretations and much more. For tonight's purposes, I'm just gonna spotlight one of these Doc's Teach activity tools and that is compare and contrast. So this specific activity asks students to analyze two photographs that were taken either during or shortly after the D-Day invasion and one in particular really highlights the vital role played by the 320th Barrage Bloom Battalion. So let's go ahead and take a look at the first photograph in this activity. This photograph may look familiar to many of you. Of course, this is an iconic D-Day image and we had the privilege of hearing more about the stories behind this photograph from Alex tonight as well. But for the purposes of this particular activity, we would want to start by simply giving students some time to closely look at the photograph and then to think about the question, what details stand out to them from the photograph? Focusing on things like people, objects and actions. And then once students have had a chance to essentially look at the photograph, make those observations. Focusing on this question here, we would then repeat the same exercise for our second National Archives image which is entitled photographs of the French invasion beach. And the idea is that you would do the same thing with the second photograph, give students a chance to take the photograph in to look at it closely and then to think about that question, what details stand out to them and specifically in terms of maybe the people, objects and actions that they see. So the first part of this activity really asked students to make observations about the photographs. What do they notice? What do they see? Okay, this is a really important first step in primary source analysis. But once students have had a chance to make those observations, the next set of questions that this activity introduces helps them to shift to interpretation or to drawing conclusions from their observations. And this is key because this is where analysis and comparison comes into the picture where we can help prompt our students to that higher level thinking. And so in order to do that, once students have had a chance to examine the photographs separately, we can then have them compare the images side by side. And really our overarching question with this comparison is what do we learn about the D-Day invasion by comparing these two photographs? Because the idea is that students have already had the opportunity to gather details and information from examining the photographs separately, but by comparing the images side by side, students now have the chance to see what additional information they can learn about D-Day by closely looking at these photographs in tandem. And so to help students better answer this question, we would want to break that comparison down into smaller components. So we may simply ask students to think about, well, what do you see that is the same in the photographs? Or what do you see that is different between these photographs? And we wanna encourage students to think about these similarities and differences related to things like time, location, and even the photographer's perspective. And to be able to help students draw conclusions to make interpretations from their observations, we would want them to prompt them to consider the why behind any similarities or differences present in the photographs. Again, the purpose behind this comparison is to help students think through what similarities and differences are evident in these photographs, but even more importantly, what new information do those differences in particular reveal about D-Day and the various roles required to implement this amphibious assault? Now, both images also have captions that can provide additional context. I usually recommend having the students analyze a photograph by itself first before adding the additional context that a caption can provide. So in this case, both photographs have fairly extensive captions that can help students learn more about who took these images, the photographer's location, the timing of when these images were taken, and of course, barrage balloons. And we'll get to that more in just a moment. Now, as a concluding activity, we can encourage students to think about, well, what questions do these photographs raise? And as I mentioned just a moment ago, hopefully a main difference as we're looking at these photographs that students will be able to pick out is one of these photographs does not have, right, any barrage balloons in sight, and we can see the other photograph has several barrage balloons captured in the image. And so the idea is that once students have identified this difference, that will hopefully prompt them to raise additional questions related to these balloons. For example, what exactly are those objects, right, floating above the beaches? What's a barrage balloon? What is its purpose? And, okay, most importantly for our context, who placed these balloons on the beaches. And then again, once students have had a chance to raise some of those questions to kind of dive deeper into that conversation, we would also want them to consider, well, what questions do the photographs raise but actually can't answer themselves? And the idea is to help them think through what additional sources may we need here in order to find the answers to the questions that have been raised through these photographs. So really through observation and analysis, this activity provides an opening to talk more about the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion. This is an activity that was really designed as a quick introductory activity to enable educators to hook students' interests, to introduce them to the existence of the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion and then to use that to dive deeper into the content, whether that's talking more about the 320th or even just African-American soldiers' roles in World War II in general. Now this activity is also designed to encourage students to consider how the similarities and differences between these two images both connect to but then also extend their understanding of D-Day. So potentially this is the first time that students may have seen a photograph with Barrage Balloons and then, this is maybe the first time that they've had a chance to even talk about Barrage Balloons existence. So thinking about what they already know about D-Day and how does this add to, how does this supplement and increase their understanding of the varied roles that were played as a part of this amphibious assault. And of course finally, because we were talking about National Archives primary sources, asking students to think about that, the information that a photograph does and does not answer also reveals the potential limitations of using photographs as primary sources. These limitations can be things such as the framing, right, of a photographer's perspective or just the fact that some details are just naturally emitted because of the limited view of a camera's lens. So having the opportunity to have these discussions with students as well. So the compare and contrast activity highlights just some of the National Archives records that educators can use to introduce students to these lesser known D-Day stories but also reinforce their primary source analysis skills. As with many of our Dock's Teach activities, the primary sources and the questions included in this activity can be scaled up and down to best suit your student's grade level, their abilities, or even what you're hoping to accomplish through the activity itself. So in addition to the two photographs that are highlighted in this activity, the National Archives has several other photographs that are related to the 320th Brudge Bloom Battalion that you can also use to reinforce students' understanding of this unit's role during D-Day. So we have two of them highlighted here. So the photograph on the far left, this is actually a close-up image of soldiers of the 320th Brudge Bloom Battalion in action on Omaha Beach. We can see that the abbreviated caption there identifies Corporal A. Johnson and others walk a balloon over to the winch to be able to host that balloon up in the air. And then right next here to me, our second photograph is actually of Camp Tyson, which was the main Brudge Bloom training center. So this is where the 320th Brudge Bloom Battalion and many other Brudge Bloom units as well had the chance to train and to hone their specialized skills. So in addition to the 320th Brudge Bloom Battalion, of course, the National Archives has other primary sources that highlight additional roles related to D-Day, including being able to expand students' knowledge of women cryptographers and their impact on the D-Day invasion. So women actually accounted for around 11,000 of the estimated 20,000 co-breakers employed during the war by both the US Army and the US Navy. They came from diverse backgrounds, but many of them, although not all of them, had college degrees or they were considered proficient in skills that were useful for code-breaking, so things like language or math or science. And they were viewed as loyal Americans of good character. Now, co-breakers during the war provided intelligence on everything from ship movements to battlefield strategies, really offering an inside view of the enemy's next move. Women cryptographers in particular served in various roles, such as breaking and re-breaking enemy code systems. They also tried to verify the security of the United States' own encryption methods to see how breakable those methods could be by an enemy, and they also created dummy or fake traffic to help redirect the enemy's focus. Now, when we're talking about D-Day specifically in the lead up to D-Day, the women cryptographers provided valuable intelligence that actually helped to influence Allied Commander's decision to land in Normandy, and then also in the lead up to D-Day to increase the probability that this invasion would actually be a surprise attack, the Allies engineered a deception campaign to help spread disinformation among the German Army about where and when the Allied invasion of Europe would commence, and so as a part of their diversion tactics, the Allies created the Fictional First US Army Group. Now, a fictional army needs fictional radio traffic to verify its existence, and so to help sustain the sarai, this deception, women code breakers played a really important role in engineering this dummy traffic. So again, it's fake radio communication traffic, but it had to mirror real communication traffic closely enough that the enemy was actually going to believe that this was credible information, even though they were being fed false intelligence. And so records from the National Archives have to visually capture some of these important roles that these women cryptographers played. So we have two such photographs on the screen here. Again, just showing these women in some of these various roles that they had during World War II. For our purposes tonight, I actually wanna focus on two additional primary source records, a diagram and a photograph, because a close analysis of these two records invites discussion about broader social issues of the time, namely stereotypes surrounding women's work, but also encourages student reflection about gendered notions of wartime heroism. Now, both of these primary sources that we're gonna look at in just a minute are available on Doc's Teach, but this time, I actually would just like to discuss how National Archives records can be used in conjunction with just general document analysis questions to spotlight these lesser-known D-Day stories. So one way to introduce this activity would be to simply ask students what you already know about D-Day, either from past classes, from books, from movie portrayals, and then based on their understanding, to ask students to describe how they would define heroism as it relates to D-Day, maybe thinking about the people, events or objects that come to mind. And then you can introduce this diagram here from the National Archives, which is entitled A Message from Originator to MIS, or Military Intelligence Service, and we can use the Project Zero Thinking Routine, see Think Wonder to help analyze this primary source. Now, for anyone not familiar with Project Zero, these routines are designed to help deepen students' thinking, and so using this routine, we can pose questions like these to our students. So the C element of this routine can be as simple as what do you see? What details stand out to you? And again, because this is our first step in primary source analysis, this question focuses on observation. We're not to interpretation yet. Instead, the wonder element of this component helps to transition us from drawing those observations to then building interpretations based on the details that we see, because it asks students to consider, I think that this information is in the diagram because. And then the final component, the wonder component again, can be as simple as asking students, well, what questions do you still have about the diagram? And again, this may be, what questions do you have about the diagram that we can kind of pull information out and talk further? Or what questions do you have that this diagram raises that again, doesn't answer? And this is simply meant to, to highly to help students think about the fact that images often only tell part of the story and that they can still leave us with many unanswered questions. Now, once students have had a chance to walk through this routine, this is a potentially good place to introduce some additional context, such as the fact that this is a diagram that was produced by the Signal Security Agency. So this was basically the Army's main code breaking unit during the war. And what it depicts is the various steps involved in deciphering enemy messages, anywhere from interception of those messages to crypt analysis, so being able to actually break the messages and then translation as well. So once students have walked through this diagram, we can then show them this photograph which is entitled a typical SSR, Signal Security Agency unit at work. And basically it shows a group of officers and listed men and both male and female civilians working together on the same project. And so similar to the diagram, we can have students analyze the photograph with our see, think, wonder, thinking, routine questions as well. And then once students, of course, have had a chance to analyze the photograph and the diagram separately, we can once again have them compare these two primary sources to consider what additional information they can learn from analyzing the records in tandem. And we can ask students, for instance, to consider the differences between the diagram and the photograph. So I wanna focus on the diagram specifically for a moment. You may have had a chance to recognize or to see when I showed the diagram earlier that basically each stage of deciphering an enemy message is depicted by a character in the diagram. And really with the exception of the typist, all of these characters are portrayed as men, implying that it is men who are primarily involved in each step of deciphering these enemy messages. So here we have a diagram produced by the agency. It's really an idealized scenario of what this code breaking operation looks like. But as we've already talked about, this really doesn't capture the reality of the situation. We're more than 50% of the cryptographers involved during World War II were women. And so we can see that this photograph depicts an actual situation in which we have military and civilian men and women working together for a common purpose on a common project. And so once again, once we've asked students to identify some of those differences in the photographs in the diagram, this could be another good point for some additional contexts. Explaining things, for instance, like the fact that for many women co-breakers, World War II was actually the first time that they were actively recruited for a job because of their education and specialized skills. They were desperately wanted and needed by the US Army and the US Navy. Now, code breaking in particular was a more accessible field for women due in part to its relative newness, but also the stereotypical notion that women were best suited for positions that required attention to detail and repetition, which cryptanalysis certainly involves both of those. But the different scenarios that we see depicted here between the diagram and the photograph really offer an opportunity to discuss with students what these differences reveal about the stereotypes surrounding what was considered women's work, right? Both prior to and during World War II. But to also help them think about, well, how did this diagram and the photograph extend our thinking about D-Day and the types of heroes and heroic actions that we see performed, right, as a part of this amphibious assault. And again, with the goal of continuing to add to students' understanding of the D-Day invasion itself. Now this see-think-wonder routine is just one resource that educators can use to help their students analyze National Archives records. I just wanna add, or end, excuse me, by quickly highlighting another resource directly from the National Archives, and these are our primary source analysis worksheets. You can find these analysis worksheets at both our agency website, so that would be archives.gov, but then also on DocsTeach as well. These printable graphic organizers are available for many different types of primary sources. We have them in two levels, intermediate and novice, so you can see the novice one is the one in the front, and then intermediate in the back on the screen here, and we actually have them in both English and Spanish versions as well. So here we have highlighted a worksheet for analyzing a photograph, and this worksheet leads students through the process of analyzing a primary source document by once again, starting with observation, and then moving on to increasingly interpretive and open-ended questions. And the idea is that approaching a primary source in this manner helps students to be able to base their interpretation on a foundation of factual evidence that they are deriving specifically from the primary source, and the goal is that over time, applying this method with our students that it will help them to internalize a methodical approach to primary source analysis that will allow them to eventually confidently approach various types of primary source documents and be able to analyze them and gather information from them even independently. So as we've seen tonight, the National Archives has many records and resources that tell a myriad of stories from D-Day. I hope that this information that we have walked through here today just gives you a sense of how some of those primary sources can be incorporated into the classroom and hopefully encourages you to utilize some of them as well. And so at this point, I'd like to thank you for your time and I'd like to introduce Dr. Brienne Robertson, who is an education specialist here at the National Archives and invite her up to the stage as she will be leading our moderated panel discussion. All right, good evening. So I have the privilege of transitioning us to the moderated panel discussion. So I'd like to take this time to go ahead and invite all of our speakers back onto the stage and invite a new one, Ms. Emily McDarbet, who will provide our teacher perspective, our classroom teacher perspective for this evening. So for those of you that are in the audience, go ahead and start getting your questions prepared. If you are watching us from home, go ahead and start typing those questions into the chat box as we will try to take questions remotely as well for our speakers. So since typing takes a little bit more time, you can start doing that while I have them prepared. I'm gonna begin though by introducing our new presenter for this evening, Ms. Emily McDarbet. So she is coming from us. She is a social studies teacher for Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in history and a Master of Education in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Maryland in 2015. She has taught honors and AP levels of government and politics in US history. And in 2021, she was an inaugural teacher of the LGBTQ plus studies elective course in Montgomery County. Emily is the recipient of awards for excellence in teaching and student advocacy from the city of Gaithersburg and the Middle States Council for Social Studies. And I'm delighted to say she has also been volunteering for the National Archives since 2013. So welcome, Emily. Thank you. So I wanna begin by asking you what, like let's just get down to brass tacks. Talk to me about what are the challenges of teaching with primary sources? So the challenges are first as a teacher, you get excited as a history teacher, we got into this because we love primary sources but that's not what everyone loves. So first getting that challenge, that buy-in of getting students to want to read challenging texts or interpret texts that are not from their time period but then also probably the most challenging as a teacher is time. We have the luxury of talking about D-Day for an entire evening, I get 45 minutes. That's also including changing classes, getting students through a routine to get started. So when you have a typical US survey course, you're looking at 300 years of history and 135 days give or take whatever else is on the calendar. So time is your biggest constraint followed by having to differentiate for various students, can all students access the text? How much of it are you willing or can you modify for students without losing the integrity of the text? Then also getting that contextualization, a struggle we're seeing as we move further, a beautiful thing about history is you get more years. However, that means your audience and your students, they're less connected to the further past. We can talk about D-Day, I have context. My grandfather served in World War II. I know some background just because of being around it in my family. However, for students today, my students, their context is the 1990s, the 1980s. We're getting further and further. So you have to build a lot more foundational knowledge and a lot more context to interpret these texts. And it's kind of hard sometimes to know where every student is coming from with that. And then differentiating for levels, IEPs, 504s. So a teacher's doing a lot just to talk about one photograph in maybe 30 minutes or less. So that's a big challenge as much as we love them is then also getting students to love them. But they're incredibly valuable and every single curriculum is going to require them. And we see sources used not just in social studies, it is a cross-curricular thing. So these skills are applicable. So you're building this and you're trying to get student buy-in and we will continue to use them. But you just gotta get creative on how you're going to use them in your classroom. So you mentioned curriculum requirements and that sort of thing. So talk to me about D-Day. And so I know that you teach honors, you teach AP government. So what specifically is mandated that you cover for data? So I am gonna read this just to make sure I have it correct. I am using the Montgomery County Public Schools curriculum as well as the College Board. I do wanna clarify, I'm speaking from my own perspectives and my own experiences, I do not speak from Montgomery County Public Schools. So from our standard honors US curriculum, it says to quote, investigate the impact of the war on the economy, service members and Americans of different races, ethnicities, genders and sexual orientations. And then from College Board in relation to D-Day, World War II more generally from both of these. Quote, the United States and its allies achieved military victory through allied cooperation, technological and scientific advances, the contributions of servicemen and women in campaigns such as Pacific Island, Opping and D-Day invasion. It's not a lot to go on, but a lot of things both of you have brought up with those photographs hit every single thing in that. So we're looking for history from multiple perspectives through analysis and primary sources. But at the end of the day, kind of the significant students need to take away from this if we're gonna talk, said brass tacks. If I'm gonna put this on an exam, what's the significance of D-Day? The two main things students need to take away from this according to most of curriculums is D-Day is a turning point in World War II because this is gonna force German forces to fight on two fronts. This is what's gonna help us lead to more consistent allied victories leading us towards victory in Europe. And then also demonstrations of Eisenhower's leadership which you talked about is also then in American history going to lead us to having Eisenhower elected as president. What leadership do we see now and then how is that gonna play out into the 1950s? So those are the two big things that they need to take away from D-Day while also looking at multiple perspectives. So how might you then imagine using that broadening perspective activity that Caitlin showed us? How would you bring that into the classroom? So what I like something like that for is I love images. They can be both incredibly accessible primary sources because there is no text. So depending on context, I like the questions you have and the zero think wonder method. I like that better than KWL because, sorry, no wonder word. Because I don't have to assume prior knowledge. I don't wanna assume prior knowledge from students that can be intimidating, that can isolate students who then realize they don't have a lot of prior knowledge. But getting them to just look at a photograph, what do you see is a wonderful entry point to have everyone participate in the class. But I also like that it's fast. I'm probably gonna use that as an introductory warmup but if I got five, 10 minutes, that works really well. You could even vary if you wanna cover lots of different things. Again, I might only have three. I think when I taught this in AP history last year, I had four days to cover all of World War II, four. AP teachers, I feel you, we're hiding in crunch time. But I was lucky to hit World War II by March, April. I've got till May 6th to teach up until 2000. So you only get a couple days. So I can have a lot of different perspectives. I can pull those images of women. I can pull images of code talkers. I can pull images of the 320 battalion. And maybe I divide that up across different groups. Do the same activity but have a lot of different things happening and then we can hit a lot of perspectives in a short amount of time before transitioning into notes or into a video or whatever we're gonna be doing after. So I like images because they're accessible. I like that because we have a variety of them that are open in the public domain. I use a lot of National Archives records that you can hit all of those things in a very quick amount of time. You do have to do a little bit of planning beforehand. You gotta find what you wanna use. Luckily Doc's teach makes that very easy. But you can hit that objective pretty quickly while also incorporating those primary source analysis skills. All right, so I wanna move now. We have a question from one of our online viewers. And so I'm gonna open this up to the entire panel. So whoever wishes to answer it may. But Samantha Fowler asks, how might a teacher differentiate the National Archives documents, so texts, photos, et cetera, for students who might be below grade level or English as a second language learner? So I'm happy to start with that since it was a question specifically about National Archives records. So one of the ways when we look at, because we have so many primary sources and we think about what would be the best primary sources to be able to use as an educator. One of the things that we do think about is accessibility and how would a teacher be able to use this to differentiate. And so we really do love to incorporate photographs as a part of our activities. Not that, of course, documents are not important. They certainly have their place and it is important for students to know how to be able to read and analyze them. But the idea with the photograph is you don't have to worry as much about texts, about vocab, about language. And just being able to kind of to read through maybe language that students are not as familiar with. So the source itself, so thinking about the sources that you choose and kind of the accessibility of that is something that goes into our doxie checktivities is something that can help to be able to differentiate that. When you're looking at a photograph, certainly you do have to build skills and there are questions that you wanna ask when you're examining a photograph but you're able to kind of take the issue of text of language and put that to the side for a moment. And then the other thing to think about in terms of differentiation with an activity like this which you can certainly do with a variety of doxie checktivities is we provide some recommended teaching strategies and some questions, but the idea is that we also would encourage teachers to tailor those questions to the students that will be going through the analysis. And so if you have students that are potentially below a grade level may have difficulty accessing some of the content kind of maybe starting at that basis of observation and working to build those skills up and then being able to scaffold up from that observation to then interpretation. We see these details, what might those things mean? And then also when I was walking through the doxie checktivity there were quite a few questions that were a part of that activity but being able to scale back those questions a little bit so we provide some recommended questions and of course these are nice questions to be able to dive deeper into the content but if you know that you only have a certain amount of time or you know that maybe it may take your students a little bit longer to get through an activity being able to highlight just a couple of those questions that you really want to be able to emphasize to have a good conversation with your students about and those are the questions that you're going to choose to use. So again that's the nice thing with an activity like that compare and contrast is that it is flexible in nature so that you can adapt it to your students to the time that you have and then to what you are hoping the purpose behind that. And as a fellow educator I'll just also add if I may that our primary source analysis worksheets we have novice and intermediate and we name them that way on purpose we've actually heard from educators so that they're able to use those novice worksheets with English as second language learners and it doesn't feel bad because it doesn't say like elementary school children, right? Like it's not branded in a way that feels insulting to older students. So that's one thing that we have heard from teachers that is really great with those worksheets. Also in Docs Teach when you're searching for activities you can search by grade level, grade band and we always encourage folks to search like one grade level above or below what you're actually are because you may find some things that you can easily adapt as Caitlin said. So with that I'm happy to open it to our in-house audience. Also if you are watching from home still keep those questions rolling in but if anyone here has a question for a panelist please go ahead and raise your hand and we have our volunteers would actually carry the mics to you in the audience and we would ask you not to speak until the microphone is in your hand. So. Sorry. Yeah. So yeah, go ahead and. Okay, I have a question. We're just trying to avoid the lines in the stairs. I never use this at school of course. Never need that. So I have a question for Mr. Kershaw. You know, we do have our students, they write research papers and they look at primary sources. So and we often talk about colorful people in these historic events especially in D-Day. Now how did you choose like you were looking at Captain Leonard Schroeder and his interaction with Theodore Roosevelt Jr. And I was just fascinated by that because I really hadn't read of all that before and read of other things. How did you, how do you think that like demonstrates if you're looking at students, a group of students how do you think this Theodore Roosevelt Jr. and others who work with him? How would you say that's like demonstrating personal leadership in an event as big as Normandy and especially Utah Beach? That's a good question. I think in Roosevelt's case it's a bit of an outlier because his surname explains why he was on Utah Beach the fact that he had a very famous relative. His story is well known. I cherry picked eight what I considered to be superstars for the first wave and it was just a very personal bias. I didn't really cover that much new ground but I think my overall take was a new angle. So I wanted to look at the guys that were first that if their missions had failed he they would have failed that were most likely to be killed who had the longest odds of surviving and made the most important decisions and achieved the most important missions. So Schroeder officially was the first American to come ashore not the first to land in Normandy that was a guy called Captain Lineman. He was a pathfinder for the 101st airborne. His boots touched the dew soaked grass in Normandy at 12, 15 a.m. And Schroeder came in I think at 6.32 or 6, 6.36. He's among the first wave on Utah Beach and off to his right about a hundred yards in a landing craft also in the first wave was Theodore Roosevelt Jr. They knew each other well. They'd spoken the night before. I found a really great interview with Schroeder in a French magazine from the early 90s. And I thought their relationship was interesting because he had a very powerful his deputy division commander not assistant division commander. Someone of that rank and that stature who has an intimate relationship with a junior officer. And that's because they were a tight unit because Roosevelt was a superb leader. And by leader I mean someone that could get close to people that he gave commands to that would trust him and most importantly would show the way. And so him landing in the first wave he's a most senior allied officer, general rather, to be on D-Day in action. The act of stumbling, hobbling ashore with a walking stick was seen not only by Schroeder but by many others and it was an inspiration. That's why there's a very famous scene in the movie The Longest Day, one of the most famous. So yeah, I think that Schroeder allowed me by picking certain characters, these eight guys I was able to tell stories of many other people. So I could tell the airborne story through Lilliman and the 101st airborne. I could tell the fourth ID Utah Beach story through Schroeder because it wasn't on his own. These are people at the center of units that have very important objectives. So I don't know whether that answers the question. It does, thank you very much. Thank you. Other questions, he'll bring it to you. My question might be for Mr. Kershaw as well or anyone else. I see that the theme of this is about primary sources and I'm curious about when Eisenhower was selected to lead D-Day from that point forward and all the changes he had to make to the planning. Could you describe at a high level I guess, the changes he had to make and what sources are available to learn from about those changes? Well, there were lots and lots of sources for Eisenhower, lots of sources on that period from January of 1944 until D-Day. I think the key decision he had to make was who to listen to and who not to listen to, who to be annoyed by and who not to be annoyed by. One of the reasons why someone of his ilk who had never been in combat was chosen by Marshall was because he was a supreme diplomat as it turned out, a very good politician. Patent even before the war was over said Ike's all about becoming president. So I think that he had an enormously complex job but he delegated it superbly and he knew how to deal with the Brits which was a big issue. There's a really famous, coming back to famous photographs is a really famous color photograph of the Overlord Commanders. I think it's taken in April of 1944 and the only two Americans out of a group of eight I believe are Bradley and Eisenhower. So this is a British show. I say that with my plummiest English accent. Eisenhower's primary job is to hold that bunch of prima donnas together to make them function as a team. So he has to listen, but he doesn't have to act on what he's told. Plastic example being Lee Mallory telling him that airborne operations essentially is a suicidal option. Not to meet you wanna hear less than a month before D-Day. What was he gonna do about it? How would he respond to that? Eisenhower's Eisenhower, he listened and went ahead and made decisions anyway. One of the interesting things about Eisenhower that I just come across recently looking at his correspondence with Marshall, which can be easily found, is that one of the big problems that Eisenhower was facing in the run up to D-Day was pattern and how the American public were responding to the revelation in late 1943 that Patton had had this famous slapping incident, which actually wasn't just one incident, it was two, so slapping and then there was a kicking up the ASS. And Marshall says to Eisenhower, which is credit to Marshall and explains a little bit about their relationship and how things work, he lets Eisenhower make the decision. He says there are several letters actually from April into May of 1944, while at the height of planning and nervous tension for D-Day, several letters between Marshall and Eisenhower about what to do with Patton. Because it's a big issue back in the United States but in occupied Europe people could care less what they do with Patton just to arrive. And Eisenhower decides that he can't do without Patton and he'll bring him into action later on and he says to Marshall that I'll bring him into play later on we're gonna need an army commander of his stature and his experience. So looking at Eisenhower's diaries and the other information about his actions in that winter and spring of 1944, I don't really know how he didn't have a heart attack. I don't know how he didn't collapse from tension and stress, it was excruciating. And I think that is a measure of someone that's been practicing since 1942 through 43 to be Allied Supreme Commander at that moment. He was groomed by Marshall for a very long time. He knew how to operate at a diplomatic level. He knew how to, for example, tell Churchill that he couldn't be in the D-Day invasion. He knew how to basically, he was the only guy that got to decide and he enjoyed that power and he used it correctly. But it was a hell of a challenge, extraordinary. I'll add to that that Montgomery, the much loathed by Americans, Montgomery, had it not been for Montgomery, you wouldn't have had Utah Beach, you wouldn't have extended the bridgehead. Montgomery came and looked at the plans and made actually the most critical changes and said that we need a lot more men if possible and we need a much broader front. And by the way, where are we going? We're heading for a port. The point of Normandy was that we take Sherbourg for logistical reasons. And so Montgomery said we need another American beach, it became Utah and that's closest to Sherbourg because that's our objective. We'll get to Paris eventually and maybe Berlin but first of all, we've got to get ourselves a port. So how do you deal with that kind of suggestion? Do you say no? Do you have, does your ego overtake the situation or do you listen and agree? And to his credit eyes and hour, could listen, could process the information, didn't annoy people, wasn't condescending and would make the right decisions to incorporate good ideas that he saw were good ideas and that was just through not just based on immense experience of dealing with, as he described them, a bunch of prima donnas. Thank you very much. So we have time for just one more question and since folks here, we are gonna recess out for an opportunity for book signing and some refreshments. So I received another question from our online visitors that I'll go ahead and conclude our program with. And so this is open to everyone but I know that we have focused a lot on high school students in particular but the query that we received online is asking about college students specifically and how college students don't seem very interested in primary sources and so how can we get them more interested in trying to work with primary sources more? I mean I think our presentation tonight demonstrates that there are many fascinating stories that can be told through primary sources but they can be daunting if you've never worked with them before so how do we kind of ignite or spark that curiosity in the first place? So I know for me, at least from the high school perspective or high school students have the luxury that as a teacher I'm gonna bring them these sources. I search them out whereas I recognize when I transitioned into college and was studying history I was encouraged to go do the research myself. I don't ask my students to do the research in my class. I give them the sources I want them to read so a big part of that challenge is accessing those resources. Now I had an advantage. I was a volunteer here at the National Archives. I know how to use a pull slip. I know how to go to the archives and do that but that is a very different type of research than a library research. Especially as now more things are becoming online and digitizing it seems easy to go find things versus I'll just go to an online database. I'll just go to Google but it is a very particular type of research so I think a big part for college students is you gotta get them to the fiscal space so having the opportunity I was lucky that I was already at the archives. I was here for my internship multiple times a week. I had someone teaching me how to use this and then I used that for my own research papers for my own thesis in my senior year but not everyone is getting that. They're saying go do research, find sources, go downtown, take the metro. So if you can orchestrate those opportunities to actually teach your students to not make these spaces so intimidating because it's not like searching a library where I can just put in a key term and it's gotta pop up. You have to know record numbers. You have to know all sorts of different things. You've done plenty of primary research. It's not the same as what you're taught in a high school so that transition to college students does need to be explicitly taught and that they can find, it is easy to find them if you know how to. So helping students that way or start out small in those other classes, provide some primary sources for them. Don't always encourage like go find it yourself. You might need to help them a little bit. Yeah and I would just kind of add on to what Emily was saying there. I don't teach within a college context so I understand that there are different constraints involved with that and different challenges of course with teaching primary sources but being able to find those ways to incorporate even some of whether it's the sources that are related to D-Day or resources related to whatever topic they're looking at because I can just think, for example when I was looking doing research, being in that physical space in A2, looking for photographs of these women co-breakers and cryptographers and I came across the diagram and I came across the photograph and I had a moment to examine it and be like wait a minute, like this diagram seems to be telling a very different story than what this photograph is telling and kind of adding to some of the kind of secondary source context that I had had. It was almost like that light bulb moment where it was like wow, this is a really fascinating story and I can see the story played out in these records. So being able to again, incorporate those primary sources as you are able even in small ways in the classroom to help walk students to maybe that light bulb or that aha moment where it's like we have these physical, tangible records of history in front of us and these are really powerful stories that we're able to take away from our analysis of that and again that comes from the records themselves. Yeah, if you have an opportunity to actually go see the records, like if a college professor can and we have record centers all over the country, you also have your local records, talk to libraries, they have amazing collections but if you can actually get students to tangibly hold it, not a PDF or a picture of it but actually have a chance, maybe as a class, you pull some, you let them actually see the photograph. I worked with Dorothea Lang's photographs for programming we've done here and that's an incredible experience to actually hold the photo that you've seen in a textbook your whole life. Even though it's the same photo, it's not the same experience. So getting students to actually maybe make a field trip out of it, have your library pull a couple if you can actually get them to see the document itself versus just here's a transcript or here's a picture of a picture that can make a huge difference. What did that feel like for you, like doing research and holding ICE records? Yeah, it reminds me of a moment recently when I was somewhere and someone brought out an escape and evasion. We started talking about escape and evasion and someone brought out an escape map that's a silk, basically a handkerchief. And it's beautiful, it shows you all the main roads, rail lines in Europe if you're shot down over occupied Europe. So unfolding that gives me a big thrill. It's almost, it's like somebody pulls out an SS dagger or a Nazi flag that it was a trophy from the Second World War. It's real, this is something that a GI has picked up or kept, somebody that was in combat has kept. And when kids see objects and touch them, whether it's a pistol or a medal or an escape and evasion silk handkerchief, you can see their eyes light up. Now what I would add to that is then if you go and look at international archives, if you go and look at the escape and evasion reports by people who escaped from or occupied Europe and got back to the UK, there were around about 2,000 Americans who completed what was called a home run. So you're shot down over Nazi occupied Europe, at least 50 people risked their lives so that you can get to the Spanish border across the Pyrenees, sometimes in winter, you get to Spain and then you get back to England and that's called a home run. It's an extraordinary achievement when you think that you're on a B-17 and half your mates have been killed or blown up and you land in a cabbage patch in Belgium. To get back to England is incredible, but if you look at the escape and evasion reports which they all had to make, so they were debriefed, very carefully and strictly debriefed because the worry was that they might have been infected by the Gestapo or arrested and they were being used as double agents. So they had to go through really strict interrogation and also they were made to write a report. Now these escape and evasion reports are some of the most gripping narratives that you could possibly read. So that combined with an object, but certainly by, I would say to anybody and very interested, whether at college or a student, here's a little bit of background about what it took to escape Nazi occupied Europe. Here's what the guy wrote when he got back and their incredible narratives. So I'm going to your point about a primary source that actually is a story and tells a story that's really engaging and fascinating that sparks their imagination and can get them deeply involved in the bigger story of World War II or Nazism or the Prince resistance or whatever. Yeah and I would also just add and I think this is applicable to any grade level, not just college and understanding that this can sometimes be easier said than done, but looking for those primary sources that not only just tell powerful stories but also powerful stories that students can make personal connections to. So it becomes something that they can also understand and maybe connect to an experience that they've had or an experience that may be a member of a family or a friend has had as well to continue right to spark that engagement. So with that I think we have to draw our conversation to a close. I want to thank all of you for joining us this evening at the National Archives. We hope that you will stay connected with us. We have an education newsletter and so feel free to subscribe to that, learn about our upcoming programs. I want to thank our panelists here this evening, Alex Kershaw, friends of the World War II Memorial, Emily McDermott and the Montgomery County Public Schools and my colleague Caitlin Ketroda with the education team here at the National Archives. So for those of you that are here, we'd love to see you out in the corridor for a book signing and for some refreshments. Thank you all so much, good evening. Thank you.