In Mrs. Blanton’s class, the students are being asked to create a model of what yellow journalism could have looked like during the Spanish-American war. The class went through the reasons for the beginning of the Spanish-American war. 

One question in particular was “Did yellow journalism fuel the outbreak of the Spanish-American war”. According to the curriculum, the class is “covering imperialism and how the United States became a superpower,” Blanton said.   

Jazz journalism was a term applied to American sensational newspapers in the 1920s. That focused on entertainment, celebrities, sports, scandal, and crime. This is tied into their next project that has to do with the 1920s, aka “The Jazz Age”. 

Mrs. Blanton’s US History class is doing a special project in which they learn and celebrate the 1920’s; better known as the “flappers” era. They are dividing the history of the 1920’s culture into, discrimination against women and civil right issues. Flappers were young women in the 1920s with short bobbed hair who wore short skirts. The word flappers originally were gifted to women who were more known for their more “free” behavior.

 The students were to pick a topic, research it, and make a project using information they found about the specific era. Some of which was the Harlem Renaissance era, the jazz age, and the Flappers era. But how the topic tied into the research project was completely up to the students. The students could choose up to 6 different topics to research and showcase. The project was initially going to be done solely because of state standards. But, they decided to put a spin on it and celebrate it in a completely different and fun way. They dressed up, danced, ate, and sang songs from the 1920s,  and explained and presented their projects to the entire class. 

Mrs. Blanton’s class also participates in making ornaments for the Christmas tree located in the Media Center. This projects only undertakes Mrs. Blanton’s students. The ornaments contain drawings and pictures of history dating from WWII to our most recent historical event, the Coronavirus. 

The Christmas tree is located in Tupelo High School’s media center to the left after entering the building.

One ornament on the tree contains an image of a soldier walking through the grass in Vietnam and in the reflection on the water shows a rice farmer. 

Another ornament resembles the coronavirus pandemic that occurred in 2020. The ornament in the middle shows an image of Franklin D. Roosevelt with the date 1932 and a famous quote from the former president, “Happy days are here again”.