About the Project

Protest music is an ultimate form of human expression. Music at its core draws people together due to the widespread nature and the various messages that can be present throughout. It also allows for a voice to those who cannot be heard or are in minorities that have been ostracized.

The United States has been built on protest. From the Revolutionary War to the Suffragette Movement to the Black Lives Matter protests, Americans are no stranger to fighting for their rights. These specific decades were chosen due to the amount of events that occurred that directly influenced the music at the time. This helped to create an easier look at the evolution of the music along with having easy access to information needed to pursue this project.

The information presented throughout this project is more useful as an interactive tool than as a paper. This is mainly due to the many different parts such as timelines, music selection, and a further analysis that would make a paper long and clunky without being able to present the results in a fashion that would not entirely make sense. By using Digital Humanities, it allows for a way for others to interact with the data and information in order to draw their own conclusions as well while also allowing for widespread use rather than keeping it in an academic field.

In short terms, yes! The hope is to further this project in terms of adding more music and events for these decades along with the potential to go beyond this time period. The initial intent of this project was to see the overall progression of protest music throughout American history which ended up being too long for the DHF period. There is at least a good chance that it will be expanded into future years due to similar data being able to be found while answering the question does protest music still exist today.