The Impact of the Atomic Bomb

This lesson was created by Jeffrey Webb, an eighth grade teacher in West Virginia, as part of the fall 2025 Pulitzer Center Teacher Fellowship program. It is designed for facilitation across approximately three class periods.

For more lessons created by Pulitzer Center Teacher Fellows in this cohort, click here.

Throughout the academic year, I try to show my students that we do matter, even in our small state of one-and-a-half million people. I center stories about West Virginia and then try to show how that story has importance both for our state as well as for people beyond our borders. That is the approach I took here with this lesson for the Pulitzer Center.

Jeffrey Webb

Lesson Overview

How do additional sources of information help us understand a historical event? Many students often learn about the past from a secondary source like an article or textbook. This lesson encourages students to go deeper and consider other sources and perspectives when learning about the past.

In this lesson, students will read a news article to learn about West Virginia’s role in developing the atomic bomb. Students will then watch a video from the Pulitzer Center to learn how Japanese individuals were affected by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By comparing the two sources, students will better understand that seeking out additional sources of information can deepen their understanding about a topic and provide a more well-rounded picture of the past.

Essential Questions

• How do additional sources of information help us understand a historical event?
• What were some of the social, political, and economic impacts of the United States’ creation of the atomic bomb?

Performance Task

Documentary poetry often draws upon and weaves together sources to create a poem. Students will use their Cornell notes and what they learned from the resources to create their own documentary poem about the impact of the atomic bomb. 

Assessment

Observation during class discussion and a checklist rubric for the performance task will be used to assess student learning.

Notes on Context & Content Advisory

This lesson contains graphic descriptions of violence.

This lesson was originally created for an 8th grade West Virginia Studies class. The news story from WBOY was included because it specifically discussed West Virginia’s involvement in the production of the atomic bomb. If the lesson is being delivered to students in other states or territories, it could be beneficial to research your own local connection to the atomic bomb and incorporate that history into the lesson accordingly.

Three-day lesson plan, including warm-ups, texts and video resources, discussion questions, and poetry activity. Download below to read the complete lesson plan.

Lesson Resources

WV.SS.8.25

• Demonstrate an understanding of West Virginia's development during the mid-20th century.

• Summarize the significant aspects of the economic and industrial growth experienced by West Virginia during World War II (e.g., chemical industry, steel industry, and coal industry).

For this lesson, students used Pulitzer Center reporting as well as reporting from their local news station to study about the atomic bombs dropped in Japan during World War II. To synthethize their learning, they then wrote documentary poetry to recount the events.

Student Poem 1: The Atomic Lightening

A white and purple flash

a napalm blast.

A bomb

that killed in mass.

Cities leveled,

this is the past.

The survivors of which,

protested in numbers.

After this,

Japan barely recovered.

Hibakusha came together,

just to be stunned.

It was cruel,

At least it was done.

Student Poem 2: World War Bombs

Hundreds of thousands

of people lost their

life,

Radiation, explosion, aftermath

Things that made people lose their

life,

Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Manhattan Project,

Explosions hit Japan's cities

Alabama, Morgantown, Wabash River

Places that made heavy water for these

bombs

Student Poem 3: Untitled

A loud boom

A hard and loud crash

flashing lights peoples screams of pain

A fireball as hot as the sun

in Japan it impacted them horribly

But little did they know

People in West Virginia were getting

Jobs instead of hearing bombs and screams

they heard gases being released.

Teacher Reflection

What is the focus of your lesson plan, and why did you write this lesson for your community?

I teach 8th grade social studies at a Title I middle school about ten miles outside of Charleston, West Virginia. In our district, 8th grade social studies focuses on our state’s history, ranging from the prehistoric moundbuilders to the Civil War to the crises of today. For a lot of my students, the subject is boring. They ask, “Why do we have to learn this?” Most of them have spent their entire lives living in West Virginia and they think they know everything there is to know about the topic. For some students, their apathy is an extension of their pessimism. West Virginia is a poor state, afflicted by a host of health concerns, and is home to a population that is both aging and dwindling. For some of these students, the question isn’t “Why do we have to learn this?” Instead, the question is really “Do we even matter?”

What is the focus of your lesson plan, and why did you write this lesson for your community?

Throughout the academic year, I try to show my students that we do matter, even in our small state of one-and-a-half million people. I center stories about West Virginia and then try to show how that story has importance both for our state as well as for people beyond our borders. That is the approach I took here with this lesson for the Pulitzer Center. Students learned about the history of the atomic bomb and, via an article from a local news station, they learned how a plant in Morgantown, WV, produced material used to construct the atomic bomb during World War II. That was the local connection. Students then moved beyond the local focus and watched the short video from the Pulitzer Center “What Japan’s Atom Bomb Survivors Have Taught Us About the Dangers of Nuclear War.” In that video, my students heard testimony from Hiroshima survivors, helping them better understand how the chemicals produced here at home had devastating effects on the other side of the world.

What did your students learn while engaging with this lesson?

“Crazy,” one student said after the video. Students were surprised at the number killed by the atomic bomb and by details like the bomb melting skin and burning shadows into the ground. A somber mood settled over the classroom, which doesn’t happen often in a classroom packed full with thirty-five middle schoolers. Several students seemed particularly shaken by the troubling details that come at the end of the video, that there are 12,000 nuclear weapons in the world today, the most powerful of which are eighty times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Japan. “That’s like enough to blow up not just a city but a whole country,” another student said.

I wanted my students to synthesize what they learned from the two sources, to help cement for them that what West Virginians did at the plant in Morgantown, WV, had global ramifications that could still be felt today. For their performance task, I decided to have them create a documentary poem incorporating information from the two sources. I thought it was an appropriate way to get them to connect information from both sources in an effort to create a fuller description of what happened. I found myself very impressed by what many students wrote.

“They didn’t know it would be their last goodbye / because on that day / purple lightning would flash across the sky,” began one student’s poem, drawing inspiration from the words of the Japanese survivors. “Alabama, Morgantown, Wabash River / places that made heavy water for these / bombs,” another student wrote, referring to what we learned about our own involvement in helping make the bombs. Yet another student offered an even more chilling comparison: “in Japan it impacted them horribly / but little did they know / people in West Virginia were getting / jobs. Instead of hearing bombs and screams / they heard gases being released.” 

What did you  learn by creating and teaching this lesson?

One thing that really struck me about this assignment is how much more willing students were in writing a documentary poem as opposed to a traditional essay. For educators replicating this lesson, I would offer one additional suggestion: don’t stop with the writing. Poetry is meant to be read and shared, and students should be encouraged to share their writing, whether that’s through a reading at the school, submission to a literary magazine, or some other forum. As the video within this lesson points out, we are approaching the day where the survivors of the atomic bomb will no longer be with us. It will be up to individuals like our students to carry on their message, to share the lessons they have learned with the world. If this experience has taught me anything, it is that we can and must give our students the tools to tell these stories. By doing so, our students gain their own voice. They learn that they matter. They learn that history matters.

About Jeffrey Webb

Jeffrey currently teaches 8th grade West Virginia studies at DuPont Middle School, and is certified in English, social studies, and gifted education. He holds an MFA in creative writing from West Virginia Wesleyan College, and he has written about Appalachia, labor, education, and history for such places as Learning for Justice, JSTOR Daily, Lit Hub, and Bright Wall/Dark Room.