Blueprint for Resistance

Project Description

Documentary focus

The online archive focuses on student-initiated anti-Vietnam War movements from 1963 to 1975, when local student activism in Ann Arbor gradually reached its climax due to the U.S. government’s active and intensive involvement in the Vietnam War during the Johnson and Nixon administrations, which led to the deaths of more than 58,000 American soldiers, whose names today are inscribed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, DC (National Park Service, n.d.).

Guided by the core value of “preserv[ing] the record of the broadest possible range [...] for the benefit of future generations” (SAA Council 2011), we digitized documents donated to the Bentley Historical Library by a variety of local residents of Ann Arbor in the 1960s, including: Richard G. Wilson, an ordinary student of U-M; Michael Zweig and Skip Taube, student activists at U-M who were highly visible members of the local chapter of Students for a Democratic Society; Arnold Kaufman, a philosophy professor at the University of Michigan who was sympathetic to the student movements; J. Edgar Edwards, minister and director of the Guild House; Marcia Barrabee, a local peace activist; and David Chudwin, a reporter and editor of The Michigan Daily. Accordingly, the online archive presents balanced and mutually complementary perspectives in interpreting the student anti-war movements, including both on-campus and off-campus, both students and faculty, both male and female, both religious and secular, and both event reporter and those who experienced it.

At the same time, following the “community paradigm" (Foscarini 2017), the online archive focuses on giving voices to and acknowledging the agency of the non-archivist others (Foscarini 2017, p. 124), especially the largely "marginalized and silenced" (Jimerson 2007, p. 254) student activist organizations in the mainstream narratives of Vietnam War history, creators of the items, as well as our users. Therefore, thematically, unlike traditional archives that are typically organized according to the chronological and hierarchical structure based on series, sub-series, files and items, the online archive focuses on actions taken by various local student activist organizations, especially Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Student Peace Union (SPU), and the Student Mobilization Committee (SMC), among others, and stresses interrelations among these selected records at the item level. The primary target user group of the online archive is high school students, who are often early in the process of cultivating their research skills to independently construct the structures and processes of complicated historical events (Garcia 2017, p. 190-191). Unlike most archives that organize their collections based on creators, events, or places, our online archive’s focus on the hands-on aspects of student activism as the criteria of collection making will help our users establish more tangible connections to, thus better comprehend each item of record.

Consideration of archival concepts and practices

In her award-winning study of online representations of archival content, Emily Monks-Leeson (2011) notes that "the website, rather than the creator or the archival repository, provides the records' present context by bringing them together and making them available for a certain purpose ... the primary benefit to such online archives is their ability to established active connections between dispersed records and collections" (p. 54). The resource we have created is largely consistent with these observations, given its presentation of the multiple contexts our selected records inhabit, for the specific purpose of providing high school students with more substantive historical understanding about the mechanics of Ann Arbor student activism in the Vietnam era.

While our "Collections" tab organizes records by their instructional value for different hands-on aspects of collective action by students -- such as raising funds and collaborating with faculty -- our object-level metadata includes information about the analog collections which house the original documents. Additionally, many items have a "Relation" metadata field linking various items together by student organization. Most objects also have an "Item sets" metadata field linking items together by the physical archival collections in which the original documents live, providing students with a form of display that partially reconstructs the experience of conducting historical research in a major archival repository.

Nearly two decades ago, Margaret Hedstrom (2002) explained that the choices archivists make "about which records to describe in greater detail, and which to digitize for remote access, will influence the characteristics of the documentary past for many users of archives. Materials that are discoverable and accessible remotely will enjoy more use than their physical counterparts" (p. 40). Today, the constraints of time and finances that memory institutions face only serve to highlight the importance of making digitization choices in a way that is responsive to existing user needs.

As young people organize to demand action on the contemporary challenges affecting them, our online resource helps address an urgent need for historical contextualization of youth protest in the United States. Indeed, as Monks-Leeson (2011) argues, "context can be seen as a unifying representational principle for online collections," and as such, we strive to honor "a certain adherence to the concept of provenance, particularly in its 'postmodern' manifestations" (p. 54). In other words, Blueprint for Resistance aims to display its records with a multicontextual approach that transcends the limitations of traditional finding aids in order to facilitate the intellectual growth and tactical efficacy of a rising generation.​​​​​​

Criteria for record selection

Items in our archive were chosen by looking primarily at three criteria: 1) usability for instruction, 2) consumability, and 3) appropriateness for age. Looking first to usability for instruction, the most important value our items had to have was some aspect of illustrative instructional value. This meaning that some aspect of protesting as a student was exemplified in the record. We felt this pre-curation of records with inherent -- and most often obvious -- instructional value was the best approach for our online archive because Patricia Garcia (2017) notes that when teachers make the choice to use archival resources, one of the most time-costly steps of developing that lesson is record analysis (p. 191). We hope to provide readily teachable items, which should shorten that specific step.

Second, we have considered a record’s consumability when digitized. In the research done to construct this archive, a number of incredibly interesting records were identified, but were ultimately deemed either too dense, or of too large a scope to be used. In 1967, a large group of University of Michigan students traveled from Ann Arbor to Washington, DC to participate in the March on the Pentagon (Hall, 2011), an event well covered in the Bentley Historical Library’s greater collection. Part of our selection process was then to choose which items fit the first category of usability, and also were of easily readable length and format.

Finally, we took into consideration an item’s level of age-appropriateness, specifically its language. It would be inappropriate to suggest that certain words and phrases were not used within protests, and the goal of our archive is not to present any sort of sanitized view of the student protests of the Vietnam War. We are, however, examining protests which took place mostly on a university campus, for an audience including  mainly high schoolers, so we therefore did conclude that it would be most appropriate to choose items whose content would be acceptable in that classroom setting. These choices were done with the consideration that high school students, when examining serious topics, bring a level of maturity which can handle most items. These three considerations fit hierarchically, in that instructional use was the first and most important criteria, while age-appropriateness was the final value. We feel that our final set of records embody these values, and will serve their users as an instructional reference for student protests.

Target user group

When setting out on the creation of Blueprint for Resistance, our team wanted to curate the content in a way that would appeal to young modern activists. In particular, we wished to speak to high school students interested in social movements and youth protest history and praxis. Historically, the literature on youth social movements places a disproportionate amount of focus on college campuses, rather than high school environments (Earl et al., 2017). This is an alarming realization as high school activism has been alive and well for decades, just as it is now. With this in mind, Blueprint for Resistance acknowledges the high school-aged activist of today. While the college campus movements of the 1960s come with many flaws and oversights, there is still much to built on here.

Through the use of primary and secondary resources, Blueprint for Resistance offers unmediated access to artifacts of the anti-war movement on the University of Michigan's Ann Arbor campus from the 1960s into the 1970s. According to an educational resource specialist at the Library of Congress, engaging young people through critical analysis of primary sources “not only makes past debates and conflicts more concrete and immediate[,] they also remind students that substantive social change is possible, however daunting the task may seem" (Wesson 2015). This repository looks to the past to empower today’s social change agents to persevere and move forward.

Students can look to the logistics of demonstrations -- their funding, organizing, and coordination with larger movements -- to inform active movements of their own. We also want these students to better understand their forebears and their grievances with the status quo, the “powers that be,” and the systems that exist to support them, all of which have their similarities with current frustrations of American youth. These sources may also be used by Ann Arbor locals, high school instructors teaching history of social movements, or college-aged students and activists. Serving our target users appropriately required careful curation and extensive metadata to better flesh out the context of each archival object.

Perspectives

Our archive focused on politically-active student organizations at the University of Michigan during the Vietnam War, and -- as was the attitude of much of this demographic at the time -- most of these organizations were outspokenly anti-war. That being said, different groups also brought their own set of concerns to the issue, and we represent those perspectives with the “Larger Movements” section of our archive. This gives wider context to student activity on the University of Michigan campus and brings student organizations into alignment with the goals of larger organizations like the Black Panthers and the national Student Mobilization Committee. The “Collaborate with Faculty” collection also includes records reflecting faculty perspectives on the war to further orient our archive within the larger political movement.

During the creation of this archive, we had several in-depth conversations about the  breadth of perspective we wanted to represent. We ultimately chose to include a collection entitled “Know the Opposition” that focuses on the other end of the ideological spectrum and highlights the literature of conservative student organizations that did not agree with anti-war protest efforts. But one perspective is noticeably absent, and that is the perspective of institutional power. We did not include politicians’ perspectives or the perspectives of the university administration. As Randall Jimerson points out in “Archives for All: Professional Responsibility and Social Justice,” archives “typically reflect power relations established by state agencies, business corporations, religious establishments, academic institutions, and other power brokers” (2007, p. 277); Jimerson further references Verne Harris's argument that the “voices of the governed” are often recorded through this lens (p. 277). By excluding the voices of the establishment from our archive, we allow students, faculty, and other youth activists to speak for themselves.

 

Works Cited Throughout Website

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Earl, J., Maher, T.V., & Elliott, T. (2017). Youth, activism, and social movements. Sociology Compass, 11(4), https://doi-org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/10.1111/soc4.12465

Foley, M.S. (1999). Confronting the War Machine: Draft Resistance During the Vietnam War. Doctoral Dissertations, University of New Hampshire Scholars Repository. https://scholars.unh.edu/dissertation/2068

Foscarini, F. (2017). Archival Appraisal in Four Paradigms. In T. Eastwood and H. MacNeil (Eds.), Currents of Archival Thinking (2nd Edition). 109-133.

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Kindig, J. (2008). Vietnam War: Student Activism. Retrieved from http://depts.washington.edu/antiwar/vietnam_student.shtml 

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