Week 5 Assignments - Abby Dow

It is useful to preface this blog post by explaining that I chose to shift my topic. I am now focusing on the federal government’s (and particularly then Surgeon General Everett Koop’s) push for sex education in response to the HIV/AIDs epidemic in the mid-1980s. I am hoping to investigate how this changed the way the U.S. schools taught sex education.

Assignment 1:

Archive: National Library of Medicine (https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/)

- The archive “celebrates twentieth-century leaders in biomedical research and public health.”

Collection: The C. Everett Koop Papers

- U.S. Surgeon General from 1981 to 1989

Assignment 2: Primary source bibliography

Realistic source list:

1)   Koop, C. Everett. "AIDS and Behavior: The Need for Education. The Surgeon General's Report: Presented at the Conference on AIDS and Public Policy Sponsored by the American Medical Association, Chicago, Illinois." Speech.

a.     This speech represents the first government acknowledgement of the need for an educational intervention. It is useful because it shows exactly what was said, and it caused a significant outpouring of both criticism and support.

2)    Lee, Robert. "Sex Education Is Just No Business of the Government." The Conservative Digest Jan. 1987: n. pag. Print.

a.     This article came out right around the time that Surgeon General Everett Koop announced his initiative to include education in public schools. It is useful because it shows the conservative repulsion to the idea of teaching HIV/AIDS in school, and emphasizing that if it is taught, it must be taught through abstinence.

3)   “AIDS Becomes a Political Issue: The New Right seeks to make it a litmus test for Republicans,” Time, 1987

a.     This article is useful because it shows how intensely political the question of AIDS education became.

4)   Letter to Everett Koop from the Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays, 1986

a.     Unlike the article from Conservative Digest, this letter represents one of the many groups that supported Koop’s push for sex education in schools to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDs. It was one of the many letters I found in support of this initiative.

5)   Inventory to the American Council on Education Records 1918-2011

a.     This is not one source, but rather a whole archive housed at Hoover that I think will be useful and where I will hopefully be able to locate some sex education standards. 

6)   The Association of AIDS Education and Sex Education with Sexual Behavior and Condom Use Among Teenage Men. By: Ku, Leighton C., Sonenstein, Freya L., Pleck, Joseph H., Family Planning Perspectives, 00147354, May/Jun92, Vol. 24, Issue 3

a.     This source is valuable not only because it is a study on the changes in sex education and the effect they have on reducing HIV/AIDs, and it represents the perspective held by the scientific community on the effectiveness of HIV/AIDS education in the early 1990s. It is also valuable because it points to other research articles on the subject.

Wish list:

7)   AIDS History Project Collection

a.     I found this source on the OAC website. It is located, like a few of the other sources on my wish list, at the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries. The collection description says it contains information about AIDS education among its 164 boxes.

8)   Californians for AIDS Research and Education

a.     Like the History Project Collection, this is located at the ONE Archives at USC in LA. The collection would be useful in an ideal world because it contains the materials of a group dedicated to advocating for HIV education. However, like the History Project Collection, there is no online access.

9)   Fatal Advice: How Safe-Sex Education Went Wrong by Cindy Patton

a.     This is not a primary source, but it is a secondary source directly related to my topic. It is included on my “wish list” because it was lost by the Stanford Libraries. Wish me luck finding it!

10)                   Sex education standards (at a national and state level) 1983-1995

a.     I can easily locate sex education standards from recent years, but I am having a difficult time locating older sex ed standards in the U.S. I think this will be essential to my topic as I evaluate how standards evolve in conjunction with the AIDS epidemic.

Assignment 3: 

Access to source - https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/access/QQBBGN.pdf

This is a speech by then Surgeon General Everett Koop on the importance of education in preventing the spread of AIDS. He gave the speech in 1987 at the Convention on AIDs and Public Policy. [FYI - it looks long but there are only about 2 short paragraphs on each page.]