The Project

We started this course by talking about how documents, testimonies, images, and objects were selectively chosen to keep. How over time, most were lost. And now, we historians have the privilege of decoding these fragments to build our understanding of the past. In this unit, you will detangle artefacts that have survived from 1990–2015 to tell a story that will help them understand the world as it was, and how it shapes today.

The World You're Exploring

Here is the landscape of 1990–2015. Four threads run through this period: politics and economics, technology, music, and social change. A fifth column captures some of the stranger corners of the era.

* The "Wait, Really?" column is just for fun. It is not used for the activity.

What You're Building

You will choose a development from between 1990 and 2015: a social change, a cultural shift, a technological transformation, a movement, or an event whose effects rippled outwards. You will develop a Research Question, gather and evaluate sources, and build a historical argument. You are not describing what happened. You are figuring out why it happened, what it meant, or to what extent it changed things.

The most interesting projects tend to look at processes and changes rather than single moments. For example:

• How the internet changed what it meant to be a teenager
• How the MP3 killed the music industry, and then didn't
• How the 1997 Asian financial crisis changed what families in Korea and Vietnam expected of their children
• How anime and manga crossed from Japan into everywhere

The Three Parts

Each part follows the Big6 research process. See the Big6 page for how every stage maps to this project.

Choosing Your Topic

Your topic must draw from the period 1990 to 2015. The choice is yours, but it needs to support a Research Question, not just a description. The next section will help you figure out the difference.

Activities

The Big Arch

We'll break into four groups. Each group is assigned one of the four topic columns from the overview table: Economics/Politics, Technology, Music, or Social & Human Rights. Your job is to build a short presentation that tells the big story of your topic across the full 1990 to 2015 period.

Make your presentation here: E block  •  G block

Three rules for your presentation:

• 🖼️Use primarily pictures: photographs, images, screenshots. Let the image do the talking. Text is the backup, not the main event.
• 🌑Identify one Dark Turn: a moment where things went wrong, took an unexpected direction, or revealed a darker side of the story.
• 📈Tell an arc, not a timeline. Where did it start? Where did it end up? What changed along the way?

As You Watch

While each group presents, write "I wonder..." over at Dowser. Something that genuinely surprises you, or that you don't know the answer to. Not "I wonder what year X happened." That is a search engine question.

The kind of question that works:

• "I wonder whether the internet made teenagers more lonely, not less."
• "I wonder whether kids who spent all their time in gaming cafes were wasting their lives, or building something new."
• "I wonder whether anime got popular everywhere because it was actually better than Western cartoons, or just because it was different."
• "I wonder whether the 1997 financial crash is still affecting how Korean and Vietnamese parents treat their kids today."

These become the seeds of your Research Question.

Homework

• 🏠Talk to your parents and ask them what three events or changes were most significant in their lifetime, so far as they remember. I'd be interested in at least one being from the country they grew up in, and at least one global. You will share these!
• 💡Think about a TOPIC you'd be interested in, e.g. the Japanese car industry in the 1990s.
• 🔎Find a popular resource - a YouTube video or magazine-style article or Wikipedia article - about the topic you think you're interested in.