Online Exhibit Mock Up

Hello Everyone! I hope everyone is staying safe and healthy!

In this post, I will attempt to explain the idea I have for my final project. For my final project, I wanted to create an online exhibit that talks about the different kinds of protesters that existed within the anti-Vietnam war movement. A lot of the images that you will see are hand drawings because I am not very technologically savvy. I am sorry for the low-quality pictures, but it is the best way I can explain what I imagine. I would rather not show the website just yet as I accidentally changed the formatting of the website and can’t undo it. Thankfully, an engineer friend has offered to help me as they are now have a lot of free time.

For this project, I imagined that the year was 2025 and that the museum I work for is creating an online exhibit for the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War’s end. This exhibit is meant to focus on the people who helped bring the war to an end, protesters. The misconception that many people have is that the anti-war movement was mostly made up of upper-middle-class white college students. In reality, many people who were a part of the movement came from varying different backgrounds.

The three main groups that the online exhibit will cover are veterans, musicians, and religious communities. Each group will have newspaper reports of the protests they organized or attended. I chose to include this as primary evidence that these groups were actively participating in the movement. This will also allow site visitors to compare the language that was used to describe the activism of each group. For example, religious groups are talked about with more respect than veteran protesters. Newspapers are also one of the main things I have access to in quarantine, so that is a bonus!

Some of the other things posted on the online exhibit will be objects, profiles, and pictures. The objects will be a mix of protest signs, buttons, and t-shirts. Thankfully, I worked on a project in undergrad that gave me a lot of access to these types of objects. Unfortunately, only the “religious” section will have objects on the page since many other places are not responding to my emails. Other things like pictures will have citations and links to where they came from.

One of the other things that I would like to include in the online exhibit is music. Musicians will be another group that the online exhibit will focus on because of the influence they had. Having their protest songs will be another way to prove that their ideas were widespread in many different parts of the country. Many within the movement connected to this music as a way to speak truth to power. Their music also shows that the movement was not only filled with young hippies.