From two-time National Book Award finalist Deborah Wiles, a masterpiece exploration of one of the darkest moments in our history, when American troops killed four American students protesting the Vietnam War. May 4, 1970. Kent State University. As protestors roil the campus, National Guardsmen are called in. In the chaos of what happens next, shots are fired and four students are killed. To this day, there is still argument of what happened and why. Told in multiple voices from a number of vantage points -- protestor, Guardsman, townie, student -- Deborah Wiles's Kent State gives a moving, terrifying, galvanizing picture of what happened that weekend in Ohio . . . an event that, even 50 years later, still resonates deeply.
All of James A. Michener's storytelling and reportorial skills are brought to the fore in this stunning and heartbreaking examination of the events that led to the 1970 shootings at Kent State, which shook the country to the roots and had a profound impact on the anti-war movement.
On May 4, 1970, two platoons of Ohio National Guardsmen fired on a crowd of students at Kent State University, killing four and wounding nine. Neither the federal government nor the state of Ohio took any responsibility for the guardsmen’s actions. Through the account of the subsequent civil trial, we follow the events of that tragic day, as experienced by the victims and their families, and share their frustration as they try to discover the truth.
The dramatic and eye-opening original account of events that shook the nation. At noon on May 4, 1970, a thirteen-second burst of gunfire transformed the campus of Kent State University into a national nightmare. National Guard bullets killed four students and wounded nine. By nightfall the campus was evacuated and the school was closed. A generation of college students said they had lost all hope for the System and the future. Yet Kent State was not a radical university like Berkeley, Columbia, or Harvard. Although a new mood had been growing among the students in recent years, the school was not known for political activity or demonstrations. In fact, exactly one week before, students had held their traditional spring-is-here mudfight. What most alarmed Americans was the knowledge that if this tragedy could occur at Kent State, on a campus made up of the children of the Silent Majority and in the heart of Middle America, it could happen anywhere. But why? how did it happen that young Americans in battle helmets, gas masks, and combat boots confronted other young Americans wearing bell-bottom trousers, flowered shirts, and shoulder-length hair? What were the issues and why did the confrontation escalate so terribly? Would there be future confrontations like the one of May 4? To answer these questions, prize-winning reporters Eszterhas and Roberts, who were on campus on May 4, spent weeks interviewing all the participants in the tragedy. They traveled to victims' homes and talked to relatives and friends; they spoke to National Guardsmen on the firing line and to students who were fired on. By putting together hundreds of first-person accounts they were able to establish for the first time what actually took place on the day of the shooting.
At midday on May 4, 1970, after three days of protests, several thousand students and the Ohio National Guard faced off at opposite ends of the grassy campus Commons at Kent State University. At noon, the Guard moved out. Twenty-four minutes later, Guardsmen launched a 13-second, 67-shot barrage that left four students dead and nine wounded, one paralyzed for life. The story doesn't end there, though. A horror of far greater proportions was narrowly averted minutes later when the Guard and students reassembled on the Commons. The Kent State shootings were both unavoidable and preventable: unavoidable in that all the discordant forces of a turbulent decade flowed together on May 4, 1970, on one Ohio campus; preventable in that every party to the tragedy made the wrong choices at the wrong time in the wrong place. Using the university's recently available oral-history collection supplemented by extensive new interviewing, Means tells the story of this iconic American moment through the eyes and memories of those who were there, and skillfully situates it in the context of a tumultuous era.
A student journalist's photographic memoir of events surrounding the 1970 Kent State shootings Working as a photographer for the Kent State University student newspaper and yearbook, Howard Ruffner was a college sophomore when the tragic shootings of May 4, 1970, occurred--a tragedy that left four students dead and nine others wounded. Asked to serve as a stringer for Life magazine in the days leading up to May 4, as student protests against the Vietnam War intensified and National Guard troops arrived on campus, Ruffner became a witness and documentarian to this important piece of history. Several of his photographs, including one that appeared on the cover of Life, are etched into our collective consciousness when we think about civil unrest and the latter half of the 20th century. Here, in Moments of Truth: A Photographer's Experience of Kent State 1970, Ruffner not only reproduces a collection of nearly 150 of his photographs--many never before published--but also offers a stirring narrative in which he revisits his work and attempts to further examine these events and his own experience of them. It is, indeed, an intensely personal journey that he invites us to share. An epilogue details how Ruffner's images became critical evidence in the civil trials against the National Guard in 1975 and 1978, as he was the first witness called to take the stand. Ruffner also contemplates the words engraved on the path to what is now the May 4 Memorial Site, a place on the National Register of Historic Places: Inquire, Learn, Reflect. Ruffner's project affirms that we need to ask questions, we need to learn about our history, and we all need to reflect on the past so that our mistakes will not be repeated.
