You Tube
Makes History Easy!

Many historical events escape You Tube's purview; the signing of the Declaration of Independence can be viewed only in historical re-enactment; you're better off just reading about it on Wiki (even if Walt Disney's version of Paul Revere did capture this seven-year-old's imagination.)  But shortly after Thomas Edison electrified the world (pun intended), moving pictures began capturing famous moments.  They often were re-enactments as well, but by the actual people involved instead of stage actors, and within days or even minutes of the actual event.  (For instance, ribbon-cutting, bill-signing, and hand-shaking ceremonies were often done several times to make sure the press got good footage.)

The Earliest Moving Films

Our first link is in fact of a film made by Edison in 1894.  It shows two cats boxing: not momentous in content, but merely in its existence. 

This film by Edison in 1900 proves that love is eternal and that we're glad sound hadn't been added yet.

There are a number of important historic moments that could have benefited from the use of sound, but sadly, that had to wait for another generation.  But you can see

• President McKinley's inauguration in 1901,
• Queen Victoria's funeral in the same year,
• Teddy Roosevelt's Swearing-in in 1905, (although this recorded speech holds up better than the unrelated video)
• And a very elderly Mark Twain, also filmed by Edison. 
• Long before Stallone invented "Rocky," Jack Dempsey was making film history.  You can see him fighting Jess Willard in 1919. 

That was around the time of World War One; they caught a bit of that on film, too. The sinking of the Lusitania, in an even rarer animated video from 1918, captures that direct cause of our entry into World War One. 

War is not exempt from the joys of musical moments, as George M. Cohan (the Man who owned Broadway) proved.  "Over There" earned him the Congressional Gold Medal.

The Post-War era wasn't all song and dance. A wave of anti-immigrant sentiment caused Sacco and Vanzetti to be convicted and killed for a crime that virtually every historian says the didn't commit; in fact, it was a crime someone else confessed to committing.  Of the many songs commemorating their lives and deaths, Holly Near's is my favorite.

The Great Depression and World War Two

I had hoped to segue by showing Cohan (as portrayed by James Cagney) playing Franklin Roosevelt in "I'd Rather Be Right," but I can't find it on You Tube -- and I don't know how to put it there myself! 

In 1927, sound and motion had been linked, and Al Jolson delivered his immortal message to the world: "You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet!"  So our story continues with sound -- sometimes a voiceover narration, sometimes the words of the people featured. 

Black Tuesday and the Great Depression cannot be captured on film -- how can you compress a national crisis of over a decade into a You Tube clip?  Here are a few tries:

The Stock Market Crash as a result of the panic on Wall Street, leading to the Great Depression.  The Song "Brother Can You Spare a Dime?" and the photos of Dorothea Lange capture the decade better than any other short video I've seen. 

Franklin Roosevelt was the hope of the nation.  His Inauguration speech, in 1933, addresses the issues that plague the country.

At the same time, Fiorello LaGuardia ran for and became mayor of New York.  He was so successful that La Guardia airport is named after him.  Here's one of his campaign speeches.

In 1935, FDR justifies signing the Social Security act in an effort to relieve the effects of the Depression. 

While the economy occupied the American consciousness, Europe was immersed in a message of hate.  Adolf Hitler rose to power on the strength of this speech in 1933. His propagandized version of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, directed by Leni Riefenstahl, was supposed to prove Aryan Supremacy, but African-American runner Jesse Owens destroyed his plans by winning an incredible four gold medals. His victory in the 100 meters, with fellow black American Ralph Metcalf finishing second, is the most-often seen footage, but Riefenstahl's documentary shows a clip of Hitler storming out of the stadium that, again, I can't find and can't upload.  Hitler's address at the Nuremberg Rally in 1938 is widely attributed as the impetus that catapulted the hatred into war. 

While America was praising the heroic achievement of Jesse Owens, we weren't treating African-Americans so well at home.  Marian Anderson's contract to sing at the D.A.R. hall in Washington DC was refused when the members finally noticed that the renowned singer was black. Liberal Eleanor promptly resigned from the group and got Franklin to make amends by allowing Anderson to sing at the Lincoln Memorial.  Whether the song is praise for the Roosevelts or a slap in the face of the D.A.R. (or perhaps both) I do not know.

England was the first victim of Hitler's war by sea.  Winston Churchill made many memorable speeches.  The finest of these were not recorded on video, so we're making do with a mixed-media montage.  If you want to see the great man in action, there are a few films:  "Do Your Worst;"  "the fate of Holland...," "The Iron Curtain." 

On December 8, 1941, America finally gets involved.  FDR addresses the attack on Pearl Harbor the day before and declares war on Japan. 

On June 6th, 1944, the troops landing at Normandy brought about the end of the war in Europe.  D-Day was celebrated across many nations.  Ten weeks later, on August 25th, the allies liberated Paris.

April 12, 1945, President Roosevelt died.  His passing was mourned not only by families who felt that his programs helped ease the poverty of the Great depression and by Europeans who believed that his intervention helped end the war in the Atlantic, but also by the many victims of polio and infantile paralysis whom he supported, having suffered from polio himself. 

At the time of Roosevelt's death, the war in the Pacific still surged.  The Japanese refused to surrender until August, when the U.S. dropped two atom bombs, one on Hiroshima on August 6th and a second on Nagasaki on August 9th. After the incredible devastation, Japan surrendered. 

The latter 1940s were marked by the Nuremberg trials, in which many Nazi war criminals were convicted and punished.  Adolf Eichmann, the head of Hitler's Secret Service, was one of many Nazis who escaped to South America. These mass murderers were sought, captured and tried, especially by the Israeli government.  Eichmann was caught and convicted in 1960, and sentenced to death by hanging. 

Harry Truman, Roosevelt's vice-president, served out the remainder of Roosevelt's term and was then elected in 1948.  Here's his Inaugural Address, in 1949. 

Eleanor Roosevelt, meanwhile, was campaigning vigorously -- not for political office, but for the UN's Declaration of Human Rights.  This was one of many of Eleanor's causes.  In 1933 she urged women to help victims of the Depression, and in 1940 she added her efforts to the Red Cross's fundraising effort.

The Cold War

As Eddie Izzard mentioned, after Russia lost 26,000,000 soldiers in World War Two, they decided to take over most of Eastern Europe in order to build a buffer zone between themselves and the west.  The invasion of Hungary in 1956 was filmed by many Austrians who were helping the Hungarians escape. The invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 kept the flames of the Cold War burning. 

The United States responded to this aggression with the "Cold War," often referred to as Communist Witch Hunts.  Dwight Eisenhower's 1953 Inaugural address warns the country of perils to be overcome at home and abroad.  Those perils were often blown out of proportion, according to many people, especially in the attacks on Hollywood.  Many people spoke out, in defense of themselves and others.  Yet this official propaganda film made by the U.S. government shows that the Witch Hunts were very real indeed.

One of the earliest and most famous targets of accusations of Communist spying was leveled against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.  They were sentenced to death for crimes that many believe were falsified. 

The primary agent of the House Un-American Activities Committee [HUAC] was Senator Joseph McCarthy, R-Wisconsin. (not to be confused with the later Senator Eugene McCarthy, D-Minnesota). Joseph McCarthy is almost certainly the model for the anti-communist propagandist Senator John Iselin in the 1962 version of the Manchurian Candidate.  These young students do a creditable job of summarizing the McCarthy witch hunts.

By the end of the decade, McCarthy had been discredited, and America faced a new threat: the Military-Industrial Complex.  Many people credit this phrase as an invention of 60s radicals, but it was in fact coined by President Dwight David Eisenhower, hero of World War Two and a conservative Republican. 

Eisenhower delivered his farewell address three days before John Fitzgerald Kennedy took office.  Before he did so, he had to successfully overcome anti-Catholic bigotry.  This speech of Kennedy's before a meeting of southern Protestant ministers is a measure both of the bias he faced and the brilliance with which he faced it.

Kennedy had a lot of big names in his corner.  Frank Sinatra recorded a record for his campaign; Judy Garland was known to be a strong supporter (and rumored to be a bedmate, as were so many women). 

Kennedy's brilliance (and his father's connections?) won him the election. And like Abraham Lincoln, almost exactly 100 years earlier, he took office facing one of the major issues of his presidency:  the Cuban Missile Crisis. 

Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschev had already expressed both a desire to de-escalate armaments and to assert Soviet power. His famous "shoe-banging" incident at the UN, in which he emphasized his speech with a loud thump, was much belittled in the American press. 

Fidel Castro had become president of Cuba in 1959, and as a Communist, had strong ties with the Soviet Union. Russia secretly began building missile bases in Cuba.  Kennedy took a strong stand against both Cuban and Soviet acts, and won. 

Kennedy was a visionary, as this speech shows.  He delivered it the night before he was assassinated.  It was not his only speech on the necessity of achieving scientific and technical superiority.  This one, delivered two months earlier, is one of many.  Kennedy spent most of his brief tenure trying to move America into the future, challenging us to give our best to our country. 

It's hard to choose a handful of so many great speeches, as it was for Winston Churchill and the Roosevelts.  Great speakers are legends for a reason, and trying to epitomize their greatness isn't easy.  Adding a note of levity is, however.  JFK didn't spend all his time fighting for greatness; he got the day off on his birthday. 

On November 22, 1963, the course of American history was changed, not for the first time nor for the last, but for the worst of all reasons: a conspiracy against our own citizens.  Anyone watching the famed Zapruder film can tell that Kennedy wasn't shot from the sixth floor of a building behind him.  Therefore he wasn't shot by Lee Harvey Oswald. 

For anyone who wants a reasonably realistic explanation of the Kennedy assassination, I recommend Oliver stone's move "JFK."  However, I won't link the 2 1/2 hour film here :) The movie centers around New Orleans District attorney Jim Garrison, who investigated Oswald's and Ruby's visits to New Orleans, their apparent connection to each other, and alleged falsifications in the Warren Commission Report.  Garrison was attacked by the government and the press for his investigation. 

Regardless of what the movie and Jim Garrison say, Oswald almost certainly had CIA connections.  The evidence of this is fairly strong.

The New American Revolution

Whether the turmoil of the 1960s and 70s is related to the growing distrust many young people had for their government or is more directly related to the escalation of the Viet Nam War (or whether those two are linked as Stone's "JFK" suggests), it is undeniable that anti-war, civil rights, women's rights and gay rights issues so dominated the latter portion of the 1960s as to lead many people to take seriously the threat of revolution. 

A lot of that revolution started in and was reflected in the music of the era.  But we're not going to stray off to Beatlemania and the British invasion; this page is intended to introduce you to the historical and political wonders of You Tube that aren't primarily musical. 

For instance, how many of us have seen Malcolm X -- not the movie, the man?  His speeches, or at least the ones I saw on You Tube, seem to be carefully considered statements about the deficiencies of the "one day things will change" policy of Martin Luther King. Dr. King's response was equally well-reasoned.

The earliest signs of revolutions were in the black south.  Rosa Parks and the Montgomery busing boycott, Busing boycotts and voters' registrations drives began in the 1950s, and ultimately led to the Civil Rights Law of 1963 and the rise of Dr. Martin Luther King

While the early 1960s were primarily focused on Civil Rights for blacks, other political movements were forming.  The Civil Rights movement was linked to a more general human rights message in Bob Dylan's song "If I Had a Hammer,"  the most famous recording of which was by Peter, Paul and Mary at Dr. King's 1963 mach on Washington. 

In 1967, the Anti-War movement found words in Arlo Guthrie's comedic classic, Alice's Restaurant. A more ironic anti-war song was "the Fixin' to Die Rag" by Country joe and the Fish.  An enterprising student used the song as a backdrop for his history project on Viet Nam. 

By 1968, so many events were happening that we could hardly keep track of them as they happened. One too many people believed that Dr. King did indeed have a dream, and made sure he died before that dream came true. Walter Cronkite, the anchor not only of CBS evening News but of our last real belief that the news was believable, reported the event.

When Bobby Kennedy ran for President, his speeches, especially his victory speech at the California primary, addressed the needs of a unified approach:  "We want to deal with our own problems within our own country, and we want peace in Viet Nam."  Three minutes later Kennedy was shot on national television.

The Black Panther Party rose to ascendancy in part because many people felt that Dr. King's assassination justified the abandonment of non-violent change.  Huey Newton, one of the leaders of the Black Panthers, seems awfully tame for all the discrediting of his stance.  Bobby Seale took over a lot of the Party's leadership after Newton was imprisoned. 

In August of 1968, the Democratic National Convention in Chicago combined black and anti-war activists; for some the message was an end to war, to others, it was an end to the genocide or Black and Latino soldiers who couldn't afford the draft deferral tactic of attending college or graduate school.  Rallies turned into a mass attack on demonstrators by Chicago Police, the State Militia, and the National Guard.

In 1969 eight protest leaders were charged with Conspiracy to incite to riot. Most commentators alleged that the charges are absurd, since the eight had no common causes or goals, and didn't ever meet together.  When Bobby Seale was denied the right to defend himself at the trial, he called the judge words I probably can't print here. As a result, he was brought into a courtroom bound and gagged, and eventually was removed from the courtroom.  Seale served four years in jail for contempt of court.  All defendants were acquitted. Since the trial was not televised I can only find an animated reenactment. 

In June of 1969 another group asserted its civil rights.  Gay people, at first primarily drag queens, took a stand on Christopher Street in New York in what eventually became known as the Stonewall Riots, named after the bar in which the fighting began. 

As the decade changed, more and more radical groups organized.  Jane Fonda's efforts against the Vietnam War earned her the nickname "Hanoi Jane." 

Women were demanding their rights, frequently (and ironically) because they were denied equal roles in existing organizations. Jo Freeman, Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago, wrote,

Next Stop, Women's Liberation...

In 1976, there was Anita Bryant and the Orange Juice Boycott.