Social Tumult, Political Movements, War... sound familiar?

*A reminder that class will not meet on Tuesday 3/15 - I will see you on Thursday

The last two years have provided us all a sense of what revolution feels like. With a deadly, new virus spreading around the world and public health guidelines falling on political ears, a global economic crisis, a reckoning with racial justice that saw protesters and counter-protesters spilling into the streets, and the rise of populist anger and authoritarianism around the globe - we all got a smell of it.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the war that unfolds before us is shocking in its violence, but isn’t surprising, given the global events since the end of the Cold War.

Read about journalism and misinformation: First read about RT America’s demise and the celebrity and young journalists who work there; and second read about Russian disinformation here.

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Prior to 2021, 1968 stood as a singular year in terms of tumult, from the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy to the student rebellions in France, Mexico, and Japan - the year rocked.

The Vietnam War served as a graphic backdrop to this accumulation of events. With its daily death counts and the moral purpose of the war called into question by images on the television news, many Americans began to lose faith in their government – something that was punctuated by the Watergate crisis 5 years later. You can get a sense of what people watched on their nightly news with these clips from CBS.

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The Weather Underground (see the trailer here) is a documentary that takes you along for the bumpy, terrifying ride. This is a group of Americans, so distraught about the Vietnam War, and inspired by the left-wing revolutions around them, that they resorted to terrorism. They were mostly well-off white college kids. The film was nominated for an Academy Award in 2004, and was first released as the nation grappled with the Iraq War and a post-9/11 world. Do you see a revolution brewing among young people on the Left or the Right today?

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In 1965, conservative commentator William F. Buckley debated writer, poet, and cultural critic James Baldwin debated the position "The American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro" at the University of Cambridge. What would be different or the same about this debate if it occurred today?