When Maya Lin, a 21-year old Chinese-American architecture student, won the competition to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., the war had been over for only six years. How does the controversy over Lin's design reflect the both the conflicts of the Vietnam War and the conflicts of the period in which the memorial was created?
ETA: I originally posted a YouTube link to the Monterey Pop Festival documentary by D. A. Pennebaker that has since been taken down. Here are some alternatives for a similar viewing experience. Enjoy!
This clip is the introduction from the documentary. You can find other clips from the film on YouTube.
During the same summer of 1967 when riots broke out in Newark, Cleveland, and Detroit over racial tensions, urban renewal and police violence, the Monterey Pop Festival brought together some of the most recognized musicians of the day as well as yet-unknown artists for a three-day music festival in Monterey, California.
The Monterey Pop Festival took place three years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident and the escalation of US involvement in Vietnam. "Monterey" was two years before Woodstock and one year before the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy. It was two years after the assassination of Malcolm X. As much as the 1960s are remembered as a decade of "sex, drugs and rock 'n roll," they are also a decade of tremendous conflict and transformation for Americans.
What insight does the D. A. Pennebaker documentary of the Monterey Pop Festival give you into this period? What does the documentary show you about the complexities and conflict of this time that you don't get from only reading documents?
