Sports Illustrated 1960-12-26 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Here's an easy lesson - have students find as many differences between their time and the 1960s by looking through just one magazine. This magazine and this issue has enough material to make that worthwhile
Great debate series. Two short readings with comprehension and critical thinking questions. Richard Nixon's views written in 1985 against the publication of the Pentagon Papers is compared with the views of managing editor of the New York TImes
Nixon's first televised speech, with video and transcript. The rhetorical devices can be shared with students - notice how he shifts subject at the end of the speech, notice how he calls the bombing of North Vietnam "his ordeal", notice how he tries to change conversation to dirty politics on all sides" - use this in its entirely - or cull out quotes for DBQ, or short doc analysis.
This 172 pdf document can be skimmed by students to get an idea of how the president's viewed the race against McGovern in 1972. Teachers can direct students to "Ctrl-F" through "abortion", "crime", "experience", "Cold War" (and others). The questions to explore touch upon how reflective this is of the political climate in the early 1970s. More importantly, were these issues important to people, or made important to people through these campaigns?
Stanford Research into the Impact of Tobacco Advertising
Advertising is not part of the taught narrative canon but its value as a primary source of the second half of the 20th century is considerable. Teachers can simply set students loose in these tobacco ads - how can they help us understand the United States through this period?
Lyndon B. Johnson : Civil Rights Statements (1964) | U.S. Embassy & Consulate in the Republic of Korea
A quick exercise in class can have students looking at the quick description of the Civil Rights Act on the US Embassy in Korea's website. The Embassy chose the words "after lengthy debate" rather than the words over the vigorous opposition of southern Congressmen and the longest filibuster in American history (57 days). Both of the descriptions are factually correct, but the reader walks away from with an entirely different understanding of the CiviL Rights Act. Be aware that this is happening to you as the reader of any description of the past, the writer is shaping your understanding of the event through the words used.
David Parsons uses Arthur Greenspon’s 1968 photograph of a U.S. Army paratrooper in Vietnam to explore the different versions of history that have been presented to the public since 1968.
The unit consists of four tracks. The first three focus on separate content areas from the 1960s--foreign policy, civil rights, and electoral politics. Each of these three tracks is structured similarly and contains about the same amount of work, allowing the instructor to choose which track best fits his or her course. The fourth track examines events of the 1960s in the context of the Cold War, and thus reverses the order of the previous three tracks (here the documents are first, and the tapes second). By clicking on the link for the selected track, a series of separate pages appear that can be presented to the students, with the assignments for only that option. Instructors should not give access to this entire page to students, since it has tended to overwhelm them in the past.
