Semester One Speech

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.