Digital History as a Research Methodology

In the process of researching and writing my thesis I turned to the emerging methodology of digital history, and would like to document here the process of doing digital work and the future possibilities for digital history.  Framing Red Power sought to utilize digital technology to investigate and analyze the interaction between media and politics by focusing on the Trail of Broken Treaties as a lens to understand the complex connections between political movements and mass media.  The American Indian Movement was well-known for its propensity for grabbing headlines.  While the occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973 is highly significant and symbolic, it has received substantial attention from scholars.  The Trail of Broken Treaties, on the other hand, was AIM’s first sustained media coverage of the sort they wanted.  The type of language and rhetoric deployed by the media and by AIM, the narrative frameworks, and public discourse both shaped and were shaped by the Trail of Broken Treaties and the context of the early 1970s.  At its core,  my thesis attempted to shed light on the broader interaction between media and politics, and how this complex relationship shapes political culture and ideology. 

Framing Red Power: Newspapers and the Trail of Broken Treaties

Commentators, participants, and historians have suggested connections between the media and the political movements of the 1960s and their interactions that allowed activists to communicate their agendas. By utilizing media coverage of the Trail of Broken Treaties and ensuing occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1972 by the American Indian Movement, Indian activists secured a medium in which to voice their goals. The study of the relationship between mass media and the protest movements is important, historian Julia Bond has argued, because “until historians unravel the complex links between the southern freedom struggle and the mass media, their understanding of how the Movement functioned, why it succeeded, and when and where it failed, will be incomplete.” Bond’s declaration can be extended to other movements of the 1960s and 1970s that utilized mass media to their advantage.

The American Indian Movement forcefully inserted their agenda into public discourse and used the print medium to insert their voice into public policy debates.  What sort of things were activists talking to the media about?  What was the media reporting?  Omitting?  What was AIM’s message?  Did the media report the demonstrator’s goals or was the message lost in the sensationalism of the occupation?  Was the occupation of the BIA a successful strategy for disseminating their agenda?  Framing Red Power analyzes the ways newspapers covered the American Indian Movement by bringing together digital technologies and traditional historiographical methodologies, allowing historians to pose new questions about the interaction between media sources and political actors.