Author: Nick Campagna

My lesson on using TS as a form of primary source went well for the most part. I think that the ideas and concepts were there and conveyed what I wanted the lesson to show. However, I believe that my lesson had a fatal flaw in the fact that I did not incorporate actual footage of the videos I was describing. I would make students read the description of the episode since I thought it would be more beneficial since they could not see the entirety of the episode itself due to its length. However, I should have found video clips that were in line with what I was looking for rather than having them read it due to the nature of TV. If I were to do this lesson again, I would include clips of the episodes I would be presenting.

This lesson is designed for high school students and seeks to help students gain an understanding on how popular TV can be used as a primary source. Furthermore, the lesson will also demonstrate to the students how societal discussions often find themselves in popular media. Students will have background on the 1960s including Civil Rights, 2nd Wave Feminism, and the Cold War with an emphasis on the escalation in Vietnam.

Students will be grouped up and given an episode from Star Trek the Original Series to analyze in relation to the context they already have on the 1960s. The class will then come back together to share their findings and have a broader discussion on using TV as historical sources.

Sources

“Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”

“Turnabout Intruder”

“Private Little War”

Target Audience: High schoolers, ideally following our unit on the Spanish-American War so that the students have context to analyze the political cartoons of this lesson

Content: This lesson will broadly review the Spanish-American War for the students but it will be more specifically covering how to go about analyzing political cartoons. I will give them a set of guided questions and documents that they need to both examine and answer in small groups. This lesson will proceed our unit on the Spanish-American War and will give students the opportunity to grapple with understanding the war from an American prospective and the American view of Cuba at the time.

Procedure: I will briefly review what we have learned in our previous unit by broadly going over the war and its consequences. Next, students will be divided into groups and assigned images to look over and answer questions on the board about. Finally, we will convene as a group and discuss our findings.

Resources:

Image 1: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Judge-2-6-1897.jpg

Image 2:  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Uncle_Sam_and_the_Goddess_of_Liberty_bring_freedom_to_Cuba,_Puerto_Rico,_and_the_Philippines_(1898_newspaper_cartoon).jpg

Image 3: https://picryl.com/media/the-duty-of-the-hour-to-save-her-not-only-from-spain-but-from-a-worse-fate

How to analyze a political cartoon