First Semester Summary Speech

          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.