In lecture today, Professor Putman was talking about counterculture and hippies. He described how they rejected the mainstream and cultural norms for a different type of lifestyle. This included tie dye, drugs, and the concept of love over war. My friend that lives next door to me in the dorms has the most colorful room I’ve ever come across. The only way it can be described is colorful and happy. I realized that she has this small tapestry (pictured below) draped across her bed and it completely embodies the hippie counterculture. “Make Love, Not War” and “All we need is love” were two common phrases of the time.

Today in class Dr. Putman mentioned the counterculture of the hippies and described their lifestyle. He mentioned how San Francisco was the epicenter of the counterculture because it was known to be a more openminded city. We saw a clip in class about a big outdoor concert that took place in Golden Gate Park  in San Francisco. I was able to connect that to a concert I had also been to in Golden Gate Park where that same hippie spirit was still alive. There were people with flowers in their hair dancing around, and just a large amount of people overall who all gathered together to listen to music and experience good vibes.

During the presentation about Emit Till I first shocked that I hadn’t learned about the event before, but I also knew that I had heard the name many times before. For spring break my friends and I road tripped up to San Francisco, and on the way I figured out where I had heard it – in a Kanye West song. I was driving and the song “Through the Wire” by Kanye came on spotify while everyone else was asleep and I couldn’t believe it. I had heard the song countless times and always wondered what he had meant by his girlfriend being afraid that he looks like Emit Till after his almost fatal car crash, and now I know.

I purchased this black and white skull as a wall decal for my apartment from Ikea. However, it got me thinking about a Mexican tradition I learned about in Spanish Class. As part of “Dia de los muertos,” the spanish version of Halloween, people decorate skulls in bright colors and patterns as seen in the second picture. This is supposed to paint the idea of death in a positive light instead of a sad one, and to promote the idea of a joyous afterlife. If we go even further back in history, we see that the Mexicans actually adopted this tradition from the Aztecs. Since we live so close to the Mexican border and since our school mascot is an Aztec, I thought this would be interesting to share.

For my essay, I wrote about how WWII ultimately led to the revival of baseball in the United States. Two days after it was due, my friends and I went to the last game of Padres-Giants series. It’s cool to be able to go to a game with a new insight on “America’s Favorite Pastime”.

This game of Hide and Seek is still ridiculous  

A weekend ago I went to Disneyland and remembered how it was created to be a distraction from the war going on. I realized how I had been to Disneyland so many times to get away from the pressures of school or work and how I guess that’s what it was made for. I went on to tell my family, who i was with, but to be honest I doubt any of them heard. I decided to do some more research on it later and found information about how Walt Disney would invite world leaders such as the Shah of Iran and Empress Farah to come enjoy their time here. Other Cold War politics went on to explain how Khrushchev was denied from entering.

This past Spring break, I went to Disneyland. While I was there, I remembered that Professor Putnam was talking about it and how it was a product of the Cold War. It was really interesting walking down Main Street because I was imagining and thinking to myself, “Is this what the world was like years ago??” I took this picture when I was there, and I think it looks cool because the airplane steam kind of look like “missiles.” I wish I had “You are haunted by history” flyers to put up all over the park (though I might get in trouble.. haha).

The picture above shows meta history– high school aged girls from the ’40s on a school trip in Salem, Massachusetts where countless innocent people were accused of witchcraft in the 1690s and executed. It’s funny how present everything seems to us, but in reality, history passes by us everyday. It was highly unlikely back then that any of these young women could have predicted how awestruck we would be looking at this picture today, how full of history it truly is and how much substance it holds. These girls were living in a time of great apprehension with World War II lurking just beyond them; the Salem Witch Trials were a period of fear and suppression. These time periods were three hundred years apart, yet the similarities are astounding. Their impact on American society has shaped the way we are today, not only as a country, but also as a people.

Vanessa Rodriguez, Section 1

The United States essentially took  a “domino-esque” viewpoint upon the Vietnamese and thought that if they stood by whilst the communist Northern Vietnam took control of the rest of the country, then in turn other countries would be overtaken by communists as well. Since the south could not resist the communist push of northern Vietnam by themselves, the United States got involved and aided the rest of the country in terms of resisting communist takeover. So basically the primary reason the Homefront got involved was to keep the spread of communism at bay.