Author: jessica42

After reading George Orwell’s article titled, “Politics and the English Language” i have realized that i my writing is very terrible especially when it comes to writing in a historical approach. I have become accustomed to writing jargon in my writing and using big words to make myself sound more interesting and thinking that it would make me sound smarter. yet, i was so wrong because Orwell discusses that as a writer, i should not use big words and should use short words that will make clear sense in my writing. Orwell’s argument is that as our generation has progressed, the english language has worsen. He argues that people have been uninterested in moving forward with the english language. the other article argues about the research made by Bonniefield and Worster. i think that the authors’ argument is that making stories has become more narrative in a sense that the stories are more elaborate. i think that these two articles could be compared in that it is important to be able to write a good story but also use the proper english language. I agree with my peer @ramsescastillo03 that, “Orwell makes good points that many historians and English professors would agree with but society changes all the time and so does any language.”

The history event that I chose to do was to watch a documentary on the 32^nd president of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I watch a two-part documentary on Netflix titled “The Wheelchair President”. In my opinion, I think that former president FDR was one of the best presidents of all time. By watching this documentary, I learned the impact that he had on economic and foreign policy all while being physically disabled. It was interesting for me to see how FDR had managed to hide off his disability because he felt that it would make him look unfit to for high governmental power in the eyes of many Americans. Roosevelt was very open minded president who wanted all countries such as Russian to become a part of the nation because he believed that there was an essential good in every person. He was a man of many talents and was very good at advocating for the betterment of the people who lived in poorer conditions. Roosevelt wanted a new power that was centralized on an inclusive government that would include all nations. it was interesting to learn that Roosevelt was very quiet about his disabled condition on that he did not want anyone to know about it there are even very few pictures of Roosevelt in his wheelchair. Seeing this documentary as a historian makes me realize that the presidency before was not as explicit as it is today. Now, we can know everything about the presidential candidates even before they come president. Yet, in the past the personal life of the president could be maintained private. Overall, this documentary taught me new information about FDR from his personal life and how it differentiated from his happy and bright mind in policies.

i found the reading by Cunfer very interesting because he questions how the research of the dust bowl should have been more than just environmental but also more geographical. Cunfer argues that Worster’s research on the dust bowl was more focused on the two case studies on two small communities rather than the whole region. He discusses how the analysis of the whole region is more beneficial to understand the dust storms and the droughts. i found it interesting to see that although the GIS technology had already been invented during that time it was not largely used. the maps show how the dust storms did occur but that they were not rare because there were accounts of farmers and their families that the dust storms were of the norm. there was also a period of the dust bowl that was not studied and how it had continued through into 1879 and how it was not talked about roughly because there were no people living in the plains during this time.

i found the map of indigenous la to be very interesting because I could actually visualize the way that California had looked in the past. I also think that these graphics would be very useful in digital history classes because it would allow students to look more closely on graphs. I agree with my peer @rdaigh that said “Overall I think that a resource such as the Mapping Indigenous LA website would be a beneficial tool high school teachers and students or as a starting point for a project.”. I think graphs are very useful in history because it lets you look at the geography of a place from the past.

In Koppes article, he is making a comparison between the works of Bonnifield and Worster  discussing the impact of the Dust Bowl on the American of economy. He argues that the Dust Bowl has been scholarly researched to a minimum because it is primarily defined as a natural disaster that only resulted in economic downfalls. Koppes argues that Worster’s theory of nature as a source of capitalism led to the severe destruction of the environment. There was an increasing amount of clearing of grass in order to have more acres for farmland. He also discusses how Worster believed that the New Deal was only helpful to the farmers in the way of relief rather than reform because they were not given a new way to advance after the economic downfall.

I thought it was interesting what my peer Heaven said, “Because of the less rain fall and lack of water resources this led to new government programs.“. The dust bowl happened during the depression which was a huge loss for the agriculture industry. Koppes also compares the dust bowl to Marxisn in that the exploitation of the land was as the bourgeois exploiting the proletariat. I think that Koppes argued that the Dust bowl was an economic but also an environmental disaster and that may have been a result of overwhelming capitalism.

In chapter six, I think that Popkin argues that history has reached a new era in which everything has become more technologically advance. The advancement of history changes the ways and the types of methods that can be used. History is now able to become online history now that data is being placed in online archives. Popkin also argues that history has reached new paradigms in that science has become significantly improved into being used to analyze history. He argues that women’s history has also influenced historians way of thinking about people and the way in which they see history . It has helped relations between teachers and professors. Gender history has helped shape the world in that people could actually studied gender relations from a historical context. He argues that women history has helped change history because we can study the way in which we both men and women social, political, and cultural history.

In the T. Steinberg’s reading about the Earthquake and Fire in San Francisco of 1906, Steinberg makes the argument that people see the disaster as more of a fire than an earthquake. He argue that businessmen insisted that it was just a fire because they believed it would affect their economic growth. Capitalists feared that any talk about earthquake would make others with economic interest in California take their money elsewhere. Steinberg also argues that the insurance companies were regretful in saying that there was an earthquake because it was seen as something that they were obligated to pay. Whereas the fire, they could pay but a substantial amount of money for the damages.

By reading the Communist Manifesto I came to the realization that communism was a way to prevent the proletariat and bourgeois from battling out their differences. The bourgeois had private property and the communist manifesto aimed to diminish it because they wanted to have universal property. In the document it was also stated that the bourgeois and the proletariat were not being individualistic by having factories because they were being governed by a higher authority. The communist manifesto also included laws that would be set out for the countries which included a progressive income tax, abolition of rights of inheritance , and free education for all children in public schools. The document demonstrates how communism would be beneficial in creating uniformity within the social classes. Marx then  argues other socialist thinkers ideals and states that they are different in that the rise of the bourgeois evidently leads to their fall by the proletariat. I think that Marx was conveying that communism was going to be essential in helping the classes to unify and have equality. Communism seemed to be the way that the government should be structured so that the class structure could be fixed and people would have a better standard of living.

i think that the communist manifesto was placed so that there could be just one leader and that the other sub leaders of different social groups could break up their groups an be just one group. As @ngojoseph said, “And if Marx never developed this ideology, important communist nations would not have had a platform to revolutionize upon such as the Soviet Union and China.” i think that without this communist manifesto, communism would not have been known today or perhaps it would have been by another country.

From the article I have learned that the book written by Larson is a very good book that provides a lot of facts and evidence about the Galveston natural disaster. His book provides readers with a lot of narratives from people who were in this horrible event. I think the way in which Larson wrote about the brothers, Isaac and Joseph, provides vivid imagery on how there may have been a lot of rivalry between them since they both were meteorologists. The book shows specific details about the occurrences during the floods and the aftermath of the disaster. As my peer @jessicak wrote, “The Galveston hurricane shows that humans and technology has its limitations”. The book describes how nature is clearly much more powerful than society in strength to destroy anything and anyone that gets in its path.

The argument in this article comes from Lew Fincher because he argues that Larson is in a way exaggerating that Isaac was the hero and how it is only because of him that people were saved. Fincher argues that Larson sites more about Larson in ways that make it seem like he was the one who did it all. Fincher argument also centers around how he thinks that Isaac had full responsibility to alert the people of the town because he knew about the weather conditions of that day. Fincher argues that Larson wrote the book by making Isaac seen as the only hero. Yet it is ironic Fincher says that it is a good book when he seems to not like it at all.

In chapters four through six I found Larson’s style of writing to be very descriptive and vivid. Larson’s style of writing provides the readers with real accounts about people in the this devastating natural disaster. His writing conveys sorrow and sadness because it is very unimaginable to even think about what these people actually went through. As @armando35 said, “Larson focused more on the people of Galveston and the way they were dealing with the aftermath.”. These chapters are mostly about the men, women, and children and the ways in which they tried to survive the horrific winds and the floods. The destruction of property was not even close to being equivalent to the amount of people that died. I found it quite gruesome how many people who were trying to avoid debris would also see the abundant amount of corpses pass by through the waters.

I think that what was gained from Larson’s style of writing was how a man versus nature is a battle in which inevitably nature will always win. His writing shows how a natural disaster could rapidly and efficiently destroy a society within minutes. His writing conveys evidence of primary sources from people who were in this disaster.  His writing also shows how natural disasters occur at any given rate and even if people have created safe shelters they could still be unprepared. In one personal account, from the orphanage, it states that, “Sister Camillus had hoped the clothesline would save the children, but it was the clothesline, rescuers saw, that caused so many to die, tangling them in submerged wreckage.”(Larson, 213).

I think that what is lost from Larson’s style of writing is how there wasn’t details on how other people from different communities found out about this disaster. I think that not having information on how the rescuers came to Galveston leaves readers, like myself, left to think about how no one from the other stations of the weather bureau came to find out why no one was responding to them.

The reading by Carl Smith discusses how the Chicago fire was in a sense a way that the society was rejuvenated from their wrongful doings. The two major factors that were affected by the fires were the way religion was and how it affected the different social classes. The Protestants and people from the middle class saw the fires as God’s punishment to Chicago’a wrongdoings and that the fire clean the city out from the people’s sins. A lot of people in Chicago saw the fires as a good thing because they believed that it was a religious disaster. Smith makes a note that,”The effort to interpret the fire as an act of purification was derived from a longstanding concern— especially on the part of the “old settler” generation that had arrived around the time of the city’s incorporation in 1837…” (Smith, 131). As my peer Matthew said,People of all ages and sexes took part in criminal practices such as looting abandoned buildings, some even resorted to murder.The fires could be seen as bad because the prisoners were let out because it was seen immorally wrong to leave them in the jail cells to burn. The fires were very significant for the people of Chicago because they saw it as a way of erasing the past and making a better future for them economically and socially.

The aid that the city of Chicago was receiving symbolized that every one across the nation was feeling their sorrow and gave them goods and services that would benefit all of their population. Smith uses primary sources as a way to demonstrate vivid descriptions of how the fires affected all people of different social classes. His use of personal narratives including songs and newspaper articles provide details about the people who witnessed the fires first-hand.