To start off the new year, we did a 3 week history project taught by Ms. Maxwell. We were focusing in 20th century history, after the Second World War. Our projects would get inspiration from a song. An old classic, but I had never heard of it before.

The song is We Didn’t Start The Fire by Billy Joel, released in 1989 when Billy Joel was 40 years old. The song is different than most songs, as it is a list of events that happened in Joel’s lifetime that he thought were significant. The song was quite popular at the time, but it was criticized for not actually being a very good song since it just listed events. But nevertheless, it was popular and stood the test of time, since we were studying it in our English 12 class in 2020. This song would be the inspiration of our projects we would be working on for the next 3 weeks. We were tasked with choosing one event that interested us mentioned in the song, and then create a visual artifact explaining what the event was, and why it is considered significant in history.
The driving question was:

“What makes an event significant?”

Over the course of three short weeks, we studied the idea of significance and the factors that make a historical event important or influential. We started off this project by choosing an event we were interested in from the song by Billy Joel. There were 106 different events mentioned in his song, and around 17 students so the chances of getting the event we wanted were pretty good, as everyone had to have different events. And I believe that we all got our first choice, except Spencer who had to be happy with his second choice.

The topic I chose was the 1969 Moon Landing. The reason I chose this was because I’ve always had an interest in space, and I didn’t really know much about the first moon landing so I wanted to find out more. Another reason was because in the song by Billy Joel, he references the moon landing through the lyric: “Moonshot” which I thought was interesting. I didn’t know what that really meant, so I looked into it. At first I thought it was talking about the photos taken on the moon, but the word moonshot also means an idea that seems impossible to achieve. I couldn’t find any concrete connection between the song lyric “Moonshot” and what Billy Joel was actually talking about, but the aspect of photography instantly intrigued me. And little did I know, it would become the basis of my entire project.

After receiving our topics, we wrote a two page summary of the event that we were studying. I researched everything I could about the first moon landing in history, and explained why it was, and is, so significant. I researched the timeline of the moon landing, and also the impacts it had on the United States, and the globe. In my research, I found out that a bunch of random items we use today in our daily life were made partly because of the moon landing. Some of them were kind of interesting.

After this two page paper, we made a 5-10 page formal research document that contained all the information we would need to complete our project. We were required to have at least 5 different sources, and all our research should answer our own personal driving question and thesis, which had to prove why our event was significant. So for me, I was researching the moon landing. I was relating how photography can influence an events’ significance, while also explaining how the moon landing was significant. My own driving question was what you see in that image above. It was the question I was trying to answer with my artifact I would make for the main part of project. My thesis was for the written document portion of the project, and incorporated four other images throughout history to help prove my point. The photos I curated to help prove my point are extremely interesting photos in my opinion. They are, “A Man on the Moon” by Neil Armstrong, “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper” by Unknown, “Saigon Execution” by Eddie Adams, and “Falling Man” by Richard Drew.

And finally, once that was all done, we could start our projects. At first, I planned on making a video, but after some more thought and some critique from Ms. Maxwell, I realized that it would be difficult to make my video interesting as I was mostly presenting photos and then describing their context and importance. So, instead of that, I looked into making a photo essay. The traditional style for a photo essay is something like this:

A series of images that usually happened during a short period of time. I didn’t foresee this working for the images I wanted to showcase since mine were from different points in history. Other classmates of mine were planning on creating a keynote presentation. I thought I would do the same, but I wanted to make it more interesting. I looked into alternative options for a typical PowerPoint or keynote presentation, and came across a website called Swipe. This site is an online slideshow creator, but the awesome feature that was the reason I chose to use Swipe, was that it was interactive. Anyone who I gave the link to could have my presentation up on their screen as I was going through it. I thought this was perfect because I was presenting a lot of images, and I wanted all my classmates to get a good look at them. So now, I had all my research, my images, and my medium to present everything I know. All I had to do was do it.

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My presentation went really well in my opinion. We all had 5 minutes to present our artifacts to the class, in whatever format that was. My artifact was my photo essay and my interactive presentation. I’m quite happy with the format I chose, I feel it really helped emphasize the meaning and importance of each photo I chose.

Overall I really enjoyed this project. I found my topic interesting, even more so when I chose to focus more on the photography side of the event. On the learning side, I think that I learned a lot. I hadn’t really ever thought about what makes an event in history more or less significant than others. It was really interesting to me to see how different historical events became influential and important. This project opened my eyes to the events that have shaped our recent history, and urged me to think about what makes up a significant event. I also found my own research soooo incredibly interesting. For example, I had no idea that a photo was partially responsible for ending a war. The Saigon execution photo by Eddie Adams is living proof that a photo has great power to inspire change. I was also blown away by the Falling Man image and how it’s simple nature is almost terrifying. But probably the most interesting thing I learned was with the moon landing photos. The photo that became the most iconic is the one that looks the least patriotic or heroic, and in my research it said that that was the reason it became iconic. It took me a while to wrap my head around that idea, but after a while it made perfect sense.
Anyways, I am very happy with the learning I underwent for this project, and I’m looking forward to more like this in the future.

See you