Includes 6 videos and nearly 30 minutes of footage about JFK's life and death.
Includes pictures of JFK and important people, places, and events in his life.
Everyone has read about history’s most important people and events in dense textbooks and classrooms, but words can only say so much. In Charles River Editors’ Interactive Biography series, history comes to life in video and audio, allowing people to not only read history but truly experience it, through the eyes and ears of the people who were there.
In many ways, John Fitzgerald Kennedy and his young family were the perfect embodiment of the ‘60s. The decade began with a sense of idealism, personified by the attractive Kennedy, his beautiful and fashionable wife Jackie, and his young children. Months into his presidency, Kennedy exhorted the country to reach for the stars, calling upon the nation to send a man to the Moon and back by the end of the decade. In 1961, Kennedy made it seem like anything was possible, and Americans were eager to believe him. The Kennedy years were fondly and famously labeled “Camelot,” by Jackie herself, suggesting an almost mythical quality about the young President and his family.
As it turned out, the ‘60s closely reflected the glossy, idealistic portrayal of John F. Kennedy, as well as the uglier truths. The country would achieve Kennedy’s goal of a manned moon mission, and the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 finally guaranteed minorities their civil rights and restored equality, ensuring that the country “would live out the true meaning of its creed.” But the idealism and optimism of the decade was quickly shattered, starting with Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. The ‘60s were permanently marred by the Vietnam War, and by the time Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. were assassinated in 1968, the country was irreversibly jaded. The events of the decade produced protests and countercultures unlike anything the country had seen before, as young people came of age more quickly than ever.
An Interactive History of John F. Kennedy humanizes the nation’s youngest elected president, explaining the roots of the Kennedy family, the basis for John’s presidential ambitions, his war service and journalism, his political career and assassination, and all of the accomplishments and shortcomings inbetween. Along the way, you will learn interesting facts about JFK you never knew, like which famous relative also died on November 22, and see pictures of the important people and events in his life.
