Annotated Bibliography

Annotated Bibliography 

Research Question: Why hasn’t an anti-war movement emerged in the United States, similar to that of the one that of the one that existed during the 1960s against the Vietnam war? 

Elbaum, Max. “Ending U.S. Wars in Vietnam and Iraq: Today’s Antiwar Dilemmas in Historical Perspective.” Peace & Change, Vol. 34, No. 3, Issue 260, July 2009, pp. 260-269 

Max Elbaum, the author of this journal article, is an American author who has written extensively about the new left, the civil rights movement, and the anti-war movement. Peace & Change is a peer reviewed journal that was established in 1972 and covers peace studies. Elbaum is an outspoken left-wing activist, and so his writings are skewed slightly to the left, which is reasonable due to the fact that anti-war movements by nature are leftist. In this article, Elbaum goes into depth about the inherent flaws regarding the Vietnam War and compares the U.S. invasion of Vietnam to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. He compares the causes of each of the wars as well the differences in how the American people reacted to each war. This source is useful because it can be used to compare the differences in the American attitude regarding war during the two time periods.  

Levinson, Nan. “We Still Need an Anti-War Movement.” The Nation, 9 February 2022, https://www.thenation.com/article/world/modern-anti-war-movement/ 

The Nation is an American Magazine that is left leaning and covers political news. Nan Levinson, the author of this article, is an author and journalist who focuses on civil rights and military culture. She is therefore a qualified and credible author. In this article, Levinson criticizes America’s presence in the Middle East, specifically Afghanistan.  She also analyzes the reasons why a strong anti-war movement didn’t develop within our nation, despite America’s twenty year long presence in Afghanistan. This source is useful as the war in Afghanistan deeply affected the people of the country, and was also very similar to the Vietnam War, so many comparisons can be made. This source can also help explain why a strong, modern anti-war movement hasn’t developed in America. However, the article does not go into too much detail about what the Vietnam anti-war movement was like and how it was different than today.  

Weeks, Linton. “Whatever Happened to the Anti-War Movement?” NPR, 15 April 2011, https://www.npr.org/2011/04/15/135391188/whatever-happened-to-the-anti-war-movement 

NPR is a well-known news source that is mostly centrist but may sometimes be moderately left leaning. Linton Weeks, the author of this article, has been an NPR editor since 2008. Weeks starts off the article by criticizing the U.S. and its many invasions overseas. He then goes deeper and questions why movements against these invasions haven’t taken root like they did in the 1960s. Weeks also brings up the distance many Americans today feel regarding the many military occupations overseas, which is a vital factor to consider when comparing the Vietnam War and today. Weeks also hypothesizes why resistance to wars today may look different from what it used to look like in the 1960s. This source is incredibly helpful, because of Weeks’ hypotheses that directly relate to the research question.  

 

REFLECTION:

When working on my annotated bibliography, my first step was to summarize each source. That gave me a good idea of where I wanted to go from there for each source. After I did that, I looked at the author of each source as well as where each source came from. I did a quick search on the background of each author in order to check for credibility and possible bias. For my second draft, I was a bit more thorough when writing about credibility and usefulness of each source. If I could do it again, I would spend more time researching possible biases for each source, because I did not include enough of that in my bibliography.