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| The Iran Hostage Crisis |
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Author: Kenneth J. Bechtel, Anne Arundel County Public Schools
Grade Level: High
Duration: 1 class period |
Overview:
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The Iran Hostage Crisis lasted from 1979-1981, but its aftereffects changed the political and diplomatic landscape between the United States and Iran for decades to come. On November 4, 1979 Iranian student demonstrators stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took 52 Americans hostage. The hostages would be released only when the Shah came back to Iran to stand trial for crimes committed against the Iranian people. The former leader of Iran, the Shah had been voted out of office in 1950, but was reinstated after a U.S. lead coup in 1953. He became a close ally of the U.S., but was wholly unpopular in Iran and was eventually overthrown in 1979.
The situation was only expected to last a short time, but it dragged on for 444 days. The Carter administration was seen as inept and ineffective in handling the crisis. A botched rescue attempt in 1980 only reinforced these views and Carter was not reelected in the 1980 presidential race. The hostages were released on January 20, 1981, the same day Ronald Reagan was sworn into office. In this lesson, students will examine primary source documents from throughout the crisis in an attempt to reconstruct the event. They will in essence be working backwards, trying to decipher what documents are more important than others as they construct a debriefing of the event. The instructor will then share the actual details of the crisis and students will be able to see how their close their interpretations were to what actually happened. |
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