Navigation around the CNN site is not easy, the combination of colours and organisation of information results in a sensory overload. The internal search icon is hidden, while the Netscape search button is conveniently located on the top left-hand corner, however it’s not clearly marked as a complete internet search engine and if you are not careful you can easily find yourself quickly on another site altogether! If however you make it to the CNN ‘student news’ wing of the site, there is a large and varied archive section. CNN Student News which has taken the motto ‘news for students, resources for teachers’ and tries to spread its eye across all areas of information, offering the popular teaching plans, interactive resources, articles and popular series accompaniment sites. While there are six subject headings, one of which is a history heading; it is misleading to take the options as all there is. For example, there is a site about the cold war, developed to complement the 24 episode series; however it is doubtful if it would turn up by chance, as it is not listed obviously on the site map or under the ‘previous specials’. Thus unless one already knew it existed or ran a key word search specifically for it, it could easily go un-accessed.The whole site conscientiously aims to provide the reader with a comprehensive view of the varied aspects of American history and give a fair representation of events, movements and ‘facts’. It does even strive to put each event into historical context and develop some context and relationship between events. However, the complexity stops soon after. There is no engagement with historical, let alone theoretical or political, debates surrounding these areas. Hidden amongst interactive scenarios, teacher resources and episode transcripts are some interesting, perhaps even rare and astounding primary sources. Episode 18: Backyard 1954-1990 contains eight emails between the key players in the Iran-Contra affair, Oliver North, Robert McFarlane, John Pointdexter and his aide Wilma Hall covering the period from 12/4/85-11/7/86. Primary sources in this case are rare, all evidence having been destroyed, including these emails, which were however retrieved from the server and subsequently used in the trials. This information has been posted on the index page of the episode, although little reference to Iran-Contra is actually made in the episode. Upon further examination documents from the CIA are uncovered, along with at least one interesting link to the National Security Archive on the George Washington University site, however, all this information is simply posted on the site, with minimal contextual and no analytical information.
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