Oldest entries at bottom
July 29: Submitted (after yet one more day of procrastination!). Now, it is up to the admissions committee. I am VERY nervous.
July 28: I actually finished this essay a couple of weeks ago, but I have sat on it in hopes that some miraculous enlightenment will descend upon me full of tremendously outstanding ideas for re-writing it. No such luck. So now I'm fixing up the bibiliography and the end notes and will be sending it off to Tara Salt. I'm very fearful that this won't be up to snuff. I know it is a decent essay but I'd hardly call it exceptional. Oh, wtf, I have nothing to lose. fingers crossed
June 22: It seems I have done nearly everything on my "to do" list except paint the living room and finish this essay! Well I have made some progress by tightening up the structure and going back through my sources for notes. The library is quite insistant on getting its books back, though, so my time may be running out! I think I may finally be at a point of going into the essay and whipping it into shape. I do think picking up that issue of MHQ has helped focus my style immensely into a more academic and yet readable form. This hardly compares with the jargon laden nonsense of my New College thesis…whew! My husband, however is getting very suspicious of why his WWII-averse wife is suddenly checking out books about Eisenhower ("oh, he seems like such an interesting guy!") and researching the Battle of Stalingrad ("weren't those Russians amazing! Who knew?"). I did not want to tell him about this project unless and contengent upon my getting accepted to Norwich; I hope I can keep to that goal. But he is getting seriously suspicious…
May 31: Nunh. Well I lost my job today but at least I have five pages worth of an essay to edit. I ref. a few bits that I can't remember which book they are from. Damnit I really need to make those notes as I read the books! Now I'll have to hunt them down. Bah. I guess I should be grateful for having plenty of time on my hands…
May 27: Finally came up with the bright idea of writing an outline. Whoa. I've been out of practice toooooooo long! I put the outline on the wiki so I can ref. it later. Obviously paper is not done and therefore has not been sent to Tara yet. She said I should take my time and I am; but I wonder when the deadline is? Surely she would warn me. Well, I can only keep plugging at it.
May 25: Bought the latest copy of Military History Quarterly to get a feel for the essay style probably expected by the admissions committee. The article on Muhammad is excellent and succinct; the author Richard A. Gabriel lays out this thesis upfront and then picks it apart with careful explanations. Couldn't beg a better example. This was a good idea!
May 23: The questions I have at this point are: 1) When did Hitler call off a portion of his troops from the Eastern front in fear of an Allied invasion across the Channel? 2) Was this change on the Eastern front crucial to the Battle of Stanlingrad? 3) Had Op. Overlord failed, would the Americans have tried again (they had the resources) or would they have jumped onto the British bandwagon to push inland via the Med. countries? I think it is becoming apparent the Eisenhower is not the man who beat Hitler, but rather, is the Anglo-Alliance Man who beat Hitler. Once the Battle of Stalingrad was done, the Russians could not be stopped and it comes then to S. Ambrose's thought (from his What If? essay, "D Day Fails") that the Communist Bloc would have included the enirety of Europe up the the shores of the Channel. In an ironic vein, Eisenhower now becomes not the "man who beat Hitler" but rather "the man who stalled Stalin". Ha!
May 20th: Finally got a whole day off from work. I wonder what a 5 day work week looks like…and with art class every night at FSU, I'm beat. Anyway, spent the day setting up my Norwich wiki at last. I wanted a resource I can access work, home, or library. Of course the damn thing took three hours to format and set up the way I want, although in the end it is worth it. Bless wikidot, I love this wiki! Tomorrow I will definately work on trying to flesh out the essay. I want to get this to Tara this week!!! For sure!!!
May 19th: w00t!!! The Chicago Manual of Style is entirely online, and gives a 30-day FREE trial! I'm totally psyched. Since both MiKE and I will be in school for a while (one way or another) this should be a good investment anyway. But for now, in order to get this essay done, at least I've got a quickie membership to start work with. Spent the day formatting my end-notes and bibliography style based on the CMS examples. Oh man, this is a perfect example of why I am happy to live in the digital age. The CMS, online! Right here! On my computer! I'm so psyched.
May 18th: Rough drafted out some ideas. Plebian. Weak. Need more pathetic-sounding adjectives to describe this draft. Okay, here: it just plain sucks. But one must start somewhere. Coming around to an idea of showing Eisenhower as crucial to D-Day, and then how the victory fell out from that point, only. Trying to "what if?" prior to D-Day is futile, due to the wide number of factors involved, it is impossible to say much of anything on it. Could pin the success of D-Day on Eisenhower and then discuss how that shortened the war in Europe, allowing manpower to be re-directed to Asia, yada yada. Still, both the Soviets and the atomic bombs were on the horizon in 1944, no way to say the Nazi's weren't bust one way or the other. To that end, the theory could be put forth that Eisenhower was supfleruous.
May 11th: Deep into the books. Overy's work is font of surprises at every turn. Interesting stuff! I also think I need to throw in some verbage about the Enigma, just to prove that Allied Victory was way more complicated than one man spanking Hitler's armies. Also thought of the idea to ref. the "What If?" essays. That could backfire with any old-school historians on the admissions committee, but I think it is worthwhile to at least review it; not so much for the highly speculative conclusions reached in the essays, but to analyze the bits and pieces they thought important enough to change. Could very clearly indicate the Allied resources that these historians think were crucial to Allied success. Enjoyed General Ike by his son, John S.D. Eisenhower. Lots of neat stories about the man himself that make him more real to me, particularly his youthful friendship w/ Patton.
May 9th: Occured to me during a particularly boring day at work that finding Bruce Nelan's original Time article would be a sterling idea (I'm quick that way…). Simple to do, and free (yeaaa, Time!). So now I have a copy of that and annotated it. Pretty much a lot of hero worship and simplification of key events. Eisenhower was a fantastic general, no doubts, but it is clear that this article was written in order to bring tears to the eyes of "The Greatest Generation." I'm more and more tempted to form an "Eisenhower didn't do squat!" hypothesis just to be contrarian, but hey, that would be wrong (both literally and ethically! ha!).
May 5th: Dig through the local library for something, anything, that might help with this essay. Score big with Richard Overy's book, Why the Allies Won, which is now my crib sheet. However he doesn't mention Eisenhower too much and puts a lot of the credit on the Soviets, so I will have to branch out from here. In reviewing the question, kind of wonder if it is a trick question, along the lines of, "Everyone thinks Eisenhower beat the Nazis — why are they wrong?" Could be. Will have to parse that for a bit.
May 3th: No avoiding it, must start this now! This weekend! So I choose question #3, the one about Eisenhower. I really wish one of these questions actually relates to something I know anything about, say, the entirity of World War I, for instance, or perhaps Machiavelli. Not WW II!!!! Worse is the question about the Viet Nam conflict, though, so I take what I can and run with it.
April 25th: Re-read "Essay Questions" and thought, "hey, I really should get cracking on this." I don't.
April 20th: Recieved admissions documents from Tara Salt. Read over "Essay Questions" and decided to something else first. Like, drill holes in my teeth or something. Okay, what I really did instead was my personal essay.
