In 1970, famous singer-songwriter Neil Young wrote the song “Ohio” about the massacre of American college students by American soldiers at Kent State University in Ohio on May 4, 1970. The National Guard was called in to stop a peaceful protest on the university’s campus, but it ended in tragedy with four students dead and twelve wounded. All of a sudden the lyrics to Neil Young’s song, “What if you knew her and/ Found her dead on the ground/ How can you run when you know,” made sense to every American who had heard the news of the incident.
Preceding the events that occurred on May 4, 1970, students all over the country were protesting and, in some cases, rioting against Nixon’s decision to invade Cambodia. Students 18-20 years of age were old enough to be whisked away to Vietnam by the draft at any time; but, because they were not old enough to vote, many felt as though they only way they could express their opinions was through organized protesting. “If kids are arming themselves with helmets, and training in street fighting, it’s a reaction to the frustration they feel in a police state,” said one student present the day of the shootings (qtd in “The View from Kent State” 23). Despite the increasing tensions among the people of the town and the students, many guards agreed that they did not “sense a deep personal menace” (qtd in The Guardsmen’s View 68) among the students. Nevertheless, student radicals set forth the chain of events leading to the shootings by setting fire to the campus’s R.O.T.C. building. The guards had known that, although they carried live ammo, they were not to shoot unless they had been shot at and were sure they had been shot at. It was to be left to the police to disperse the student protestors, The ...
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... young men and women died, and twelve more were severely wounded in a place they called their second home. Despite the rebellious radicals that had vandalized the town and the ROTC building, the National Guard was out of line and were not penalized enough for the damage they had caused. It is hard to see a campus full of young men and women as enemies of the state.
Works Cited
“A View from Kent State.” New York Times. 11 May 1970. 1 and 23. New York Times (1851-2007)-ProQuest historical newspapers. Web. 30 Sept 2013.
Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. “Ohio.” By Neil Young. Neil Young Archives. Reprise. 2009.
“Death at Kent State.” How It Was. National Geographic. 2008. Web. 30 Sept 2013.
Furlong, William Barry. “The Guardsmen’s View.” New York Times. 21 June 1970. 13, 64, and 68-69. New York Times (1851-2007)-ProQuest historical newspapers. Web. 30 Sept 2013
Dr. James and Freda Klotter are both noted educators in the state of Kentucky. Dr. Klotter is the Kentucky state historian and professor of history at Georgetown College while his wife is an educational consultant with the Kentucky Collaborative for Teaching and Learning, with many years of experience in the classroom. They outline major influences and developments of the frontier to statehood, Civil War, post-Civil War, and modern times. Throughout the book, anecdotes of the lives of well-known and anonymous Kentuckians to shed light on economic, social, and cultural subjects. A Concise History of Kentucky will be useful to many readers wishing to learn more about the state.
The 1960’s was a time society fantasized of a better world. However, the horrors of the Vietnam War soon became evident; the mass amounts of death occurring because of the war became a reality. It created a “movement”, especially in American colleges, in order to stand up for what they believed to be “right”. By 1970, many Americans believed sending troops to Vietnam was a mistake, however there were also various individuals becoming increasingly critical of the student antiwar movement
During the 1960’s, there was a rising tide of protests that were taking place. College students began to stand up for their rights and protest for a stronger voice in society. The United States was going through a tough period marked by the Cold War against communism and also the war in Vietnam. From Truman to Nixon the United States government involved the country more and more in Vietnam. Nixon announced a new policy in 1968 called Vietnamization. (Foner, 4th edition, pg.1028) This policy would bring American troops back home, but it neither limited the war nor ended the antiwar movements.
The "Four Dead in Ohio" On Thursday, April 30, 1970, President Richard Nixon told the American people that they were sending troops into Cambodia. This upset many Americans because Nixon was brought into office due to his promise to end the war. In his first year of presidency it looked like the end of the war was near, but with this announcement the end of the war was not evident. This pro-war decision by Nixon upset many people and led to riots all over the country. How could the President make the decision to continue the war when he promised to end it?
Freedom Rides, Vietnam, and Social activism among the youths of America have left the 60’s with a very profound effect on our society. Without question, the decade of the 1960’s was one of the most controversial in American History. Throughout this period of social unrest, anti-war attitudes were gaining prevalence in a peace-loving subculture, and individuals began to question certain aspects of governmental policy and authority. This was the decade of peace and war, optimism and despair, cultural turbulence and frustration.
...he Oxford Journals, The Journal of American History, Volume 93, Issue 1.2013. Accessed November 20, 2013. http://jah.oxfordjournals.org/content/93/1/290.extract.
If school shootings form an extended riot, what exactly are the shooters rioting against? What do they aim to do? Riots are mainly fueled by chaos and they involve unplanned, impulsive havoc, the terror of unaccountable, collective action. Shooters, by contrast, tend to contemplate their attacks months in advance. “ Sometime before the end of the school year, my plan was to steal a recycling bin from school and take one of the pressure cookers I made and put it in the hallway and blow it up during passing period time” ( LaDue pg 2 of article). Many shooters plan meticulously, keeping journals, studying weapons and techniques, plotting the perfect mass murder. In this regard, they are about as far from riots as you can get. One can’t plan to riot or have rioting materials ready on hand for when an incident does or does not occur. Gladwell ineffectively uses Granovetter’s theory as it clearly does not apply to school shooters. And what kind of riot spans this stretch of time and space, showing up all across the country over nearly two decades, with no end in sight. Eric Harris said he wanted to “kick-start a revolution,” a bit of delusional grandeur, but in a sense, he did start one. The shooting phenomenon forms something like a social movement or community; it’s more enduring and more deeply entrenched in our culture
With the rights given to Americans by the Amendments, this group of eighteen-thousand petitioners wore black armbands to school during the holiday season of December 1965. The petitioners did this to peacefully protest against the Government’s policy in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. The Des Moines, Iowa schools found out about this armband idea and adopted a policy on December 14 that states: anyone wearing the armbands would be asked to remove it and if they did not comply they would be suspended. John Tinker, a fifteen year old, and Christopher Eckhardt, a sixteen year old, are both high school students in Des Moines, Iowa. Mary Beth, a thirteen year old junior high student, is John’s sister. Mary and Christopher wore black armbands to their schools on December 16 and John Tinker wore his armband the next day. They were all sent home and suspended from school until they would come back without their...
In conclusion, the Kent State shooting was a tragedy that has never really had anyone held responsible. Thirty-eight years later, “Official investigations as to exactly what happened at Kent State were inconclusive.” The days preceding the shootings, the students burned down the ROTC building, protested on the commons, and threw rubbish at police officers. The violent actions of the students put the law enforcement officials and National Guardsmen around them on edge. On the other side, the Guardsmen arrived in full combat gear to put down unarmed college students. There was no reason for the soldiers to fire at the students that were hundreds of feet away from them. Whether one of the soldiers fired in a moment of panic or if they were order to commence shooting may never be known.
In 1970 the nation was in its highest state of controversy. The generation gap that had begun to form in the sixties was now more of a ravine. The youth of America was finally standing up and raising their voices in protest against all the problems that plagued the country they would have control of in years to come. There were many events that helped in feeding the flame in the hearts of Americans. One such event was the Kent State University incident. It is an event that touched the nation and made such a profound mark, and yet it only lasted for thirteen seconds. In the thirteen seconds the Ohio National Guard, along with the rest of government by association, established themselves as the new enemy. All eyes were on them, scrutinizing their every move, pointing out every mistake they made. Interestingly enough, most don’t even really know exactly what went on in those thirteen seconds, but they knew that it left four students dead and nine injured at the hand of the National Guard, so that was enough to strike the hearts on millions. Still today, twenty-nine years later, we still don’t really know what went on. Who fired the first shot, and were they provoked? Was it necessary for the National Guard to be present on this typically calm college campus in the first place? And why did it have to end in such tragedy? There are so many questions, and so many misconceptions about this incident, and like any controversial issue, there are always two sides to the story.
In combination with the previous chapter, which looked at the way in which children were used and attacked during the Civil Rights movement, it made it only more clear the effect that children could have on a social movement. (Mcguire 135, 188). The evidence in this chapter points to the important power that young people, including people that are the age of myself and the others in my group, can have in a social movement; furthermore, our group found this to be a very important thing to focus on in our discussion. We decided to pose debate questions such as “Is the role of college students in the Black Freedom Struggle the same as it is now as it was in 1959?” and “Police Officer Joe D. Cooke Jr responded to Betty Jean Owens disappearance with immediate action and eventually found her. Cooke was 19 year old intern studying criminology at an all white university. Was his age a contributing factor to his response?” combined with a discussion question of, “What may have changed between Owen’s generation and the previous generation that produced a different reaction and indictment for Owen’s case?” in an attempt to get our fellow classmates to think about these issues of race in combination with the way in which they intersect with
On Wednesday February 7th, the protesters met to plan another protest and they made a list of grievances that they took to city hall (The 1968 Orangeburg). The next day was one that made this massacre known by many, many people. The night of February 8th 1968, protesters met highway patrolmen at South Carolina State University. A protester threw a rock and hit a patrol officer so a patrolmen fired a gun to scare them, then after that the protesters were fired upon leaving three shot and twenty-seven injured (Orangeburg Massacre). After the events, the next day the governor at the time, Robert E. Mcnair, said the massacre was “ ‘one of the saddest days in the history of South Carolina’ “ (Orangeburg
Phillips, Charles. "December 29, 1890." American History 40.5 (2005): 16. MAS Ultra - School Edition. EBSCO. Web. 6 Apr. 2015.
How safe do you feel when you attend school everyday? Many students and faculty don’t really think too much about school being a dangerous place; however, after a couple of school shootings had taken place their minds and thoughts may have changed completely. On April 16, 2007, in the town of Blacksburg Virginia, a college student who attended Virginia Tech, opened gunfire to his fellow classmates. This shooting has been considered to be the biggest massacre in all of American history. There are many things to be discussed in this major tragedy. Some of them include the events leading up to the shooting, the timeline that the shootings occurred, the causes, and the significance in this particular shooting. The Virginia Tech is only one of the several examples of the horrible behavior and violence in our school systems today.
Correspondence of John C. Calhoun. J. Franklin Jameson, ed. Annual Report of the American Historical Association 1899. II. 1900.