Teaching History to Captain America

I started thinking about this post in 2011, Captain America: The First Avenger came out. The movie came out the summer before I started my PhD program, and Clio Wired in particular made me think about how digital tools could make history education more accessible on the move.

It was a sort of thought experiment: how would you catch Captain America up on the years he missed, when he’s presumably constantly running around saving the world? Assuming S.H.I.E.L.D. would fill him in on the basic geopolitical and military information, how to do you get across the facts of the national and global social and cultural changes of the second half of the twentieth century in a way which is both relatively bite-size and captures the nuance of current historical interpretation?

At the time, I was inspired by the work of my colleague Richard Hardesty, whose project that semester looked at the intersection of baseball and civil rights activism in Baltimore (he probably would say this better). I wondered about the possibility of doing the major events of a decade built around baseball as a video, allowing for responses and remixes, all of which would be on YouTube or some other public platform.

Three years later, we have the second installment of the Captain’s story. One of the things which delighted me about Captain American: The Winter Soldier was Captain Roger’s list of “things to look up,” and moreover the fact that the film had different items depending on which the country of release. This choice by the directors and/or designers shows an awareness of the different important cultural moments for different nations. K-pop or the Beatles? The World Cup or the Superbowl?

What do you think? What would you put on that list for Cap? What podcasts or blogs would you tell him to check out?

 

2 comments

  1. I would find articles, news films, and music relating to the women’s and African-American’s equal rights struggles. since the Cap is all about justice and fighting for what you believe in, he should know about those eras. Also, since American women really began to come into their own during WWII and afterwards, he would probably find that interesting.

    1. Films are an excellent idea, as is music. A group of us had a conversation maybe a year ago about teaching the history of US race relations through musical theatre. Probably would want to incorporate that.

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