US
history this year so far has been very productive in my opinion. My favorite activity that we have done so far
was our research projects about the movies that we watched first quarter. I actually learned a lot in those few weeks
and writing the paper about them afterwards just reinforced what I had
learned. I enjoyed researching the two
movies and being able to decipher between the true facts and the things that
the moviemakers made up to make the movies more entertaining. I learned that not all things we see on
television that claim to be based on a true story are always true. I learned and was able to prove that
Hollywood likes to change events that happened in history to make them more
appealing to their audience.
One thing that I was most
unpleasantly surprised with was how women were treated in the work force. I did not like learning about how they were
treated unfairly and like they were not as good as men. Their pays even displayed how much they were
disliked. Companies and men saw women as
less than equal to them, therefore their pay was much less than men. Men also saw women as a threat because it
lowered their pay and put them out of work.
The men wanted to make all of the money in the household and prove that
they could take care of their family’s without the help of their wife.
There is a lot that we have learned
this year that I am pretty positive that I will remember ten years on down the
road, but one thing that really stood out to me was when we learned the
difference between empathy and sympathy.
I always knew that they were very similar and deal with concerns of
others, but I never knew what the exact differences between the two are. I now know that sympathy is simply felling
sorry for someone and empathy is feeling sorry for someone and understanding his
or her situation.
One big thing that Americans dealt
with in the past was racism. Obviously,
we are still dealing with this issue today.
Many people in America that aren’t American feel discriminated against,
the same way people felt back then. I,
personally, do not think that non-Americans are treated any differently than
the Americans. I believe that we should
all be treated the same and that we are treated the same.
If I were able to go back in time
and rename the “Gilded Age,” the time between 1865 and 1920, something
different, I would name it the “Age of Conduct.” This name seems fitting because this whole
time period deals with all sorts of economic growth, including the wages of
working people going up, causing a lot of immigration. The immigration resulted in an increase of
industrialization, causing all wages to rise over the time period. The economy rate in the United States rose
faster in this time period than it ever had before, making this name very suitable.
