The first semester of our eleventh grade United
States history class is now over. It
seems like just yesterday we were walking into this classroom as brand new
juniors trying to see if we had any friends in the class. We were all eager to get to know Ms. Lawson,
a teacher that many of us had never met before.
I think I can speak for everyone here when I say we were all extremely
pleasantly surprised to watch movies for the first couple weeks of class. Little did we know at the time, but we were
actually learning a lot through watching these movies. That was the best first impression a teacher
has ever had on me, so thank you for that Ms. Lawson. One sad day when we all walked into class we
were all struck with a rather unpleasant surprise when Stuart asked “Are we
watching a movie again today?” and Ms. Lawson replied “No, we are actually
writing an essay on the movies we watched.”
Luckily, we all learned a lot of reliable and accurate data from the two
movies we watched in class and were prepared for the essay.
Some
of the things I learned this semester will stick with me forever. For instance, I did my research for one of my
blog entries on the collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Bangladesh in
2013. The top floors of the Rana Plaza
building were garment factories. Even
though the building was in terrible shape, the owners of the garment factory
did not let their employees stop working.
When the building collapsed, over two thousand people were busy at work
on the top floors. Unfortunately, half
of the people in the building that day died, and the rest were seriously
injured. It is said to be one of the
worst accidental collapses of a building in history.
Conflict
that was around in the period of our study can still be seen in our country
today. Racial tension between some black
and white people may not be as strong as it was in the early 1900’s, but it
definitely is still around today. Instances
such as the Trayvon and Zimmerman case and more recently the conflict in
Ferguson really show that there is definitely still racial tension in the
United States. These examples are just a
few of many discrepancies between white and black people in our country today,
but the extremities of them are far less than those of the discrepancies
between the two races that we learned about this semester such as slavery and black
people having no rights.
If
I were a historian and had to name the era of 1865 to 1920, I would call it
something like the period of “systematization” meaning to arrange into a system
or to make systematic. Throughout every
chapter in the book that we have read this semester, the theme of arrangement,
building, or creation can be found. With
the creation of the first small towns to the biggest cities the world had ever
seen, and from the arrangement of social classes to new political parties, the
United States was constantly changing to eventually become the greatest country
in the world.
