One of my things I do when teaching the US Survey is to force my favorite pop culture on my students. For example, when we get to the Great Depression, I flood our Learning Management System (LMS) with YouTube videos of trailers from Frank Capra movies, the entire original War of the Worlds broadcast, and radio programs like Dick Tracy. Of course there is that one lecture where I play “We’d Like to Thank You, Herbert Hoover” and to explain some of the New Deal I will play “Tomorrow,” but the version that includes FDR calling Frances Perkins and Harold Ickes to participate in the Oval Office sing-along.
By the time we get to the 1960s, I make them listen to a playlist I created. Well, today we hit the 1980s and I discovered that my students don’t know about the most significant moment that kicked off this decade. No, not Gordon Gekko’s “Greed is Good” speech or that Pac Man (1980) was released or even that Nicholas Cage starred in Valley Girl (1983). I am talking about the 1980 Winter Olympics and the Men’s Hockey game between the US and the USSR (aka the Evil Empire!) and the miraculous triumph of the US hockey team.
Usually, I get one or two people who are familiar with this historic game. This time, none of my students knew what that was. Sure, they could have been hiding their knowledge behind a muted mic and video, but the few who chimed in said they had not heard of the Miracle on Ice. This event looms large in my personal memory. It was more than just a feel-good moment or spectacular hockey game. I was just about ten at the time; I had only a passing sense of what was going on in the world. Of course we were aware of the Hostage Crisis in Iran. I hadn’t developed fully that sense of impending doom that would prey upon me throughout the 1980s, but it was there.
As I studied history, first in college, then in graduate school, I came to understand the larger context of why this hockey game was important, as is the significance of a nation united. The US suffered from that “crisis of confidence,” that President Jimmy Carter preached about. Inflation was high, as was unemployment. The Cold War continued. Yet, we have these moments in our history where what divides us fades away a bit and call it national pride, or a sense of kinship comes to the forefront. It often happened in times of war, or crisis, where we accept that I may believe one way, you another, but we are united behind this common purpose, or by our shared humanity, or something. Or heck, am I just being nostalgic during this current time of crisis, where what divides is really dividing us?
So, I am predisposed to think that this 1980 hockey game is significant and an important event, one that my eighteen-to-twenty-something-year-old students should know about and understand. Do you believe in miracles?
One Solid Comfort 