Buffalo Soldiers and Native Americans

This past week in class we learned about the Buffalo Soldiers and Native Americans. Some activities we did in class was we read documents and watched ABC Clio videos. These resources helped us to come up with the essential questions for the lesson, which is, Did the government have good intentions when enacting policies for westward expansion? In what ways did these policies impact the Buffalo Soldiers and Native Americans? This question is asking if the government enforce the policies with the hope of benefiting anyone other than themselves or did they want to harm the people or was it an accident. 

Buffalo Soldiers were a group of black soldiers. Native Americans are the original habitants of America. The Buffalo Soldiers were provided with all their supplies from the government, seems like a good thing right? Well it wasn't because the government provided them with the old sick and beat up horses, ratty used uniforms, and also their military training and shelter. I believe that the government knew what they were doing could potentially backfire and not have a good outcome of the Buffalo Soldiers and Native Americans. By providing them with the defective supplies is setting them up for failure. This negativity effected the Buffalo Soldiers and Natives. They had more restrictions that held them back from doing what they wanted and they were being discriminated against. The rules also provoked fights between the natives and soldiers. this is another reason why is was a negative effect. 

The government tried to make it look like they cared by providing them with supplies and such but in all honesty they knew what they were doing the second they started giving them reject horses and tattered uniforms. The policies were the icing on top pf an already crumbling cake. that was the last straw. 

Captain Or Robber?

This week in class we got the topic of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. We watched a series of videos with many topics concerning Carnegie and Rockefeller. The class split up into four groups and each group focused on one category while watching the videos. The four categories were: Main Ideas, Key People, Important Events, and Essential Terms. My group was assigned Main Ideas. We took notes on what we felt was the most important topics covered in the videos. Then the class was split up into two groups. Half of the class read a biography on John D. Rockefeller and the other half read a biography on Andrew Carnegie. After we all watched the videos and read over our notes and the biography each of the four groups came up with what they thought would be the essential question for this activity. The winning essential question was "Should Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller be classified as Robber Barons or Captains of Industry?"

I believe that Carnegie is a captain of industry and Rockefeller is a robber baron. I think this because robber barons were people who bribed government officials, hired personal army's, treated workers poorly, destroyed rival business and were seen as corrupt, cruel, and unsportsmanlike. Rockefeller fits this description perfectly. Rockefeller offered to buy out his rival companies oil company railroads, drilling, sales personnel, and oil refineries. This shows that Rockefeller is a robber baron because he is deliberately trying to take his rival companies out of competition. A captain of industry is defined as "a business leader whose means of amassing a personal fortune contributes positively to the country in some way." I think that Carnegie is a captain of industry because he believed in rewarding workers by recognizing their talent/hard work and promoting them in the ranks of management. A robber baron wouldn't treat workers as well. Also Carnegie spent excess amounts of money on public needs, and education. He donated millions of dollars to advanced education. Carnegie does his in an effort to help his country like a good captain of industry would.

Freedom From Above or Below

Before vacation we talked about the slavery in the south and how exactly they came to be free men. The essential question was "Who 'gave' freedom to enslaved Americans? Did freedom come from above or below? To what extent were Abraham Lincoln's actions influenced by the actions of enslaved Americans?" Freedom from above is when people from higher up help the people below and freedom form below is when the people from below helps themselves. We read and analyzed six different documents to help us find the answer to who freed the slave, was it from above or below, and how much Abraham Lincoln actually had to do with it.

I believe that the freedom of slaves came from below. The slaves took it upon themselves to get what they wanted and worked their way up to make it known to the government that they would stop at nothing to be free. In Document Y (see picture below) we can see that the slaves are taking action and leaving the plantation and following the union army. Also, in Document X we see freedom from below because the fugitive slaves were first to take action by going into the city and taking things and living in empty buildings basically to make themselves a nuisance to the union so that they would have get the attention of the government to ask them what they should do about all the slaves that have overrun the city. This was smart because the union can't send them back to the south and back into slavery because they are fighting for that to stop. In the Letter to Horace Greeley you can see that freeing the slaves is completely secondary to Lincoln and that shows that he wasn't doing as much to free than the slaves were doing themselves. In the Emancipation Proclamation Lincoln does declare the slaves of the rebellion states free he knows that they won't listen and it is solely to declare the war is now about slavery and that they are willing to fight for it but Lincoln didn't come to this conclusion on his own. He had been influenced by all that the slaves were doing. That shows freedom from below even though it is Lincoln speaking it is the thoughts and hard work of the slaves.

We see freedom from below all the time in our life. For example Bruce Jenner has recently decided to live the rest of his life as a women. Bruce is not the only one, there is many other people struggling with their gender identity and all these people are working on making it be more widely accepted. They are helping themselves and each other. Bruce is doing a documentary on his transition and his thought process through it all, it is an attempt to help people have a greater understanding of how exactly it works and why it is so important to the transgendered population to be accepted as who they are. By Bruce doing this he is helping other transgender maybe realize that it is okay to be who you are and helping to tell other people in the world why transgendered people do what they do. This is freedom from below because the transgendered community is helping each other to make it more widely accepted.

Here is a clip of Bruce Jenners interview with Diane Sawyer:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PwNH52S9Etw

Scavenger Hunt Battles

Last week in class we continued to discuss the civil war. We focused on some of the battles and the West, East, and Naval theaters. Each of us were assigned a battle and all we knew about it was the date and we had to search around to find out the name, theater, victor, and a couple facts about the battle. I was assigned battle #13 which turned out to be the Battle of Vicksburg. The Battle of Vicksburg was in the Western theatre and the victor was the Union. Once we figured all that out we had to create a Google doc with all the info included. In order for everyone to learn about battles other than the one they researched themselves we needed a way for people to access other google docs. The way we did this was to create a sheet with a bitLy link and QR code that would take you to the google doc with all the info on it. We each printed out the sheet that would direct to our Google doc and hid it somewhere in the school and we all looked for them in a scavenger hunt game. This is a screenshot of the information of my battle:

 

You can reach this by scanning this QR code or typing in the bitly link.

To discuss whether the Confederate or the Union won each theater we created a pallet to collaborate out idea. We wrote under at least two of the theaters and stated who we thought won and why. This is the link to the padlet: A Block Padlet In the Eastern theatre six out of eleven battles were won by the Confederate and the remaining five were won by the Union. In the Western theater five out of seven battles were won by the Union and the Confederate only won one battle in the West the remaining battle was a draw. Out of the two battles fought in the Naval theatre the Union won both. After looking over all the information for each battle it is clear that the Union is the overall victor. The Union won twelve out of twenty battles and the Confederate only one seven, also there was one tie. In each battle the Confederate and the Union put up a good fight and lost many men in the process.

 

Election of 1860

This week in class we discussed the election of 1860. To help us learn more about it we watched a crash course video about the election and read the article Civil War in Art. Civil War in Art was a collection of primary source pictures about the Civil War with descriptions of each picture by their side. We read and then created an educreation video about all the pictures and what they meant. Also in.o that video we answered the question Were the results of the Election of 1860 representative of the deep divisions over slavery? This question is basically asking did the outcome of who won the election have anything to do with how the north and south have such different opinions on slavery. This is the link to our video and the original script: 

Our Educreations

>It all started off with John Browns Harpers Ferry raid in 1859. 

>Northern Republicans were equally angered by the recent Supreme Court decision in case of Dred Scott v. Sanford, declaring free soil unconstitutional. Northern Democrats, meanwhile, struggled to convince Americans that their policy of popular sovereignty still made sense. 

>The Democratic Party split into three groups each with different ideas on how to deal with slavery in the west. These three parties lined up against Abraham Lincon, of the Republican Party, who was running for president. Who advocated that the west be free entirely. Lincon won with less than 40% of the popular vote and 59% of the electoral college. His election was fair but pushed the Deep South to succession. 

>The states didn't like that Lincon was trying to reunite the union. 

>As a responce to Lincons election South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas succeeded from the union and formed a new nation called The Confederate States of America and named its president Jefferson Davis. 

>The upper south and the rest of the Union urged the Deep South that has succeeded, to come back to the Union. When Lincon was inoggurated on March 4th 1861 he gave a speech and incourraging people to return to the south and promises that he would protect slavery where it is already existing. 

>Lincon didn't want the confederacy to take control of the United States military force in the south. Lincon wanted to protect fort sumpter from being attacked and taken over so he sent unarmed supply ships to the fort and told Jefferson Davis his plan. The confedeacy attached the forts before the ships had arrived. 

>Virgina,Tennessee, North Carolina, and Arkansas joined the confedeacy to protest Lincons mission to reunite the union. Only Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware because the boarder states because they remained in the union although the they were slave states. 

>The Northern public became extremely interested in  patriotism after the attack in fort sumpter. Many artists began to record the events that happened there. For example; Frederic E. Church's painting Our Banner in the Sky, created in 1861, shows a tattered flag in the sky much like the one that would have been discovered after the attack.  

>Currier and Ives' publishing of the Bombardment of Fort Sumter, Charleston Harbor, a print showing the battle from the Confederate point of view, marked the beginning of a very important new relationship between the artist and the public. This newfound relationship allowed the public to see and understand what was occurring in the war from different vantage points. 

Citations

Abraham Lincoln:

Painting a national treasure: https://www.jeremypenn.com/2014/08/painting-abraham-lincoln/

Jefferson Davis:

History.com: http://cdn.history.com/sites/2/2013/12/jefferson-davis-portrait-AB.jpeg

Abraham Lincoln 2:

Stufffromthelab.com: https://stufffromthelab.wordpress.com/category/uncategorized-stuff/page/46/

All other pictures:

Civil war in Art: http://www.civilwarinart.org/exhibits/show/causes/introduction/the-election-of-1860-and-seces

Let's Talk About The Elephant in The Room

In class we made a timeLine regarding pro slavery and anti slavery in the civil war. We seperated the pro and the anti. In order to figure out which event was pro or anti we had to read about them. Once we figured it out we wrote a brief description and for some we put a picture. The picture of the timeline is below...

In the early 19th century the main topic or the "elephant in the room" of American politics was slavery. Just because it was a predominant focus doesn't mean they wanted it to be. The government wanted to avoid it. Slavery was such a big topic because people were finally reliving it wasn't right and that things needed to change. The government wanted to ignore it because they had always relied on slates and didn't want tot give that up. This was very obvious during the Dred Scott Case in March of 1857. A black slave filed a lawsuit against Missouri stating that he and his wife should be freed because they used to live in states where slavery was illegal. The court ended up saying no they should not be free because thecnically they are slaves and slaves can't sue anyone. This discuted the antislavery activists. 

Slavery is Entrenched

Cotton was a main factor of why slavery was entrenched in the early 19th century. In class we went to the computer lab and did a activity online. We looked through a website that had a timeline of how slavery was changing overtime and the growth of the cotton crops. We took notes at each time stop in the timeline. 

Cotton was rapidly growing and earning so much money, by the 1860s cotton was up to $191,800,000! Since the production of cotton was growing the cotton gin was created. The cotton gin was a machine that got the seeds out of cotton efficiently and effectively. It was blades that pushed out the seeds for softer and seedless cotton. This made production faster and made the cotton softer and cleaner! 

People thought slavery was "declining" in the late 18th century because slaves were being freed and escaping. But that was not the case slavery was actually increasing, "Between 1792, when Whitney invented the cotton gin, and 1794, the price of slaves doubled. By 1825, field hands, who had brought $500 apiece in 1794, were worth $1,500. As the price of slaves grew, so, too, did their numbers. During the first decade of the nineteenth century, the number of slaves in the United States rose by 33 percent; during the following decade, the slave population grew another 29 percent" this shows how slavery was increasing.