Presidential Elections on the Web
I’ve been talking to one of my colleagues in the high school social studies department about working with her students throughout the Fall on understanding how the internet is changing the American electoral process. Exciting stuff. From the impact of bloggers to fundraising on the web to Obama’s VP announcement via SMS, there’s a lot to talk about. To get the ball rolling, I want the students to look at how candidates over the last 12 years have used the web to support their campaigns. It took some digging, but between the Internet Archive Wayback Machine and 4President.org, you can get a pretty good sense of how things have developed so far:
- Clinton/Gore ‘96 - hard to find an archived copy of the entire site.
- Dole/Kemp ‘96
- Wayback Machine Collection of all 2000 Election Campaign web sites
- Bush/Cheney ‘04
- Kerry/Edwards ‘04
- Obama ‘08
- McCain ‘08
It’s been an interesting exercise for me because I’m not used to thinking of the web as a primary source for investigating history. Current events, certainly, and a great vehicle for presenting materials such as text, photographs, and video - but until now I’ve never really considered web sites themselves as historical artifacts. Of course, none of it would be possible without the wonderful Wayback Machine, a tremendous resource whose value will grow exponentially as time goes by.
I hope you and your students find these sites useful. I’ve tagged them all as ’election’ on my del.icio.us page. Enjoy…
