Mod 8 Reading Check: The Four Freedoms, and Visions of the Postwar Worl

This Reading Check is a focused reading of two important documents that will remain important to the 20th- and 21st-century American global identity. You don’t have to read the entire attachment, but skim as much as you can of Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” speech and Henry Luce’s essay, “The American Century.” While we already know a fair bit about President Franklin D. Roosevelt, we may be unfamiliar with Luce. He was the American magazine magnate behind the influential Time, Inc., and thus magazines like Time, Life, House and Home, and Sports Illustrated. The sources featured in this assignment were from 1941 and 1942, upon US entry into a war that had been raging since 1939.

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Assignment Instructions

Step 1: Annotate

Click “Load…” below to read President Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” speech and magazine magnate Henry Luce’s “The American Century.”

As you read, create annotations and/or add to annotation threads created by other coursemates reading and marking up the same document. Touch on the following prompt through your class annotations:

Prompt: According to these documents, why did the US enter World War II? What are the mid-century values of Americans, according to what you are reading in these sources? What is meant by the “Four Freedoms” and the “American Century”? What accounts for these ideas of American exceptionalism coming out of the desperate Great Depression? What visions of the US do men like Roosevelt and Luce see for the nation after the war?

Your annotations can:

• Discuss evidence that could be used to answer the above prompt. Feel free to use the threaded notes option for more conversation.
• ‘Translate’ a portion of the text, or put the author’s words into our 21st-century vernacular. What is being said?
• Note details about the author’s perspective or the author themself.
• Pose questions for other coursemates to answer for clarity.
• Note relevant details from the textbook or other readings.
• Share the historical significance of a selected section of the text.

To be meaningful, annotations should be more than a simple highlight (though feel free to highlight passages that speak to you). Highlighted sections won’t be seen by the rest of us.