Poetry and National History Day -Week 6

Over the past week or so in American Studies, we didn't learn much to reflect on, because of the no school days and the National History Day project. I chose John D. Rockefeller for the person for the project. I had chosen him because I was interested on his huge influence on the oil industry and how he had become the richest man in the United States, and still is the richest man ever since inflation had made his worth even more. But since there isn't much to talk about,, I've decided to reflect on our poetry presentation and unit. I found the poetry unit thus far pretty interesting. We studied lots of poems by different authors, such as Edgar Allen Poe and Emily Dickinson. I found that I enjoyed Poe's poems better because there seemed to be a story behind each poem. But for the poetry presentation, I chose to do a poem by Emily Dickinson because she had many literary devices, and they seemed easier and better to analyze. I felt that the presentation went pretty well, but there could've been some things I could have added to make it even better. My poem had dealt with fame and corruption of fame. It was a pretty interesting poem

Test and Rebuilding- Week 5

In the past week for American Studies, we took our Unit 1 test and studied the rebuilding of America after the Civil War. I found the test somewhat easy and I felt I knew all the material that was covered. The review session the class before helped a lot with the formats for the compare and contrast portion, and the OPVL portion. I feel that the best part of the test for me were the OPVL and question portions, and the compare and contrast I could've done a bit better and improved my answer to make it more efficient and answer the question better. For the second half of the week, we continued on the history of America and studied the United States and its status after the Civil War. We learned that from that period to around the 1920's, the US was in a severe economic recession, which I found surprising because I had previously thought that time period had somewhat neutral economic standings up until World War I and the Great Depression soon afterwards. We had also learned that a new method, called sharecropping, had replaced plantation systems since slavery was now abolished.Sharecropping was when a landowner rented out his land and in exchange, expected some crops back. This method was almost as bad as slavery since most people couldn't catch up on their due crops. I think the plantation system could've worked better but they would've needed a substitute for the slaves

The Civil War- Week 4

For the previous week in American Studies, we talked more about the United States as it progressed through the 1800's. We discussed America, and the different territories, and how they changed into states as time progressed. We had a big discussion on the Civil War, and the different events that took place to launch it into effect. We talked about the crumbling nation after James Buchanan had left it, and when Abraham Lincoln took office, 7 states had seceded from the Union, prompting Lincoln to start the Civil War, the bloodiest battle in American history. The war had killed 750,000 Americans. In class we discussed two major battles in the Civil War. The Battle of Gettysburg, and the Battle of Cold Harbor. We talked about them in great detail and watched historical representations and reenactments of the battles. We talked about the importance of the location of Gettysburg, and we analyzed some of the battle plans for both sides, I found it interesting how each side planned their attacks and the outcomes of each individual attack and it was helpful to see a visual representation. We also looked into another document, a court case between a slave and the government, The case was not on the issue Dred Scott (a free slave) had brought up, but whether or not Africans had the right to bring cases to court. I found the case extremely interesting, and saw how oppressed blacks truly were. We created an OPVL on the document, which helped me understand the text even more because of the further analyzation.