Could use some help, here

[grumbler]

As part of my school's lockdown end of school year, I need to come up with a class for the seniors who now cannot go off and do their senior projects.

The idea behind the class is to provide about 60 hours worth of instruction in some topic that students will be interested in.  The class must
1.  involve some element of choice
2.  involve some element of community (things the class can do together)
3.  entertain as well as educate.  We want this to be fun but still meet academic standards.

I have decided to offer a course in the Cold War, specifically the whole "Balance of Terror"/nuclear deterrence/"living with the bomb" thing, primarily from a cultural and technological standpoint.  The "community" element will be three movie watch parties.  I'll start the course with "On the Beach" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HusewgIe_1k for those who haven't seen it) to emphasize how grim this period was, in some ways.  I'll show "Fail Safe" about midway through, once we've established what was going on and why it was so frightening, and then show "Dr. Strangelove" at the end, to kinda lighten things up.

I think that this might be interesting to students because their parents and (especially) grandparents lived through this, but these students were all born 10+ years after it was all over.  History courses tend to never get this far.  It is as much ancient history to them as the moon landings are to most languishites

Research projects i have in mind are some things like

• How, exactly, did the technology work?
  What arms control measures were implemented, and why?
  What was "Civil defense" and how realistic was it?
  How did the nuclear arms race impact wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan?
  How did the nuclear arms race contribute to the space race?
  Anti-war/Nuclear Disarmament movements

Those I think I can handle.

What I am hoping for is some insights from people here into
1.  Sources accessible to, and meaningful to, high school seniors (other than the obvious ones they can find via Google)
2.  Any way to tie the Cold War/nuclear arms race into the Civil Rights movement or any other "anti-establishment" movements not primarily motivated by the Vietnam War.
3.  Any Cold War links into music or art styles or other cultural expressions. 

Any other ideas/comments welcome.  This is the Brave New World to me.  If you don't think this is worth doing, though, save your electrons.

[Oexmelin]

I can ask our Cold War historian.

Meanwhile, here are a few resources:

Baltimore '68: http://archives.ubalt.edu/bsr/

The Great Society Congress: http://acsc.lib.udel.edu/great-congress

Freedom Summer Collection on Civil Rights: http://content.wisconsinhistory.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/p15932coll2

Oral history of the Nevada Test Site Project: http://digital.library.unlv.edu/ntsohp/

McCarthy audio files: http://cdm16280.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/p128701coll0

[grumbler]

I can ask our Cold War historian.

Meanwhile, here are a few resources:

Baltimore '68: http://archives.ubalt.edu/bsr/

The Great Society Congress: http://acsc.lib.udel.edu/great-congress

Freedom Summer Collection on Civil Rights: http://content.wisconsinhistory.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/p15932coll2

Oral history of the Nevada Test Site Project: http://digital.library.unlv.edu/ntsohp/

McCarthy audio files: http://cdm16280.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/p128701coll0

Thanks.  I need to relate the CW to the Civil Rights Movement to use most of these, but the Nevada test Site stuff is exactly the kind of "I wouldn't have thought of that" stuff I am looking for.

[mongers]

"On the Beach" is a good start as it's one of the earlier movies in the genre, maybe 1958/59. And you could link it to the early anti-nuclear weapon 'civil rights' movement like the Aldermaston marches, which I think got started at the same time, so well before the anti-war or European anti-US stuff of the mid-1960s.

And 1958/59 is also the time of the perceived technological inferiority to the USSR and missile gap that was invented as a tool in the US domestic politics.

[Barrister]

2.  Any way to tie the Cold War/nuclear arms race into the Civil Rights movement or any other "anti-establishment" movements not primarily motivated by the Vietnam War.

Only a partial answer, a hint really... but I seem to recall the Soviets loved to point to the US's poor treatment of blacks as a kind of "whataboutism" of its day, and that's been cited as a partial answer to why white Americans started to turn out in favour of civil rights.

[Syt]

2.  Any way to tie the Cold War/nuclear arms race into the Civil Rights movement or any other "anti-establishment" movements not primarily motivated by the Vietnam War.

I presume you're already offering a global context, i.e. the unrest that gripped the rest of the world in 1968 in France, Germany, etc. Granted the arms race played a smaller role in those that e.g. Vietnam or, in Germany, the post-war generation challenging their parents on their Nazi history and their ignoring the past.

For a more direct arms race context the mass protest in the 80s in Western countries against the deployment of NATO Pershing II mid-range missiles to Europe (a response to the Soviets' SS-20 deployments) might be more on topic. It was one of the factors that led to the Green parties in Europe gaining traction and entering parliaments (e.g. Germany 1983).

Might throw in the Soviet worry about the 1983 Able Archer exercise and the false alarm of the Soviets' early warning system during that period.

[Syt]

I was 13 when the Cold War ended in 1989. The nuclear threat was quite real for me at the time. I grew up in a town with an American detachment that guarded what was known as "the site." It was an open secret that it was a stockpile of nuclear ammunition to be used by the German missile artillery stationed on base and one year there was an Easter March of thousands of peace activists to the base in protest. It might have been 1982 or 1983, maybe? It was in our old apartment before moving to another one in 1984 or so.

I saw The Day After on TV, and in school we read "The Last Children of Schewenborn" about the nuclear aftermath in a small town in Germany.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Children_of_Schewenborn

In our minds it was mostly a question of when WW3 would start, not if. We took some comfort in the fact that with our army base and nuclear site we would probably be hit early and die quickly.

[Maladict]

A look into life behind the iron curtain might be an interesting counterpoint to the US perspective, but maybe that is outside the scope of your class.

[The Brain]

A look into life behind the iron curtain might be an interesting counterpoint to the US perspective, but maybe that is outside the scope of your class.

They're high school seniors. Babushkas and tractors aren't gonna get them excited.

[Sheilbh]

I presume you're already offering a global context, i.e. the unrest that gripped the rest of the world in 1968 in France, Germany, etc. Granted the arms race played a smaller role in those that e.g. Vietnam or, in Germany, the post-war generation challenging their parents on their Nazi history and their ignoring the past.

For a more direct arms race context the mass protest in the 80s in Western countries against the deployment of NATO Pershing II mid-range missiles to Europe (a response to the Soviets' SS-20 deployments) might be more on topic. It was one of the factors that led to the Green parties in Europe gaining traction and entering parliaments (e.g. Germany 1983).

Might throw in the Soviet worry about the 1983 Able Archer exercise and the false alarm of the Soviets' early warning system during that period.

Yes and in the UK you had the Greenham Common women as well. There's a useful collection of resources here: https://www.theguardian.com/newsroom/story/0,,1865502,00.html

Also it's hardly anti-establishment but it might be of interest to look at the Russell-Einstein manifesto:
https://www.atomicheritage.org/key-documents/russell-einstein-manifesto

Bertrand Russell went on to be President of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (the origin of the peace symbol):
There are some useful images/ideas of early anti-nuclear activism here - https://www.humanities.mcmaster.ca/~bertrand/cnd.html
And some stuff about CND: https://www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/21cc/counterculture/demonstration/demonstration.html
And the Committee of One Hundred: https://www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/21cc/counterculture/civildisobedience/disobedience.html

Also non-anti-establishment but may be an easy way into things is the David Lange-Jerry Falwell debate in the mid-80s (Lange, also a methodist lay preacher, arguing for the proposition that nuclear weapons are morally indefensible). So some background on the nuclear-free New Zealand debate:
https://nzhistory.govt.nz/politics/nuclear-free-nz
The text of Lange's speech is here: https://publicaddress.net/great-new-zealand-argument/nuclear-weapons-are-morally-indefensible/
There's also a Youtube video which includes clips (but most of the main speeches), Lange starts at about 20 minutes and Falwell replies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCZFPfe0LvA&feature=emb_title
(The most famous clip "I can almost smell the uranium on your breath" gag is at about 28.30 to 30 minutes)

In terms of tying the Cold War into civil rights the Making Gay History podcast which is a podcast of interviews from an oral history project and very interesting:
https://makinggayhistory.com/

There's a few that might be interesting from a Cold War/Civil Rights perspective. Each episode on the website have additional resources - several were persecuted by the FBI because they were threats to national security, a number were fired from Federal or military jobs for the same reason (Frank Kameny, for example - https://makinggayhistory.com/podcast/episode-1-5/), others were involved in other movements (Bayard Rustin is paricularly interesting - https://makinggayhistory.com/podcast/bayard-rustin/). And in the early days a lot of leaders of the then Homophile movement were communists (Chuck Rowland - https://makinggayhistory.com/podcast/episode-1-7/) and there was a bit of a coup against them by anti-communists who wanted respectability (Hal Call - https://makinggayhistory.com/podcast/episode-13-hal-call/). This also touches on the lavender scare which is again an important way the Cold War entwines with this movement.

Obviously things change in the 60s and 70s as that approach failed and different voices (non-white, more women - thought the early Daughters of Bilitus are important, trans people, the poor and marginalised in society etc) gain importance and the movement goes from an assimilationist, respecatability politics movement to a gay liberation movement. Plus the whole ideology of the new left at that time of liberationist movements making allies with each other (though LGBT activists weren't always welcome - even amonst each other) sort of moved them from being a movement trying to get the right to have a Federal job to one campaigning against the Federal government.

[grumbler]

Thanks for all of the suggestions.  I'll have some questions once I've absorbed it all.