Patriotism for grown-ups

The title for this post comes from Eric Liu, the founder of Citizen University and former White House speechwriter for President Clinton. It comes at the end of an article he wrote back in October of 2014 at the height of the fury in one Colorado school district over the new AP US history framework. It is my understanding that the College Board intends to review the feedback they received this year and will announce a new edition of the AP US history framework. But I don't feel like waiting for that.

Saturday is the 4th of July. And this has been an historic month-- the shooting in Charleston, Obama's intense eulogy, the historic Supreme Court decision of last Friday, and another black church in flames last night, even as Confederate flags have come down. All these events occurring just as we get ready to celebrate our nation's ideals as expressed in the Declaration of Independence....

And so I write this post to echo the points made by Eric Liu in the article mentioned above (which you can read here). His point is that is rather childish to hold to a view of our nation as one that can do no wrong. True patriotism cannot simply point out where our nation has gone wrong. But neither should patriotism lead us to blindly extol our nation's virtues and triumphs without mention of its flaws and defeats. If we are responsible for teaching patriotism to children, he suggests, we must "behave like adults. Which means admitting that even though we Americans have done good things, and still do, we have also done bad things and still do."

If you think about it, even kindergartners can understand that. Which makes me wonder why so many politicians and pundits think AP high school students wouldn't.

So whether you are teaching college students, high school students--in an AP class or not--or middle school, you are teaching young adults. And our young adults can handle the fact that our history has highs and lows, heroes and villains, and everything in between. If pretend otherwise, we are insulting their intelligence.

Furthermore, we risk losing their trust. Vaclav Havel, the Czech dissident who became the first president of Czechoslovakia after the fall of communism, writes, "Lying can never save us from the lie. Falsifiers of history do not safeguard freedom but imperil it."

Sometimes I think it is precisely because of the high ideals of the Declaration of Independence that Americans have such a hard time admitting the bad stuff. Every nation and every group of people has its dirty laundry. The U.S. is no exception. But the idea of American exceptionalism has perhaps made it harder for us to come to grips with that. The Declaration of Independence promises so much. It is uncomfortable when we see evidence of not living up to it.

Particularly this 4th of July, because of recent events, there will likely be quite a few interesting articles popping up about this American exceptionalism,and the meaning of liberty. Here is one --"Celebrate Liberty Month: Wanted: American Exceptionalism" worth a read. So keep a look out throughout the holiday weekend, as there are sure to be others. Perhaps one of them will be appropriate for sharing with students in the fall. It could even be a good first day/week activity: to what extent has the U.S. lived up to its ideals? Discuss. Revisit the question at the end of the year.

For ideas about teaching the Declaration of Independence, check out my post, "Ideas for Teaching the Declaration of Independence: Text, Storytelling and Long-term Significance." I'm especially fond of idea #6 and 7 in that post. But there is other good stuff there. Like the great story about Jefferson and Adams both dying on the same day, which happened to be the July 4th, 1826--the 50th anniversary of what became Independence Day.

I will conclude this post with a final thought from Frederick Douglass. In honor of the 4th, check out his famous speech, "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July" here. But the words I want to end this post with are from an earlier speech he gave in Syracuse in 1847. He defines--most brilliantly--the meaning of a true patriot. A grown up patriot.

I make no pretension to patriotism. So long as my voice can be heard on this or the other side of the Atlantic, I will hold up America to the lightning scorn of moral indignation. In doing this, I shall feel myself discharging the duty of a true patriot; for he is a lover of his country who rebukes and does not excuse its sins.

Happy Fourth of July. Here's to becoming an ever more perfect union.

And to a World Cup victory from the U.S. Women's team on the 5th!

Now that it's summer...What to Read?

Thoughts on Summertime PD for the U.S. History Teacher

It is officially summer now. If you are reading this post, you are likely the kind of teacher who has a big list of Things You Are Going To Do This Summer To Make Next Year Better. And it is probably a long one, isn't it? Probably too long. After all, we are only human, and we also want to spend time this summer with our family and friends, getting some chores done around the house, maybe a little travel. And maybe do some reading that doesn't have anything to do with U.S. history or education. Right?

Right. But summertime, as you know, is a great time to get caught up on stuff, revise old things, get inspired by new things and do some learning for yourself.

I started off thinking this post would be about a variety of summertime PD--focusing on online courses (check out this one that started today!), other great blogs to follow, and getting organized with web bookmarking sites (Livebinders, Evernote and the like). But as I got going on books, I realized this topic merits its own post.

There is so much to read, and so little time (not to mention all those house projects), so how do you decide what to read?

The 7 Things All Good Lessons Have in Common:

A Checklist for History Teachers

Last month I finished a semester of teaching the social studies methods course to would-be secondary social studies teachers. And before summer gets too far along, I figured this might be a good time to review some of the things I did and share them in the hope that they are useful for readers of this blog.

While this post is written from materials designed for new teachers, I have found the checklist I describe a useful reflection tool for any teacher, myself included. As I dig through old lessons when I write this blog, I ask myself whether or not my lessons fit my own checklist for what makes a good lesson. I came up with this list after years of evaluating student teachers. The 7 items on the list reflect things I saw student teachers do or forget to do. These were the things that helped make a lesson succeed, or the things that made the lesson miss the mark.

As you review and revise the lessons you taught this year, try asking yourself whether or not your lesson meets this test. And if you think I have left important things out of this test/rubric/checklist, or whatever you want to call it, do leave a comment.

Also, keep in mind that when I say, "All" good lessons should have these things, we all know that sometimes a lesson is a work day in the library or getting straight into groups to finish a 3 day project, or something like that. So I don't mean that you have to do all 7 of these things on days like that.

Here's my 7 point checklist for what all good lessons should have:

#1: All good lessons, like a good paper, should have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

So right out of the gate, I know I'm cheating a little bit because this is really 3 things. Sort of. Together, they make the point that a lesson cannot consist of doing a bunch of random things until the bell rings. A good lesson must be PLANNED. And it should have an introduction, which sets up the main body of the lesson, and the whole thing should be wrapped up in a conclusion. Does that mean all lessons have to fit into a 40, 45, 50 or 80 minute period? Of course not. But the bell will ring at the beginning and end of each period. So even if you are planning a 2 day (or longer) lesson, you need SOME kind of intro and conclusion for each day.

The beginning, or intro: In the educational literature, some folks call the beginning of a lesson a "hook," others describe it as a "set induction" or an "anticipatory set." While each term has subtle differences, the point is that good lessons have a thoughtfully created introduction. Ideally, it should pique students' curiosity and get them excited about what they are going to do today. It should also remind students about where they've been and where they are going. (More on this in number #3, below.) See this link for a brief, but effective general explanation.

There are practical reasons for a good beginning or introduction, too. Diligent teachers have usually spent a lot of time creating a lesson, so they know what their lesson is about. But they forget, sometimes, that their students have just come in from a rough math test, or an argument with their best friend, or lunch, or a million other things. Do your students remember what you did yesterday? Do they have any clue that today you are reviewing the factors leading to the American Revolution? The answer is that most do not. So a good lesson should have a clear beginning that reminds them about what is going on, makes them forget about that math test for now and gets them to focus on history.

How do you do that? Well, I spent the better part of a 2 hour class on that this semester, so I really should write a separate blog post on this (note to self). But in case you want ideas NOW and I forget to write a post about this later, you can always do something like have students respond to an intriguing quote, or a piece of art or music, or a visual like a map, chart, political cartoon or photograph. They can do this by writing in their notebooks, adding to an online journal or blog (or twitter maybe?), or simply discuss with a partner.

The middle: This whole blog is about stuff that goes in the middle. Points #4, 5 and 6, below, are also more specific about what happens in the middle.

The end or conclusion: This is the number one thing missing from over half the lessons I observe from student teachers. In all fairness to them, most student teachers have a conclusion in their lesson plan, but they often run out of time. That, of course, is the difference between a lesson plan and an actual lesson, as all teachers know. (More on this in point #7, below.) 

But when teaching methods this semester, I found that students didn't always know what should be in a conclusion. There is more to this than I can fit in this post, but the short answer is that the conclusion should "conclude." It should tie up the lesson into a sort of package that addresses #2, below. It could refer back to your introduction, or sum up what you did in the body of the lesson. But don't just end because the bell rings. Ideally, you are sharing the burden of concluding the lesson with your students, eventually handing it off to them entirely. If the teacher is the one always summing up, we know the teacher will have learned the material. The key thing is to get our students to do it.

A few links regarding conclusions:

• Here is a link to a bunch of ideas for ending a lesson compiled by Ann Sipe of Grandview School District in Washington. I don't necessarily endorse all of these ideas. Some of them just don't work for my personal teaching style. Others are better suited for elementary school. But there a lot of suggestions to get you started if this you're looking for ideas on ending lessons.
• Also, check out this post, "Teaching Like We Write--Introduction and Conclusion in the Lecture." I came up with the idea for #1 on my checklist long before I read this post. And this post is specifically about coming up with conclusions for college lectures. But there is still useful material there for any teacher and any kind of lesson, not just lectures. I have linked to this blog post before, so you may have already seen this.

Your lesson might have a spectacular introduction and conclusion, but the most important part of a lesson is really #2.

#2 All good lessons should have a point.

This should go without saying, you may think. But think a little harder. Can you give an "elevator speech" for every lesson you teach? More importantly, can your students? Does your lesson clearly address an essential question or an important concept or idea? While it is true that some ideas are far too big for one single lesson (federalism, sectionalism, Civil War, industrialization, immigration, etc.), each lesson within a unit should build to some larger point. (e.g. you might have a few days about immigration but one of those days would focus specifically on the problem of assimilation.)

The point of "the point" is that there should be some reason why you are teaching this lesson. Something which addresses the number one question that all of our students ask,

Why do we have to know this???

The pre-service teachers I work with typically teach at least a few lessons in the semester before their student teaching. They sometimes tell me things like, "My cooperating teacher wants me to do a lesson on ___________ " and then they fill in the blank with a random topic, such as the legislation of the New Deal or comparing the North and the South before the Civil War or the five pillars of Islam (not all my students are in U.S. history). And then they want to know where they should start. 

And realistically, that's what a lot of us do. We know what we did last year, and yesterday, and so what comes next is comparing the North and South. But we should--every year--ask ourselves why do students need to know about the similarities and differences between the North and South? What is the point? How does this understanding help us better comprehend both the onset of the Civil War as well as its outcome? Do any of these differences still exist? In what way(s) does studying this topic improve the quality of our students' lives?

Did I lose you on that last one? Agreed, it's a little "out there." After all, we all know adults who live happy and successful lives who may not realize how many miles of railroad track the North had compared to the South. But thinking about the "bigger" questions behind the main topic of a lesson can help us consider why it may have mattered that the North had more railroads than the South in the first place. And then we can turn the question around and point out that the British had far greater resources than the colonists during the Revolution, and yet in that case, the advantages did not result in a British victory. Nor did the superior weaponry the United States had compared to the Vietnamese. (FYI, the last chapter of Malcolm Gladwell's latest book, David and Goliath, has a great chapter on the Vietnam War that touches on this very point. It also good stuff on the Civil Rights movement and things that make you think about education in general. A good summer read.) So your lesson about differences between North and South can lead students to thinking about war and winners and losers in general. And how big guys beat little guys but not always. And that is an idea that students can really sink their teeth into.

Many of us went into teaching to make a difference in our students' lives. And, as I pointed out in an earlier post about my high school chemistry teacher, we can make a difference even if our students don't love history the way we do.

If we ask ourselves the same questions our students are wondering--why do we have to know this--our answers will help us make our lessons more meaningful. Easier said than done, I realize. One of the ways to think about the point of each lesson is to ask ourselves how it connects to the larger unit of which it is a part. Which brings me to #3...

Pass the Popcorn: Suggestions and Thoughts on the Use and Abuse of Film in History Class

Somewhere about at the Civil Rights movement or the first nice day in April, whichever comes first, is when my students first begin to suggest that we watch the film Forrest Gump in class. By the time we get to the escalation of the Vietnam, the requests have escalated as well. "It's historic!" they plead.

No offense to anyone who loves this movie, but Forrest Gump is NOT a good movie to show in U.S. history class.  It tells the story of a man during historic periods, which is not the same thing as informing us about the historic periods. (And as I recently read in this guide to films/documentaries to use when teaching about Civil Rights by the Hasan Kwame Jeffries, history professor at Ohio State University, it does a terrible job of portraying the Black Panther Party and Black Power.)

The amount of time I have devoted to showing film (usually clips of no more than 15-20 minutes, but sometimes longer) does go up as the school year goes on. Not because the days are getting warmer and the students are getting antsy or because I am tired of teaching, but because the films show LIVE footage. I remember once showing a film clip about World War I and students noticed right away, "Hey, it's the actual people."

We don't have films of George Washington. Not till the invention of film do we get.... well, films! So any event occurring before the turn of the 20th century or so are going to be still footage or dramatizations. Ken Burns has demonstrated the power of applying film to still pictures. And films like Glory demonstrate the power of a well-done dramatization. But there is something about seeing actual footage of people and events we are studying that makes history come alive. That's why I like documentaries like Eyes on the Prize (Civil Rights) and Vietnam: A Television History so much.

But the issue of actual footage vs. dramatization is just one of the first in a series of considerations I'd like to raise in this post about how, when and why to show video in class.

How to End the Year...Thoughts on teaching from the 1970s to the Present

Note: This post is dated--I wrote this a couple of weeks before Trump announced his first bid for the presidency.  Now I'm fairly confident that this time period will get a name that references the era of division, but I will leave this to professional historians. And I will let them debate whether it will be the "long era" of division and start with 1968, the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, or the "shorter" era starting with Reagan. And what it will end with is perhaps still in our future. I am not going to update the post below because I think it is still helpful for thinking about the post-Watergate era. So here is the original post:

I have at least 3 posts that I have started now and haven't published.  I started them, and then did the digital equivalent of crumpling them up in a ball and tossing them in the wastebasket. Why, you ask? Because, like so many U.S. history teachers, I have trouble figuring out how and when to "end" U.S. history class.

The problem is not the literal "end" or last day of class. I have a lesson for that. (See this post).

The problem is what do to about the period 1970ish through, well...through what exactly? The nineties? September 11, 2001? The second Gulf War? Obama's election?

And is this time period going to be covered in one unit? Or two...perhaps one unit focusing on domestic and one on foreign policy? And in either case, what would this unit or units be called?

That last question might seem like a rather silly one. Why should the name of the unit matter?

I would argue that it matters a great deal. Deciding on a name for a unit makes it a unit, with an overriding essential question as opposed to just one isolated lesson after another, emphasizing one historical fact after another. For example, most of us don't teach units called "the 1950s," followed by "the 1960s," right? Instead, we conceptualize events into units: usually, Cold War, Civil Rights and Vietnam.  And whatever important events might have happened in 1854 or 1857 or 1860 other than Bleeding Kansas, Dred Scott or Lincoln's election have long since taken a back seat to the impending Civil War. We don't teach "the 1850s." We teach about the events leading up to the Civil War as a unit.

We do this because it helps our students make sense out of what is otherwise just one fact after another. We have to make choices so that history becomes meaningful. We have to teach themes and make connections.

So what choices do we make about the events that took place from the 1970s to the present? I'm going to take a cue from the "The Tyranny of Coverage," chapter one of James Loewen's Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks & Get Students Excited About Doing History and think about forests, trees, and twigs. (I have mentioned this chapter before--see here and here--because it is such a good starting place for rethinking how one conceptualizes a unit and a whole course. Put it on your summer reading list!)

So I decided to make a list of topics from the period 1970 to the present that I consider to be pretty important--the kind of things you would hope a relatively educated person might know. These are the things Loewen describes as "trees." The "twigs" are the specific names, dates, places, etc. that make up the content of any particular topic or "tree." Below is my list of "trees" and in parentheses are some of the twigs, in order to clarify what the topic includes. Note that the list is in the order that I came up with things--it is vaguely chronological, and the only reason I am numbering the items is so I can refer to things in the discussion that follows the list. Ready? It's quite a list...

Another great resource for teachers. . . and more on Vietnam

I promised in my last post on Vietnam that I would offer some additional resources for teachers. Rather than do a separate post on this, I will just link to them below.

A few of my resources:

• Timeline activity - I created this last year for 8th graders, but this would work well in high school, too. Titled, "Solve the Mystery," it is designed to provide background information on how the U.S. got involved in Vietnam in an interactive, student-centered way that also teaches cause and effect. See the last page for the key and suggestions. It works best if students are told which event comes first and last, but high schoolers can probably make do with a hint that the first event dates back to World War I. This lesson is also designed to help students put Vietnam in a broader context and understand it as a conflict with old roots. You could go back even further than World War I, but that gets more complicated than I thought was necessary. 

• Philosophical discussion questions - I originally used these as part of an online discussion. If you use them that way, you may want to make the questions much briefer, so you allow your students more opportunity to come up with the "big ideas" implicit in these questions. But I am including the "full" question so you can adjust as you like. They would also make great in-class discussions. Also, check out the essential questions I mentioned towards the end of my last post.

• Vietnam DBQ with a twist - this is designed for high school students. The "twist" is that students have to come up with their own question. If you teach middle school, you would want to adapt the sources and adjust the coming-up-with-your-own question part. I think middle school students can absolutely do that, but not unless you've done it before as a class. (A big shout-out to my former colleagues for this one, as it was a group effort.

Other resources:

• National Archives documents and lessons

• this youtube video Chu Chi tunnels (1:30) is a great way to show students what the tunnels that the VietCong used were like.

• Teaching the Vietnam War: Beyond the Headlines - from the Zinn Education Project

• Digital History - for background info, articles for students, and a handy list of films about the war along with film clips.

• If you're looking for resources on veterans, check out the Veterans History Project from the Library of Congress. 

• Asian-Nation.org - this website is by a sociologist, who happens to be Vietnamese. The whole website is full of useful information about Asian Americans. The link I have given is to the section on the Vietnam War, but look at the other tabs under "Viet Nam" because he also has information about the country, earlier history and current issues. For example you can look here for info about Vietnamese Americans or here to learn more about Tet, the Vietnamese New Year, so your students don't only associate it with the Tet Offensive.

• Check out the websites of the presidential libraries of Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. All four have tabs just for teachers/education. Additionally, the Miller Center offers a rich collection of resources about presidents and Vietnam (useful for topics other than Vietnam, too, fyi.) Last year, I did step 2 and 3 from this lesson off the JFK library website. If you scroll to the end of that document, you will find two really great letters to use with students. One is from a woman who lost her brother in Vietnam, writing to Kennedy. The second is Kennedy's reply. See JuniorHistorian's edit of LBJ's "Peace without Conquest" speech of April 1965 (50 years ago last month!) along with some good questions for students.

• I have used excerpts from the PBS series, Vietnam: A Television History. In particular, I like the episode, "America Takes Charge, 1965-1967" which discusses escalation and "Homefront USA" that discusses the antiwar movement in response to increasing casualties in Vietnam.

• See this lesson on the antiwar movement from SHEG (Stanford History Education Group). It includes Martin Luther King's speech, "Beyond Vietnam."

• JuniorHistorian.com has a cool lesson on the election of 1968, the contentious election that occurred at the height of the anti-war movement.

• recent article from former talk show host Dick Cavett, looking back at the Vietnam War. This is for teachers because it's too long and includes too many references students won't understand. He wrote it regarding his recently aired program on Vietnam, which I unfortunately missed.

• And last but least, no unit on the Vietnam War is complete without reference to some of the music that, in a way, became a "soundtrack" of the period. Students are often familiar with some of these songs but often have no clue as to their historic significance. This essay from the Gilder Lehrman Institute provides useful background for the teacher. A quick search on youtube and Google produced a gazillion lists of Vietnam War era music, playlists, etc. I leave it to you to decide which ones to use, because if I start going on all these links I will never finish this post. There are so many that is hard for me to choose. I like to use "Fortunate Son," "War," "Eve of Destruction," and Jimi Hendrix's rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner" at Woodstock. But I could go on and on...

Vietnam: thoughts on lesson ideas

Check out my current work on Substack!

I didn't study anything about the war in Vietnam until college. Like all too many American students, my high school history education stopped abruptly with V-J day.

But my first exposure to Vietnam was in middle school, when part way through the school year, we got a new student in class.  Our teachers introduced him and explained that he was from Vietnam. We didn't know where that was, and he couldn't tell us much, because he didn't speak much English. Despite his poor grasp of English, he seemed to understand all too clearly that at least some kids made fun of his odd-sounding foreign name and funny accent. 

One day his mother came to class as a guest speaker. She spoke English just fine. And she told us about the family's harrowing experiences escaping from Vietnam after the war, and their eventual journey to the United States.  I remember watching some of my classmates--the ones who had teased this boy--squirming uncomfortably in their seats.

Political cartoon by David Levine.

The Vietnam War is like that. It makes us squirm in our seats. Not only is it a story without a happy ending, it has left more than just the scar on Johnson's presidency, as depicted in the famous cartoon on the left. Not even counting--for a moment--the actual casualties of the war, this conflict that lasted over twenty-five years was responsible for an increasing skepticism and cynicism about U.S. foreign policy, distrust of the government in general, and the presidency in particular, from which we have yet to recover.

Funny that the seventies is known the "Me" decade, isn't it? When we think about the Vietnam War that ended in the 1970s, it's all "US, US, US"--pun intended. Our study of the conflict is very much from the American perspective.

That makes some sense. We are, after all, American and teaching American history. But widening our perspective might not be a bad thing to do. For starters, students are often surprised to know that in Vietnam, the conflict is referred to as the "American War."

Try this experiment with your students: have them search on Google the term "Vietnam War Casualties." Of the nine sites that showed up on the first page of Google results when I tried this, only three (Wikipedia was one) included Vietnamese casualties. Or even before that, try Googling "Vietnam." If you do a search on any other country, you will get news, tourist information and the like. You will get that if you enter "Vietnam," too, but you will also a few sites just about the war. That is not true of any other place on earth. Only googling "Iraq" and "Afghanistan" come close.

So I think before we teach anything about Vietnam, we might want to point out this American, war-centric perspective. And share the casualties. From both sides. (Note: this link is a great resource for all things Vietnam War related.)

A few years ago, I stumbled across the book, History Lessons: How Textbooks from Around the World Portray U.S. History which I mentioned in an earlier post about the Annexation of the Philippines. There is a chapter on Vietnam that includes excerpts from textbooks from Vietnam, France and Canada. For an excellent online source about the Vietnamese perspective, see this page. It's well worth reading the whole thing, but then scroll down to the part where it mentions the overall key points that are taught in Vietnam. I have excerpted the first point below:

It was a war against American invasion

In Vietnam, the war is called as the “Resistance War Against the United States (to protect the country)” (chien tranh chong My cuu nuoc). It is always taught that the U.S. was another colonist power and imperialist just like the French and that Vietnam is not a civil war but instead a war against American invasion.

This is an important concept for students to grasp and worth introducing at the beginning of your unit. It is complex, and you would probably want to revisit this interpretation as you go through the unit. But it speaks volumes about how differently both sides saw the war. We need to consider the Vietnam War from these different perspectives. Was it a proxy war, a civil war between North and South Vietnam, a colonial war of resistance, an effort to stop the spread of communism? That depends on what side one was on, and there were more than two. (I can feel a new idea for a lesson coming on...."Read each of the quotations below. Which perspective from this list best describes the author's understanding of the war?")

In my next post I will share a few lesson materials on Vietnam, but in the meantime, I will conclude with a few basic points that I think students need up front before they can start critically examining the period.

1. Where is Vietnam? Make sure students can find it on a map. Understanding that it was a nation few Americans could find on a map when we first became involved is key, too. Understanding Vietnam's location in relation to China, Japan, Korea and the Philippines is worthwhile, too.

2. War was never declared, so why do we call it a war?  Remind them: only Congress has the power to declare war, as stated in Article I, section 8, clause 11. You could have a whole lesson on this, and later in your unit students will likely encounter the War Powers Resolution of 1973. But I like to at least mention this at the outset and remind them that the precedent had been set in Korea.

1975 Political Cartoon - this particular copy of this cartoon, 

coincidentally, is the copy owned by President Obama that 

will be displayed in the Obama library. 

3. Vietnam was America's longest war.  Students associate Vietnam with the sixties. Understandably. But make sure they know that while the U.S. first sends troops in 1965 and "advisers" before that, the roots of the conflict in Vietnam begin much earlier. Vietnam was a matter of discussion by Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II. And Ho Chi Minh was at Versailles back in 1919 trying to get an audience with Woodrow Wilson. (FYI, the link is to a the Wall Street Journal's commemoration of World War I. Bookmark this site for your World War I unit--wish I had known about it sooner!) Just like the Civil Rights movement doesn't begin overnight with Brown v. Board, the Vietnam War doesn't start with Kennedy or Johnson.

4. I also like to set up the unit by introducing a few overall, essential questions raised by U.S. involvement in Vietnam. There are many, but the three I like to focus on throughout the unit are below. They are adapted from historian George C. Herring. I post them up on the board and refer back to them as we go.

•  Why such a huge commitment in an area of so little apparent importance? In other words, why did we get involved in Vietnam in the first place? Why did we continue?
• Why, despite an enormous military arsenal and spending $150 billion, did the world's most powerful nation still fail to accomplish its objectives?
• What were the long term consequences of this failed foreign policy for the U.S. government? for public confidence? for later foreign policy? For good measure, either to introduce the unit or conclude it, you could introduce the concept of the Vietnam Syndrome. The cartoon below is useful for that, though pretty challenging. There is a lot of background knowledge students would need to understand it. An easier one, and one of my personal favorites, you can see here. It's by cartoonist Daryl Cagle and dates from March 2003. This is a theme to develop further when you get to the Gulf Wars and --if you make it!--to the present day.

There are a few other good cartoons and a thought-provoking article about Iraq replacing Vietnam in our national psyche which you can see in this article from the Huffington Post.

Cartoon above found here. 

For more on Vietnam see my next post which includes a few things of mine and links to some other great resources. Find that here.