Nixon in 68′
Database: Encyclopedia of American Government
Nixon, Richard, Campaigning in 1968
The caption underneath the image says ” Candidates and their campaign managers try to orchestrate public appearances that will put the candidate in a favorable light. Richard Nixon appears the hero in this 1968 campaign photo. (Source: National Archives.)”
Q: Who created the artifact?
A: National Archives
Q: When was the artifact created?
A: 1968
Q: Where was it created?
A: Washington D.C.
Q: Why was the document created?
A: At the time that this image was taken, the 1968 Presidential Election was happening, where Richard Nixon won. This is why the image is showing Nixon with his arms in the air.
Q: Why is the document a primary source?
A: The image was taken while the event was happening making it an “eye witness”. Also, there is an option while I was searching to select only primary sources.
Q: How trustworthy is the source?
A: The image comes from the National Archives which is a reliable source for images and information.
Q: What other questions might you ask of the source in order to better understand what it reveals about the events?
A: I would ask for a specific date, because in history dates are one of the most important facts when learning about history. Events happen so quickly in history that is is beneficial to the reader or viewer to know when specifically this event was happening.
The image I chose for this assignment is not a direct cultural conflict, but it can still be considered a controversial because it was an extremely important election. With things like the Vietnam War, Communism, and the Civil Rights Movement all happening it makes this election imperative to the future of the United States, and many historical events occurred during the term of the winning candidate which was came to be Richard Nixon. To further my research on the election there would be a few things I would do to accomplish that. One, I go on google.com and go to the scholar area of the site where I only works made by scholars have been published. Two, I would look through old newspapers articles. For example, I would look back into the archives of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal which are highly respected newspapers and read up on events that occurred going into the election and the future president. For the sake of this class, I would ask myself some questions when reading up the topic. I would look at where the information is stemming from, when was it published, and by whom was it published.
In my opinion, another important question to consider in regards to Nixon’s victory in 1968 would be to what degree presidential elections were manipulated by rich and powerful and the general American public simply led to believe that they actually ‘electing’ the president of the United States. We can see this also mentioned in the post by Cary “Post-election Unrest in America” where students on November 5th protesting general elections calling it a “hoax”.
I used a very similar picture from AP images. Your answers seem very solid. You highlighted good sources of research in your response on the bottom. Only criticism is the location of an apostrophe in the title, which must be before the 68 and not after.
Thanks, Phillip, for this post. You have done a nice job of responding to the questions one-by-one, but I want to urge to you to push a bit further on a few different fronts.
For the image, did you encounter technological challenges in embedding the image. You include a link, which is helpful, but this does not achieve as full an effect as also embedding the image as called for in the assignment.
You answer that the National Archives created the image. This is not correct. The National Archives is the keeper of the image, but not the creator.
The National Archives is trustworthy in many important ways, although I urge caution in assuming that everything that you pull from the archive is 100% reliable. The job of the archive is not to fact-check every item in its holdings, but rather to preserve original materials. While the National Archives can be trusted to avoid altering sources in its possession, there is no reason why the sources that it accepts be from perfectly reliable sources. For example, the National Archives holds many papers from Richard Nixon and his presidential administration–would you consider every document produced by Nixon and his staff to be trustworthy?
I am not clear from your paragraph what the image tells us, even indirectly, about the role of cultural conflict in the 1968 election. Nixon was indeed connected to cultural conflict in ways that you raise in your post, but more specifics are needed to explain what this source (a single image of Nixon) reveals about cultural conflict.