Virginia Tech in the 1960s exhibit

culture 1:41 Virginia Tech in the 1960s exhibit

By:

Elizabeth McVoy

17 Jan 2020 334

The VT in the 1960s exhibit is a culmination of a class project from the class America in the 1960s. The class surveys the big picture of the 1960s, charting all kinds of social, political, and cultural change.

To create the posters, students flipped through copies of The Virginia Tech newsletter, housed in Special Collections and University Archives, to find an article that stood out to them. Focusing on the history of student life at Virginia Tech was a great way to apply the historical information in a way that was relatable and allowed them to place that information into the bigger historical context.

[00:00:01] >> There's something about actually like touching the pages and turning them over, like immersing yourself in the history that way that's really powerful, and I wanted them to have an opportunity to experience that especially because so many of them are not history majors. This exhibit is the culmination of a class project from my class on the history of American in the 1960s. [00:00:23] It's such a crazy decade. The consumer culture and that conformity where you had the Cold War still going on, but that was the really push was going to suburbia, the middle class, some things like that. But then you change into the Civil Rights movement and how that just changed everything and how it kind of shaped the decade and some of the movements that went on for the rest of the decade. [00:00:44] Students went into Special Collections and looked through the historic copies of the old student newspaper, The Virginia Tech, picked out things that were interesting to them and then showcased those in this display. And they cover a range of themes from social life, to campus politics, to national politics, and often the intersection between the three. [00:01:06] I did a focus on the football rivalry between VMI and Virginia Tech. I focused on an article talking about how they were going to meet on Thanksgiving and have this big football rivalry game. And I thought that that personified the Cold War. So you can go through life and not really understand things that are going on, but when