This morning I eavesdropped on one of my US History students telling another that he had recently watched Forrest Gump on television. As both students were commenting on how unreal some of the scenarios in the film were I interjected with, “some of those scenarios are based on real events in US History.” That’s how we got on the topic of ping pong diplomacy. To give them a quick, unplanned, lesson about ping pong diplomacy I jumped on YouTube, did a search and quickly found this NBC Nightly News clip from the 2008 Olympics held in Beijing. You can watch that clip below.

The longer clip that is mentioned at the end of the one above can be found here and is embedded below.

On a related note, the American Experience movie about Nixon is available to view in its entirety through PBS Video. I’ve embedded the video below and you can also find it here.