War and Pop Culture

Pop Culture and War…

When I conducted my research for the Bob Dylan song “The times they are a changing..” a couple of weeks ago, I actually spent a great deal of time researching and reading about folk music and learning about it’s history and evolution. I actually downloaded the song “Bring em home” from Bruce Springsteen’s album at that time, as many ideas were flowing about how to bring the history of genres of folk, at least from the 40’s through today of folk music and tying them with events for U.S. History. I recently have been listening to artists considered folk musicians such as Ani DiFranco, Tracy Chapman, and of course, Bob Dylan. I thought these were the epitome of the folk genre, but I learned that that they are the newer artists on the horizon as well as some lesser known past artists who may be not as famous, but more poignant.

I would like eventually to develop a unit where students will explore a unit of American History through the study of music and genre and how different genres develop in response to the culture of the nation. However as May approaches and we have yet to cover the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam, I don’t think it will happen this year. A cool summer project for me to work on, as I found the history of folk to be interesting and how it orginated during the Great Depression.

Perhaps to make this an assignment would be to have them identify genres of music and study it’s history, then evaluate what was going on our nation at that time, that may have fostered the growth of this genre. Some examples to use would be hip-hop, rock, blues, folk, jazz, and country. Students could also explore how these mediums are used to communicate information or to promote similar values about national events or sentiments.

The Authentic History Center resources could be used as way to study perceptions on war and to look at media art (films, books) and war propaganda through historical context and to understand perspectives of the war. I was particularly interested in the songs about the atomic bomb, since up until this point, I was not aware of any, but always wondered what people felt about it. Since I am in the process of researching the 1950s and 1960s for my next unit, I thought some of the resouces could help students understand the average American experience through those times.

I was also drawn to the Catholic church publication, This Godless Communism. It reminded me of the Mormon church books Awake! They are booklets that they distribute when trying convert non-Mormon’s into the church and usually are illustrated in a graphic novel form. The Mormons take a similar approach that the Catholics do, illustrating apocalyptic scenarios of godless people perishing in God’s terrible retribution for their sins. The Godless Communism features a similar apocalyptic ending, in which everything in our lives will be uprooted if we are not diligent in reporting people who are involved in un-American activities. In some cases, I think we may be heading back into that state of mind in terms of profiling people for terrorist activities and whether or not they are legally in this country. I also enjoyed reading the letter at the beginning which J. Edgar Hoover was pleased with the editors of the comic book for providing this education to America’s youth and encouraging youngsters to learn all they can about communism so that they can combat it. Those pieces are important for students to be exposed to, so that they understand why certain domestic and foreign policies were enacted.

On a differnt note, one of the films that I show during my slavery unit is “Ethnic Notions” which depicts the origin of the some of the more notorious stereotypes of African American people and how they originated, discussed how they were used to encourage prejudice and discrimination. The Teaching Diversity with multimedia piece of The Authentic History Center could be used to show stereotypes of other ethnicities and to find some similar depictions and reasons why they were used to demean specific groups.