Michael Hargadon did a history project that compared images of two 20th-century wars

By Frank Kuin

Michael Hargadon came to Concordia to broaden his marketable skills, and found that a history degree has done just that.

Having worked for some years for various computer companies before he enrolled, he decided not to do a degree that was directly related to his work experience.

The Honours degree he will receive this month provided him with “a very good generalized liberal arts education,” said Hargadon, who is one of the top-ranking students in History this year. It has improved his research and writing abilities.

“The degree has built skills in an area of core concentration, which is actually quite attractive to employers once you get them past the perception that studying history is essentially the art of memorizing famous names and famous places,” he said.

In fact, history is all about research and analysis. For his Honours essay, Hargadon has done a comparative study of photographic representations of World War II and the Korean War.

Examining photos from Life magazine in the 1940s and 1950s, he found great differences between depictions of the two conflicts.

“One of the big differences is that World War II was very sanitized in terms of the depiction of violence and of psychological effects of warfare on soldiers,” he said. “Whereas with the Korean War, the press was willing to publish more starkly violent depictions of dead and injured soldiers and more psychologically realistic portraits of soldiers doing things that were atypical for the time, like crying or showing fear.”

Hargadon explained this difference by linking it to the broader culture of the time, demonstrating that in literature, there was “an overall hardening of the American mindset as a consequence of the Cold War.”

Hargadon is planning to train with the Canadian military. He has been selected as a reserve officer for an infantry unit in Vancouver, where he has just moved.