This website was created for the purpose of our final project for CUNY Baruch College’s Digital History course, taught by Professor Thomas Harbison and Luke Waltzer in the Fall 2012 semester in an attempt to answer the historical question of, “Why has The War on Drugs not been a major aspect of the recently passed election?”.

We decided to name our group “Contra” because we believe that for the purpose of this project, we are like the super soldiers in the Contra video game series, where our approach towards answering our historical question is similar to run and gun stylistic shooter games, where we go around researching and collecting information.

In this site, we (Contra) are attempting to answer this question through the lens of the modern day digital historian. In no way shape or form, are we expert in this field but we are trying to solve our question by experiencing with newly develop digital tools like wordle, interactive map, charts, diagram, textual analysis, data mining and many more, use by the new era of historian.

In this site, we decide to organize our front page, like a puzzle shape, because the War on Drug is like a puzzle; a difficult puzzle. The War on Drug involves many issues; it ranges from racial issues to the cost of spending. We want to make the visitor of our site intrigue by the diversity of images on the front pages because when most people think of the war on drugs, they tend to think of it as the legalization marijuana and bunch of hippies, but its goes deeper than that. For instance, through our research, we were able to find that the War on Drug has a major racial disparities impact; minority are several times more likely be incarnated than white American for drug possessions charges.

We hope all our visitor enjoy our site, as much as we enjoy in bring light to this issues at the blog at Baruch. Please feel free to leave, any comments and suggestions.

Our group consists of:
Cary Leibowitz
Guang Li
William Lok