THE BEATLES IN THE AMERICAN MEDIA

I want you to write a paper on the American attitude to the Beatles in the 1960s. How did America view the Beatles in the 1960s and how did this view change over the length of the decade? You must analyze and selectively quote from at least TEN articles drawn from three different newspapers/magazines from the 1960s. Do not use newspapers or magazines from the present day, only articles that were written in the 1960s. Do not use any articles written after 1970. The essay should be double spaced and at least five pages in length with an additional Bibliography.

Before you start your research, become familiar with the Beatles by reading about them in books and on the World Wide Web. Then examine newspapers and magazines from the 1960s paying particular attention to what they say about the Beatles. You can find the New York Times and the Chicago Tribunte and under “Newspaper Article Search” click on ProQuest. Under “Magazine and Journal Search” you can also find CQ Researcher which includes a number of articles on the Beatles in the 1960s. In the search function, simply put in the words “Beatles,” “Beatlemania” etc. You can also use other digital collections of American newspapers you find online. For example, the Utah Digital Newspapers site at http://digitalnewspapers.org/ (Links to an external site.) allows you to search a number of newspapers from the state and Digital NC at http://www.digitalnc.org/collections/newspapers/ (Links to an external site.) allows searches of papers from North Carolina. The Illinois Digital Newspaper Collection (Links to an external site.) at http://www.library.illinois.edu/dnc/Default/Skins/UIUC/Client.asp?Skin=UIUC&AW=1386974647293&AppName=2 (Links to an external site.) allows you to search Daily Illini, the student newspaper at the University of Illinois.

As you read the journals and magazines, think about the following questions:

1. When were the Beatles first mentioned in the media?
2. What did the articles focus on: clothing, hair, music, reaction of the audience etc.
3. What section of the population seemed to like the Beatles? Gender, age, race etc
4. Who disliked them?
5. As you read through the newspapers and magazines, think about how the reporting changed. Did the articles become more or less sympathetic?
6. Did the articles focus on the same issues or did new ones emerge ie politics, drugs etc?
7. What did the media say about the release of the Sgt Pepper album?
8. What did the papers say about the break up of the Beatles? Plagiarism is a serious academic offense. The Academic Honor Code (see syllabus) states:
   “Any student found violating the code will receive a fail for the work, the Dean of Students may be notified and the student may be dropped from the course.” To avoid plagiarism, make sure you do not copy more than two words in a row from any source (book, article, website etc.) unless you use quotation marks around the words and cite your sources.