The Topic: 1968
Overview
The Basics - The
year 1968 marked many changes for the United
States. It signaled the end of the Kennedy-Johnson
presidencies, the end of the civil rights movement,
and the beginning of the end of the war in Vietnam.
More than that, it meant a change in public
attitudes and beliefs.More Detail - 1968 is recognized as being a pivotal year in United States and the world. On January 31st, Viet Cong opened the Tet Offensive by attacking major cities of South Vietnam, a move that triggered President Lyndon B. Johnson's call for peace negotiations. March 31st, L.B.J. surprised the nation by choosing not to run for reelection. On April 4th, civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot and killed in Memphis, Tennessee, leading to riots in Washington, D.C. and other cities. In June, Robert F. Kennedy, former U.S. attorney general and U.S. senator from New York, was assassinated in Los Angeles while campaigning for the Democratic Presidential nomination. At Mexico City's Summer Olympic Games, African American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos won gold and bronze medals, then bowed their heads and raised clenched fists during the playing of the U.S. national anthem in protest of U.S. racism. In August, the Democratic National Convention in Chicago was marred by clashes between Vietnam War protesters and Mayor Daley's police force. And in November, Richard Nixon was elected President with running mate Spiro Agnew, making one of the most extraordinary political comebacks in U.S. history. These and other events marked the year as a benchmark of unrest, tumult, and change.
42eXplore 4 Teens
1968 from Information Please
http://www.infoplease.com/year/1968.html
A summary of the year's events.
Related Websites:
2) 1968 at Answers.com
3) 1968 at Wikipedia
4
) 1968 in Music at Wikipedia
5) Counterculture Timeline: The High Sixties: Magical Mystery Tour 1967 - 1968 (For mature, high school students)
History in the Streets: 1968 and the Counterculture from the Hoover Institution http://www.hoover.org/publications/uk/3420216.html
What happened in 1968 and why? William F. Buckley Jr., Editor-at-large at the National Review, and Christopher Hitchens, Contributing Editor at Vanity Fair chose opposing sides that year and now take a look back, explaining the rights and wrongs of the Right and the Left and their personal triumphs and regrets.
Related Website from the Hoover Institution:
2) You Said You Wanted a Revolution: 1968 and the Counter-Counterculture
http://www.hoover.org/multimedia/uk/3420306.html
Media 68 http://www.media68.net/eng/core.htm
Media 68 is a project that is partially funded by the European Community (DG XIII, Info2000) dedicated to the ideas, facts, movements and briefly to the history of the year 1968 in the world.
Whole World Was Watching, The: An Oral History of 1968
http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/1968/ This website includes audio files,
transcripts, and edited stories from 30
interviews conducted by high school students
about various people's recollections of the
events of 1968.
Activities 2 eXplore
Choose and complete a 1968
project:
Conduct an Interview. Visit
The
Whole World Was Watching, then conduct
your own interviews; you could interview a
veteran, a college student, a protester, a
teacher, or anyone who recollects specific
events of the year. For an overview of
major events, visit the calendar at sites like
1968 from Information Please.
Then and Now. Compare and
contrast popular music from 1968 to
today's music. Make a list of things
(products) that we have and use today that
did not exist in 1968. What television
shows were popular during 1968, are any
still being rerun? What were the movies
and best-selling books of the time? How
are they like and unlike ours today?
Debate the Vietnam War. In
addition to looking at The
Whole World Was Watching and other
sites like The
Sixties Project, visit Vietnam
1968. Then take a position for or
against the U.S. involvement in the war;
be a hawk or a dove. Who would support
your position and who would not? Should
the U.S. have withdrawn from Vietnam?
Create a chart showing the relationships
between people and attitudes.
Adopt a 1968 Role. Select a
public figure from 1968 and learn all that
you can about them. Then play their role
in an event that occurred that year.
More 2 eXplore
1968,
August: Disturbances at the Democratic National
Convention (Chicago Public Library)
http://www.chipublib.org/004chicago/disasters/1968dem_convention.html
Some of the country's most publicized antiwar
demonstrations took place at the 1968 Democratic
National Convention. Allegations of unwarranted
violence and brutality against police,
demonstrators, reporters and bystanders
abounded.
More sites about 1968 Convention:
2) Brief History Of Chicago's 1968 Democratic Convention (CNN)
http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1996/conventions/chicago/facts/chicago68/index.shtml
3)
Chicago 1968-An introduction by D. Blobaum http://geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/1553/
4) CPL Chicago: 1968 August: Disturbances at
the Democtratic National Convention
http://cpl.lib.uic.edu/004chicago/disasters/1968dem_convention.html
1968
Mexico City Olympics History
http://history1900s.about.com/library/weekly/aa081000t.htm?iam=dpile&terms=%2B1968
An overview of the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico
City, Mexico.
Related Website:
2) 2 Black Power Advocates Ousted from Olympics http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/1018.html#article&txtSearchFor=1968%7C1968S
1968: The Year of the Barricades by S. Steven Kreis at The History Guide
http://www.historyguide.org/europe/lecture15.html
Read a historinan's lecture on the 1968 revolutionary events and their causes.
Demand the Impossible! Posters
from the 1968 Paris Uprising http://www.art-for-a-change.com/Paris/paris.html
An overview of the May, 1968 revolution of
students and workers in Paris. See the revolt's
posters and descriptions of each.
Related Website:
2) 1968 from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_1968
Lisa Law: The Counterculture http://americanhistory.si.edu/lisalaw/4.htm
Lisa Law's photographs provide glimpses into California's blossoming counterculture.
Shock Year :
1968 http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/rfk/sfeature/sf_1968.html
From a PBS American Experiece program about Robert F. Kennedy, this section looks at events of the year.
Sixties Project, The
http://lists.village.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Survivor.html
The site is designed to be useful to scholars
and students, but also to provide a place where
those who lived through the Sixties can tell their
own stories about the era, meet others with common
interests, and reflect on their experiences.
Vietnam
1968 by Tim Lickness
http://grunt.space.swri.edu/vn68.htm
Website contains memories of an infantry
platoon leader who arrived in Vietnam shortly after
the Tet Offensive.
Related Websites:
2) Vietnamese Say G.I.'s Slew 567 in Town http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0316.html#article&txtSearchFor=1968%7C1968S
3) Vietnam War, The: 1965-1968 by D. Simon http://faculty.smu.edu/dsimon/Change-Viet2.html
4) Vietnam War 1965-1968 from The History Place http://www.historyplace.com/unitedstates/vietnam/index-1965.html
Words 2 eXplore
Richard M. Nixon |
Robert F. Kennedy |
Black Panthers |
Richard J. Daley |
||
riot |
racism |
boycott |
|||
Viet Cong |
Cold War |
assassination |
National Guard |
Ladybird Johnson |
|
convention |
antiwar movement |
hawks and doves |
Olympic Games |
demonstration |
democratic party |
racial prejudice |
Pueblo incident |
open (fair) housing |
protest |
military draft |
Yippee |
Created by Annette Lamb and Larry Johnson, 7/99, Updated 7/07.