I spent the better part of yesterday at an education conference in Massachusetts. Once registered, you could choose to attend any workshop you wished, so I ditched my original pick to sit in on a discussion of how to use popular music in the history classroom. The presenter walked us through the twentieth century decade by decade, starting in the twenties with the advent of radio and cheap records, and ending in the present day. All we did, for 6 hours, was listen to song after song, from Bing Crosby to Bill Haley and His Comets to Buffalo Springfield to Bruce Springsteen. (I'm noticing a trend here...) The presenter really knew his stuff: he'd brought piles of CDs, and at the mere mention of a group or genre he'd slip a disc into his player and select the perfect song.
My freshman year of college, I took a class that studied the formation of modern American culture in the twentieth century. We watched movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers because they exemplified the fear of Communist infiltrators (or so the professor's thesis went). We watched Jimi Hendrix burn the American anthem to shreds on his guitar at Woodstock. That class changed how I looked at history, from something that I liked to study to something that was fierce and alive, something I wanted to possess but could never quite grasp.
Yesterday, in our cold presentation room, I felt a little echo of that breathless feeling I first got in college. It's amazing how music can do that to you; every song buried me deeper and deeper into my understanding of the past.
I'll leave you with one of my favorite songs from yesterday. Stephen Stills originally wrote it to reflect on social unrest in LA, but it was later co-opted as a commentary on Vietnam. It still gives me chills.
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