J. Stephen Pearson, Lecturer: U of Tennessee, Spring 2009
In this project, you will examine archival projects related to the Vietnam War in order to understand the ways the war was discussed differently in different places and in different times. The Newspaper Project will require you to work with local documents from the era; you will compare the ways different papers treated the war, and you will look for contextual clues to uncover the paper’s audience and slant. The Textbook Project will require you to compare the ways history textbooks have changed in their treatment of the war over time; you will need to consider how the different generations are given different “official” versions of the war.
From your survey group, pick two people to do the textbook project and two people to do the newspaper project. This will count as a quiz grade, and both members of the pair will be awarded the same number of points.
Start of class Friday, 6 February.
In the main library, find the American History textbooks; the best places to look are in the E178, E178.1 and E741 call numbers. Pick three different decades–60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and 00s–and pull one textbook from each. Xerox the title pages, then answer the following questions for each book.
Do not check these books out, as there are 22 of you working on this same project with only a limited number of books available; there are study tables nearby where you can leave them if you don’t want to reshelve them.
1. Title and authors of the text.
2. What year was it published?
3. What years does the book cover? (All of American history? Since 1865? 20th century? Since 1945?)
4. If there is a separate section on the Vietnam War, how many pages does it get?
5. Using the index, how many pages in the book mention Vietnam?
6. Looking through these pages, briefly describe the way the War is presented: key ideas, events, etc.
7. In class Friday, be prepared to talk about how the treatment of the war changed over the three decades you chose. What does this tell us about how textbooks present information to students?
In the main library, find the microforms for Tennessee newspapers. Choosing from the papers available from Knoxville, Maryville, Oak Ridge and Chattanooga, find a day in which the War received front page coverage and compare the coverage from three papers. Print copies of the headlines, and answer the following questions for each paper:
1. Headline and author/wire service byline.
2. How much space does the article receive?
3. Briefly describe how the article presents the story; can you detect a bias in favor of or opposing the war?
4. What other stories received front-page coverage that day?
5. What other war stories were featured in the main section of that day’s paper?
6. Were there any editorials, letters or cartoons related to the war that day? If so, what was their take?
7. In class Friday, be prepared to discuss how the war was viewed in the East Tennessee area and how the coverage differed between papers.