I need help with an assignment. Your assignment is to write bullet points only on what you see/feel/think of all this. This class assignment is about perspective, about seeing what this country has been and from which it evolved, a lesson about how the past sheds light on the present and hopefully makes a better future. "If you know your history, then you know where you're coming from." (Bob Marley) We return to the Great Depression when, like today, millions were out of work. The stock market crashed on Wall Street, a decade of drought bankrupt farmers in the Midwest, the plains, all the way to California, and the struggles of many, many people. A writer told of this in his 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath. His name is John Steinbeck, and the title of his book is taken from a Civil War song written by Julia Ward Howe: she went to bed after watching troops march off to war (remember that Whitman poem from Memorial Day?) then woke in the middle of the night to write "Battle Hymn of the Republic." The Civil War (more of this later in the term) was fought to free four million slaves. More people died in that war (625,000) than all the wars the United States has fought combined. here is the two-song that needs to write a few bullet points. "The Ghost of Tom Joad" by Bruce Springsteen The Battle Hymn of the Republic.