First Semester Summary Activity

Hello I am Battle; I am going to talk to you about what I have learned in the course of the semester.

 I was pleasantly surprised to learn about the history of leisure time and what they did during that time. Before learning about this, I just assumed that leisure time was always accepted and practiced, but that turned out to not be the case. At first, leisure time was looked at, as being lazy, but due to mechanization it gave the workers more time off of work, allowing them to have leisure time. I was also intrigued to learn about what they spent their time doing, for example the men spent their time in saloons and sporting events while the women spent their time shopping and going to tea rooms and luncheonettes.

 I was unpleasantly surprised to learn about how dangerous it was to live in the times of early city development. Some of the dangers of early city developments included: dangers of diseases and plague, extraordinary crowding of working-class neighbors, and especially fires. Fires became a serious problem in 1871 and destroyed cities like- Baltimore, Chicago, Boston, and San Francisco. The fires were a terrible and deadly experience to most, however on the positive side it encouraged the construction of fireproof buildings.

Something that I am likely to remember and be able to discuss in ten years from now, is slavery and the movies we watched about slavery including, 12 Years a Slave, and Glory. To read about slavery is bad enough, but to actually watch it, gave me a new perspective and made it that much gruesome.  I have always been intrigued to learn about slavery and to start out this course with learning about it through movies, was something that will stick with me forever.

 Americans in the past used to, and still today, talk and debate about Native Americans. In several events such as the Concentration policy of 1851, where each tribe was assigned its own defined reservation, Wounded Knee of 1890 where a fight broke out between the Indians and the white soldiers, and Assimilation where they forced the Indians to be Christians and adopt the ways of the white man we can reflect on the mistreating of Indians . Even thought all of that is well in the past, conversation and debate is still brought up today for example in sports. There is a debate about whether or not Native American mascots, such as; chiefs, warriors, and especially redskins are derogatory to Native Americans and their culture. After I researched I learned from a member of a Chippewas tribe that they did not consider Native American mascots offensive (besides the redskins) as long as it was being used respectfully and appropriately. It intrigued me that though this began so long ago it is still commonly talked and debated about today.

I would name the era from 1865 to 1920 the “Building Era” because this is when America became more modernized in the way they worked, lived, and constructed. Through this time period, skyscrapers were invented which allowed buildings to not take up as much space on land making it cheaper to construct. other inventions included: airplanes, cars, and even magazines for clothes, which now does not necessarily seem like a big deal, but in those times, it seemed to the people to be astonishing.