The big idea behind the midterm exercise is to harvest what you’ve read and absorbed so far about the immediate postwar period in Europe and to make it your own.  What on earth does that mean, you’re probably thinking.  What it means is to imagine yourself or a character of your own devising on the ground in postwar Europe as a journalist, say, or a government official, or an NGO worker, or a displaced person.  Your character records his/her/their thoughts on paper in the form of a diary entry, much lke we encountered in yesterday’s class, or in a letter back home, or a newspaper article, or an internal ‘confidential’ memorandum, a la Hannah Arendt’d field notes. 
The midterm, which should run between 5-7 double-spaced pages, is designed to be an exercise in synthesis imagination. It’s a way to bring to life and humanizes events, phenomena and people that currently inhabit the rubric of ‘history.’
Got it?  If not, or if you’d like a bit more by way of clarification or would like to run an idea by me before committing to it, please don’t hesitate to send me an email.