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<div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 11:40 AM, C. G. Estabrook <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:galliher@illinois.edu">galliher@illinois.edu</a>></span> wrote:</div>
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<blockquote style="BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; PADDING-LEFT: 1ex" class="gmail_quote"><a href="http://chronicle.com/article/The-Times-They-Changed/65192/?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en" target="_blank">http://chronicle.com/article/The-Times-They-Changed/65192/?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en</a><br>
<br>I remember that evening quite well. I was in my first year of teaching at a large Midwest university. A friend, an American historian, and I we're giving a series of talks in dorms on the war and American politics. (He was in fact the only other member of the university's history department who did not support the war in Vietnam; we were both fired within the year.) He met me on the stairway to the basement room of one dorm between talks and said, "Have you heard? The army has killed some students at a college in Ohio."<br>
<br>I think I responded, "That'll change everything."<br><br>In fact, as Lembke explains (and I'm not sure he's mentioned all the mechanisms), the universities responded vigorously and in a few years were able to stamp out student political awareness. They convinced students that they should beg for jobs and party in the meantime. Student politics didn't die: it was murdered like Jeffrey Miller forty years ago.</blockquote>
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<div>In the shorter term Kent State DID change quite a bit. My campus went on strike for the rest of the spring 1970 semester. Other did as well. There was some partying, sure, but there were also a lot of teach-ins and generally raised consciousness about the war and about a government that would murder its own children.</div>
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<div>Unfortunately human memory is extremely short. And as I will explain in a future epistle, there are other reasons why the peasants generally don't revolt to any great extent.</div>
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