Why did the FBI keep tabs on high school students?

thing being scouring the internet for truths about the United States because there is always,

“always. Something I may have missed, something that has just happened, something that has just”

come to light. And I found this article by En historian named Dr. Aaron Fountain Jr. Oh, so my name is Aaron Fountain and I am a historian of 20th century American history and recently published a book on high school student activism in the 1960s and 70s. Aaron's book is called High School Students Unite. Teen activism, education reform, and FBI surveillance in post-war America. And that article of his, it was titled

newly declassified records, suggest parents collaborated with the FBI to spy on their rebellious

teens during the 1960s. So yeah, I had to talk to Aaron. and if they then have to work, they will be able to catch them. - That's right. - Save.

“- How do you get that money back? - Now it costs a lot of money.”

Now there is a new financial crisis. Now there is a parking in the Netherlands. The best way to test a new gratis test. If you have the chipset, the chipset. Now to test gratis test.

The number of 18 years. The number of customers and customers is in the union. - Now it costs a lot of money. So Erin Fountain discovered that the FBI was surveilling high school students in the 1960s. And that parents would sometimes be the ones tipping the FBI off.

And this was something that not many people knew, including some of the very students who were being surveilled.

So first, I wanted to know why Erin was focusing on high school students and their activism in the 1960s to begin with.

- Oh, let me just say I was not an activist in high school because I attended eight different schools in three states. So not really possible. However, it really started by acid in. I came across a book by political scientists, Richard Ellis called to the pledge. And in several pages in one chapter he talks about junior high and high school students who sat during a pledge of allegiance as a form of political protest in the 1960s and 70s.

And it made me just wonder what were the stories behind those core cases. So during that process, I saw so many passing references to high school students involved in civil rights in anti-VNL war activism. So maybe as well how did it be in our war effects, students, teachers and administrators and I wrote a paper on the San Francisco Bay area on that very topic. And yeah, doing my doctoral dissertation on high school student activism in the San Francisco Bay area. But the book, however, that I publish is nationwide.

- And in terms of what is actually going on in the country at this time, I know that the 1960s or the civil rights era can be this kind of catch all term for, you know, social, political, global, unrest and activism and change.

“But Erin, can you just paint as a picture of how this period of time precipitated high school civic action?”

- Well, in 1960s you have a record number of teenagers enrolled in secondary school. I know high school is now like a universal experience. But prior to 1960s, less than half of the adult population in the United States had a high school diploma. It was not as important to get a good paying job. However, after war war two received a secondary education became much more important in our understanders of modern citizenship and to be a productive member in society.

But also coming out, you know, you have the civil rights movement and you get the burgeoning anti-VNL war movement and it's teenagers who are participating in both movements. And they bring these partisan politics to campus and they start to clash with school administrators who were the term and they keep those type of activities off campus. Not to upset parents, not to upset the school board because, you know, you want to keep your job if you're a administrator. And it just is constant clash going back and forth between whether students have constitutional rights to engage a political activism,

And school administrators who look at students more paternalistic and parents who argued at a school just as democratic as a household. You know, punish a kid and put them on trial. Just, you know, you do whatever your parents tell you.

“So that's what comes down and over time you get this very unique brand of high school student radicalism.”

And there's two moving parts of this ideology.

The first one is that high school students constitute an oppressed group, analogous to poor people, minorities and women.

And the second is that you couldn't truly reform society unless you first reform the high schools. Did you get the sense that these students were aware that they were a member of an oppressed group? Oh, yeah. And you read the underground newspapers, leaflets, flyers are calling their schools prisons and concentration camps. They refer to them as, like, factories that just churn out future soldiers to go into the Vietnam war. And any wonders like, well, are we citizens? Do we have, like, free speech to write to a symbol, freedom of the press?

And then this is a courage gradually. It's not like an overnight realization. And I know that college campus activism was a major media focus in the civil rights era.

“Where high school students coming into this on their own, or was this something they were, you know, borrowing from their older counterparts?”

So high school student activism then and now is hyperlocal.

Students are largely responding to issues that affect their everyday lives. And what you think about controversy is that occur in a school. It usually does a spill out beyond, like a school board or individual camp, as it remains confined to that. So because they're hyperlocal, they're not seen as national stories. However, by 1968 and especially in '69 and '70, there's a lot of reports on student uprisings in high school. And there is, like, credibility behind that. There is definitely a record number of like student walkouts, boycott protests.

And citizens of whatever after Dr. King's assassination in 1968, students start to form more independent student organizations and underground newspapers have a stronger network by 1968. However, it was not a spillover effect. Now, I should say, high school students are not adversarial to college students.

They askly work alongside them when there's a lot of distress, so for a 16-year-old, somebody who is 20-year-old is like old.

In fact, some of the people behind everybody told me, like, yeah, they organized an era like 2021, but as teenagers, we thought they were just old guys. So, I mean, teenagers, they definitely align with adults, but for the most part, they seek assistance from them. They're not letting them run their fairs. So as teenagers, they don't have asses to like media and printing press. So they have to go to them to forward that type of help. High school student actors, and when it reaches on the national attention, this already a full-blown movement.

In fact, teenagers learn that there is a movement for men and from high schools, like about a year or two, before the national press does. You know, it is hard enough for practice adults to organize and find consensus and then do something with that in terms of civic action. They did high school students, who maybe did not yet have any kind of experience with that. Figure out how to do it. I'll be out there, just as messy as adults are. There's a lot of ideological divisions.

I mean, not to mention their kids, so as a person who I interview told me that, you know, there was jealousy. There was romance. You like, you want her to so-and-so like me or not. There was like immaturity in some of the males and some independent student groups are quite sexist to their female counterparts. So it's all really messy at the end of the day, but what brings them together is that they all agree that, okay, we have to reform the school. So like, you can generally get a consensus amongst students to like, reform dress code.

Like, students regardless whether they were political or not, just did not like the fact that girls could wear pants and boys had to keep their hair at a certain length and the bands against some aphrods. So, you know, no student group or underground newspaper or protest gets like the majority of support, but they do get a no support to trigger a pretty vigorous reaction from people in power. Oh, yeah, and we're going to get to that.

“But in terms of what actually, you know, got these students that reaction, what were they activating around?”

You know, was it about national issues, you know, the Vietnam war civil rights, or was this about what was going on in their own schools? So it's actually a mix of both. So one thing that was pretty common is that students would ask their school principles to allow like an anti-war speaker to come and speak at the school to balance out a visit from a military recruiter. And they had various successes as short come is when it came to that.

So, but you see these like, you know, there's national issues, but it gets, it's in this local context. And the same thing with like, you know, black power a lot of students, there's a lot of similarities between a lot of black student protests,

so food, however, while they overlap, they're also our local concerns too.

“So they want to like, you know, doors on the bathroom stalls, which is very basic concern.”

You know, they ask for like police officers to be removed from campus in many urban school districts. This is when you start to see school administrators become much more relying on law enforcement to handle everyday disciplinary matters, or they'll ask for like access to a stadium that's adjacent to the school.

So it's similar and a lot, a lot of these protests are quite similar and they're reacting to a lot of national stuff is always shaped by what's ever going on locally.

So it's a combination of both that they react to. Okay, law enforcement in schools.

“Why was it that administrators were turning to this outside force to navigate what was going on in their classrooms and hallways?”

That's the main point in my book where I talk about like the expansion of student rights coincided with the modernization of school security. So school police, there's a history going back to 19, the mid-1950s when Tucson's Arizona's the first school district to experiment with a school resource officer.

But by the 1960s, especially with urban uprisings, you have a lot of protests that are coming out in high school, a lot of racial protests.

So you have these segregation and in desegregated schools or schools that were newly integrated, you get a lot of racial violence. And you also in those schools, you get a lot of protests coming from black students, Latino students, ages students, and white students as well, later America students too. So in response with all the social unrest coming from the high school, you get a lot of pressure from parents, from teachers, school administrators, as well as the local newspapers in whatever respect of city, the manning that order needs to be maintained in the high school.

So school administrators, they don't initially bring cops into school, they try to like, hall monitors at parents patrol, or they lock the doors on campus, a key clinical outside agitators out. And increasingly, what you start to see is that police officers in the department, in many cities, start to patrol schools, but also you get undercover cops too. The NYPD and the New Orleans Police Department were quite open about the fact that they had young officers with shrubic appearances, masquerading themselves as seniors who would attend the school and eventually investigate student activists.

I can only imagine what it may feel like to learn that the person who you thought was a friend or an ally is actually an officer in disguise investigating you.

Who were these students?

“You know, I know your book tells the stories of so many individuals in this era, can you share a story about someone who really stood out to you?”

Oh, yeah. One of my favorite characters in my book is Bruce Triggs, a kid from New York City, all American Boy Scout. You know, it's from a Jewish background, World War II is quite celebrated in his household, and you know, he joins the Boy Scouts, and he believes in a very young age that the United States is, you know, a more example of a good force for the world, and he could do no wrong. So, this is what happens that his family moves the Queen, that he attends a different school where he meets students who smoke marijuana, who are involved in like the anti war movement, and he eventually dates the girl, it's a girl on high school who was an anti war activist.

She introduced to him, Shay Garara, and he asked, "Hey, he's a communist, isn't he?" She's like, "You bet he is." And it is head, he's like, "This is just too much, I can't support a communist, are you crazy?" What happens is that he eventually goes to an anti war conference where a schism occurs, and normally, as he recalls, most people will be turned off, but he was just blown away. But the turning point is when he attends the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and when the riot breaks out, he finds himself, he gets punched in a face by a police officer.

He's already kind of gradually shipped, and that was the catalyst, and he comes back to New York as a full-blown radical and he'll find a New York high school student union, which leads to a pretty chaotic year in New York City schools in 1968 and 1969. So, that's definitely one of my favorite characters of right about the person who goes from being a very all-American boy scout to a political radical. Alright, so we gotta talk about the FBI, because kids like Bruce Triggs were clearly setting the adults in the room on it.

And we're gonna get to that after a quick break. So, food delivery services have been around for a while, and I've tried a lot of them, and I love some and I hate it others. I will say that green chef is the trusted authority on clean eating. They deliver only real farm-sourced ingredients.

Oh, I've had so much trouble fishing my life. Specifically in this box, the salmon with red peppers and olives, because I don't live by a fishmonger.

“There isn't one in my town. And salmon, salmon, my whole life, it's been a gamble.”

This salmon from green chef, these were vacuum sealed, they were gorgeous cuts of fish, the kind I literally could not get at my local grocery store. And also, I haven't made a fish in all of dish, and maybe ever. So, I learned something, and that means it was a good day. So, if you're interested in having someone else handle your meal planning and your grocery shopping in an organic affordable varied way, give green chef a try. Just head to greenchef.com/50sivix. That's 5,000 CIVI-ICS, and use code 50 civics to get 50% off your first month, and then 20% off for two months with free shipping. Again, that is code 50 [email protected]/50sivix.

Never mind how many, but I wasn't high school. My very wise friend informed me that I should stop acquiring so much blimsy, fall apart in the wash, fast fashion.

This was, by the way, before the term, fast fashion had properly entered the lexicon, so he probably just said junk, and that I shouldn't stead invest in high quality clothes that I could wear year after year. Now, there are two reasons that I did not do this at the time.

“One, I believe I was like 16 years old, to when I heard invest and high quality in the same sentence, I really heard too expensive for the lex of you.”

Now, here I am, and in the years later, and there's finally a path to exactly the kind of quality over quantity my buddy Pete was talking about, and that is quince.

This makes wardrobe staples that last. We are talking 100% European linen 100% silk organic cotton, Mongolian cashmere, high quality fabrics, well made clothes, the stuff that you can reach for year after year. As I speak, I am wearing my quince organic cotton boyfriend sweater, something that I reach for week after week, and it has been years. High school hand, I could not even imagine something holding up for this long, let alone keeping its shape, warmth, softness, and color like this puppy has.

“And because quince works directly with safe ethical factories and cuts out the middle men, I did not end up paying fancy retail or brand markup prices for this.”

So, Pete was right. I don't need a ton of clothes, I just needed the clothes that I love that last year after year. And you can have the very same right now. Go to quince.com/sifix for free shipping and 365 day returns. That is a full year to wear it and love it. And you will. Now available in Canada too. Don't keep settling for clothes that don't last. Go to qu-i-n-c-e.com/sifix for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com/sifix.

[Music] [Music] We're back. You're listening to civics 101. And civics 101, by the way, is a nonprofit podcast. And maybe one day we should make an episode that gets into these specifics of what a nonprofit really is. But the main point here is that we are not, you know, making a profit for ourselves or for anyone else.

Whatever money we receive is used to pay our journalists and pay the people who keep, you have your public radio functioning. Make sure we have the basic gear to record people's voices and share those voices with the public. Our whole reason for existing is to share with you what is happening in the world now and what happened in the world in the past so that you can better understand your world.

And just to shout out to the many many listeners who have already done that, who make sure that we can do this work every day, you know, you are proof positive that the world is not all about profit.

“It is also about people, education, and civic empowerment.”

All right, back to the show. [ Music ] I am talking with Erin Fountain Jr., historian and author of High School Students Unite. Teen Activism Education Reform and FBI Surveillance in Postwar America. Erin put in an immense amount of work to figure out what was going on, re-students and the federal bureau of investigation during the postwar era during the 60s and the 70s.

And given the fact that I had never heard of the FBI Survelling High School Students before, I wanted to know what first tipped Erin off.

Oh, yeah. Well, it came across when I was going through an underground newspaper from Palo Alto, California, and it was a group called the United Student Movement. And in the interview, the two people who are interviewed or several, I don't have to tell many, they kind of bragged about being spied on by the FBI. It's teenagers like we're bad, you know what? So I submitted a Fourier request on that very group was towed nothing existed. So when I got to graduate school, I wrote a seminar paper on in New York High School Student Union, which is actually in a book.

And a former member gave me about 80 some pages of memorabilia and two of those pages were the group's FBI file.

My jaw immediately dropped because I'm like, oh, when I long suspected, it's finally confirmed.

So I went to a professor who gave me a Fourier template, and I submitted one on the New York High School Student Union. But realized I was too late because all the files were destroyed in 79, 2010, and April 2014. I had just submitted that request, August of that very year. So realizing that, okay, the National Archives and Reconministrations actively destroyed documents. Let me submit Fourier requests on all the groups I know about.

You immediately got positive results from Milwaukee, Minnesota, El Paso, Texas, including the United Student Movement when I told when I was originally told nothing existed. And yeah, over time it wasn't like a Eureka moment. I was start to expand and I submitted Fourier requests on high school underground newspapers and school that had civil unrest or racial violence. And I started to look at suburban and rural areas. Over, of course, 10 years I found a well over 370 high school groups under some form of surveillance or counterintelligence operation.

Now, if you count the amount of students who had young at 14 who had NFBI file as well as police departments, the US military and state legislatures and spy on teenagers, then that numbers well over 600, but even that's an undercount.

“And Aaron, I know that you have submitted it over 2,000 freedom of information act requests, Fourier requests in pursuit of this information, meaning essentially that this was not common knowledge, right?”

It was not something that everyone was aware of. What has been the reaction so far when you have told people that the FBI was surveilling them? Oh, it has very naturality. Some people say, wow, that's kind of pathetic. Like, the FBI was spy on teenagers. Others are not surprised because they were around at the time. I remember one comment I saw was something like, I knew it when I shared it at FBI file. And one thing about the FBI file is I'm a school administrators, parents and students who are informants. I remember one person's like, you know, I see school administrators and even students serving as informants, but the parents, wow, that is quite shocking.

The fact that most people I interviewed, everybody was shocked that parents were informants. They weren't as surprised as school administrators were. Some were suspicious whether students weren't informants, but for the longest time I only had one example. So I thought it was an anomaly. It wasn't like eight years later that I came across multiple files shown me like, oh, this was absolutely more widespread than I had assumed.

“The notion of a parent, you know, adding you out to Herbert Hoover, right, or expressing concern to the FBI is really kind of beyond my comprehension. I think if my mother had said to me,”

I'm calling the FBI on you when I was in high school. I would have said, like, hi, yeah, good luck with that, you know. Could you give us a sense of how or why a parent would feel that calling the FBI writing letters to the FBI was a remotely reasonable response? When a kid started to get activated, right, started to speak out or organize around what was going on in their school or what was going on in their country. Yeah, some good question. So nationwide, when high school student activism reaches peak, the large consensus amongst people was that this was a master plan by some outside agitators.

And parents interested in lead, a start contact in the FBI's earliest 1965 when students are organizing against the Vietnam War.

Mostly white, middle, upper middle class parents, but it's also for the understand what the FBI symbolized in the 1960s. The popular culture lie and lies did going back to 1930s. I mean, they were, you could read about the FBI and comic books and listened to them on radio stations. You know, television and films and all of them, this still existed a present day. I've recently watched a wolf on wash readers have seen that exemplifies the FBI as being an incorruptible crime fighting organization.

“I think that you think that we did or do, I don't get it. Well, I joined and I can't discuss an ongoing investigation.”

No, I get that noise.

And so, within that context, parents, unsurprisingly, a minority parent start to contact the FBI to either roll letters to them sometimes directly to J. Edgar Hoover.

They made phone calls anytime and nights on time and midnight. I recently got an FBI file. This was not in a book from Madison, Wisconsin, and a father. He serves as an forming a very interesting way. His boy talks openly about a political group. He's involved in in Madison, Wisconsin, called the high school student for social justice. And he listens to him and what the boy doesn't know is that he relates all that information to the FBI and the FBI agrees that only contact the father when he's at work.

So the son doesn't suspect anything.

And he all expressed concerns. It wasn't after children they thought were committing like criminal acts.

They just thought they were all being indoctrinated. Or sometimes they thought children that were of their own were being indoctrinated by some clinical sinister force. So it's really this concern. I mean, I know in our contemporary eyes as seen as obscene. I love how you do that to your own kid. But for many the parents, they just thought that every institution had failed to keep their kids safe. And the FBI was their last and best resource.

“And when you say surveillance, what does that practically mean? Are we talking FBI agents hanging out in some unmarked vehicle outside of the school with binoculars?”

Like, what does surveillance actually mean when it comes to the FBI and high school kids? That's a good question. It's a variety of things. They will like, you know, cut out newspaper clipings and I, you know, clip them onto some poster as a paper. Police officers, parents, students and administrators would confiscate underground newspapers and other published materials and forward them to the FBI, which is why in a book I call the FBI unintentional archivist because a lot of documents they collect.

I've never seen anywhere else. One agent in Los Angeles, masquerade himself as a graduate student from UCLA writing a paper about underground newspaper, so he calls a kid who's now a college student, anti-ac college. And the kid just tells him everything about the underground newspaper and he has no idea that a person on the other line is an FBI agent. What is it about the actions of these teenagers that makes adults around them act in this way? Yes, this is really just the extent of their organizing.

When I say these independent student groups, they weren't just like, some of the work groups with like three people, but from the most part, they were like citywide or metropolitan wide groups. They would have members from across public and private schools across the city and the surrounding suburbs. And he created underground newspapers, which were really sophisticated. They would have like a photographer, a field correspondent, who, if there was high school, have an uprising, it would actually send their correspondent. They are an interview students.

So so much like written material, so much sophisticated organizing that is believed that they're in just no way in a world teenagers or in their own or doing all of this. And somebody has to be pulled into shrinks. I've seen letters to the editors where they'll say like, "This is just way too sophisticated for kids to write." Yeah, and to your point, right, this is the beginning of high school as these standard for American teenagers. It is a new world when you have this many young people being brought together in the same place, finding their voice through both education and through community.

Can you talk a little bit about what these disparate movements actually ended up accomplishing? What came out of this student activism? Yeah, it's short term and long term goals. So short term, a lot of schools would definitely did hire like black teacher, you know, black Latino principles, and they started teaching black history courses.

“I think it's important we think about black history. That came because of the demands from high school students themselves and wasn't just given to them.”

So the combination of very hyper local, like for example, Berkeley high school till this day is still at the black studies department, and it was the first one in the nation ready to like sex education, ready to stop kicking girls out of school because they were pregnant, which was a wise bread practice in the 1960 course, not the father, only the girl who got pregnant.

So there's the hyper local initiative, but the longstanding one is definitely the notion that students have constitutional rights in schools.

It has to be respected so long as they don't cause a disruption. It still gets debate in a what not, but prior to 1969 that was not a notion that most people could comprehend, whether a minor had constitutional rights. The oath and the office is a politics law and democracy podcast hosted by constitutional scholar Cory Brecht Schneider and serious XM host John Fuckelsing. Each week they break down the biggest political stories three constitutional lens in plain English for broad audience. It's smart, accessible, and focused on how power actually works.

The oath and the office is available wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube with full video episodes each week. We're back. You're listening to civics 101.

I am talking with Erin Fountain Jr. historian and author of high school students unite teen activism education reform and FBI surveillance in post war America.

“What about high school students today? Do you think that they can have the same impact on their schools and their communities?”

Yeah, students today still will support labor disputes. I remember to get Madison was constant. It was a janitor who was a father of a kid at the school and he lost his job after the speech with a student protest and he got his job back. There are things like that. And students today still protest against bookbands or I've seen this and then make a life. Freedom schools challenging was taught in the curriculum. I do think it's important to understand and not all students are on the left. There definitely are students on the right and they are free to believe whatever they want.

So any protest I'm talking about there's always a counter demonstration or a counter measure to whatever students are trying to achieve.

“High students on the right are pretty successful as well. Again, they're advanced.”

Yeah, I mean, I'm thinking about the fact that even today we are seeing students organize. We are seeing them stage school walkouts in order to protest immigration and customs enforcement. The fear that our peers go through every single day. It has to be vocalized. And what we're doing right now is vocalizing that fear that we've been hearing for months. And I wonder, you know, just thinking about the title of your book. High school students unite exclamation point. Do you say that you are pro student activism?

Oh. Yeah, I'm pro people. My quote Diane Nash, who made a statement that I wholeheartedly agree that one of the issues with the civil rights movement is that it's often viewed as a Dr. King movement and not as a people movement.

“And when it's viewed as a people movement, people can sit around and ask instead of saying, hey, can we have another Dr. King like figure come, they can just sit and ask like, what can I do?”

So yeah, I'm a big proponent student and activism. Many of the people I talked about in the book, it really shaped their career. There's a lot in one into academia. So when I became journalists, interestingly, one person started an underground newspaper and became a journalist in the future. You know, it came scientists and elected officials and labor organizers and a lot of that activism that they continue into their adult. But even if they don't see that activism is all rooted into their political precosiousness as a kid. So no, and kids are interested in politics and issues that affect her everyday lives.

Regardless of whether they're on a left or right, I think, you know, students from both sides should get active. Is there anything else that you want to highlight from your book? Maybe something that you don't get asked to talk about very often? I will say one thing I would be more asked me more about was the fact of how not just national but international high school student activism was in 1960 to 70s. In this book, I have a list that I worked on for over 10 years to less. Once it closed the name over 500 independent student organizations and the names of over 1000 high school underground newspapers.

And I did that because when I decided to focus on the San Francisco Bay Area and grad school, I was kind of getting a little annoyed when people say, oh yeah, of course, or like, oh yeah, that that would never occur, I live though. So yeah, when I made a list, it includes the names of groups and papers from all 50 states, including DC and Puerto Rico. But I do not have like the international aspect, and I should for listeners to know that high school student activism in this period occurred on all six continents from the literature.

And also students to a small extent actually knew that they were part of an international protest movement from secondary schools.

And there was correspondence between American teenagers and teenagers who lived in England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, American and Canadian teenagers as they met one another in person.

“Okay, so how were these students communicating across borders, what were they saying to each other?”

Oh, so this is the high school underground press. The teenagers in the United States created a national syndicate as a network to connect all the high school underground newspapers. So pretty much a syndicate as a newspaper exchange. So let's say where I live is like the office of whatever group.

So I have 20 subscribers from across the nation.

They each send me five copies of their papers. I send each copy to every subscriber, maybe keep like, you know, two to myself and send the others to like national publications. And it was share articles. And this just accumulated over time to the point that they had about 700 newspapers. And when you go to the archives at Temple University, you see these letters as students are writing to them from across the United States, Canada, England, Australia, New Zealand, Puerto Rico.

“And asking them, how do I create an underground newspaper?”

This is what, hey, can you send me papers because I want to see what America's students are writing about?

It's a unique correspondence, a guy who donated that collection, who I interviewed in a book called "A Dissocial Media of the Age." Fortunately, some of the records got destroyed. He kept 50 of the best he told me, but it got destroyed in a flood. Yeah, this happens a lot, but the ones that exist, it's a phenomenal collection just to see what students were discussing and what issues they have. So I'm going to talk about like, police and FBI harassment.

Other papers and others, when I talk about like, you know, this is a current lawsuit that we're going for. So it's a, yeah, fascinated collection that they had over time. But again, it took like five years for them to build that. Well, for those who want to know more about what Aaron learned, you can find high school students unite. Teen activism, education reform, and FBI surveillance in post-war America, wherever books are sold.

And stay tuned for what Aaron is working on right now. It's another book covering teenage action during the Vietnam War, but this time he is going global. Aaron is looking at the rules that Canada, Australia, even New Zealand played. And how high school students from across the world responded to the ways their nation's got involved in a war that inspired millions of people to get organized and speak out. This episode was produced by me, Hannah McCarthy, Nick Capeteche is my co-host.

Rebecca Lavoy is our executive producer, Marina Henkey is our producer. Music in this episode comes from Epidemic Sound. If you got something out of this episode, if you learned something, if you're taking what you learned and doing something with it in your world, that in your world, your community, consider leaving us a review on whatever platform you are listening to this on. Help us get the word out that we are civically here for you.

And only you, the public, because this is, after all, a production of NHPR, New Hampshire, public, radio. Sometimes it feels like red and blue states are just as divergent as post-World War II East and West Germany.

“So what can the US learn from German political history in order to create a more perfect union?”

Find out on the new season of the future of our former democracy, the Signal Award winning podcast from more equitable democracy at Large Media, hosted by me, Colin Cole and Heather Villanova. It's time to rethink democracy, so follow the future of our former democracy wherever you get your podcasts. Not all darkness is dangerous, sometimes it's the doorway to becoming cold. On the brand new podcast, the shadow sessions hosted by me, Hibba Belfacay, a psychologist and trauma expert. We should light on the hidden corners of the human experience.

Through raw, unfiltered conversations from the edge of healing, the shadow sessions invites you to do the deeper work that leads to real change. Follow the shadow sessions wherever you're listening now.