Vietnam

Vietnam

Vietnam Controlled Assessment 2i

Both of these representations are describing the American public’s opinion about the Vietnam War. Representation A is an extract from the children’s textbook, The Vietnam War (How did it happen?) written by Clive Gifford, and published in 2005 and is written for the British children. Representation B is a cartoon from the edition of the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper that was published in 1966, this is the time when the government sent more troops out to Vietnam. The paper is aimed at the inhabitants of Chicago and Illinois, this paper is written so that it could be read by all ages but it would mainly be the adults who would buy the paper and then read it. The author of the textbook is forty years old so therefore would not have really realised what was going on in Vietnam and he would have learnt about it after the war was over. On the other hand, Representation B has a very mocking tone because it is making fun of both sides of the public opinion. Representation B is a Democratic newspaper, this means that it would have supported President Lyndon Johnson at the time because he was a Democrat. So, the two sources are very different, the reasons for this are probably because they were published 39 years apart, aimed for a different group of people and published in different countries.

In this paragraph I am going to explain the first of the three similarities that I have found while studying both Representation A and Representation B. I think that Representation A shows this by saying that ‘the majority of American people supported President Johnson’s actions on Vietnam’ at the beginning but at the end it says that ‘over a quarter of a million people demonstrating in Washington DC’ this shows that just in Washington DC alone there was a fairly large protest trying to tell the President to pull the troops out of Vietnam because innocent American lives were being lost. Representation B shows this by mocking the army and the...

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