The Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing But…Lies
Textbooks in today’s schools still tell the same story that has been handed down from generation to generation. Every year children dress up and put on plays about the famous story of the first Thanksgiving. No one knows the truth though or at least people pretend to not know the embarrassing truth of our “founding fathers.” Textbooks today give the candy coated version of good saintly Englishmen come to a better world and find good neighbors willing to help in their time of need.
As the story goes, the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth by “accident” and found the Indians who taught the Pilgrims how to plant and grow food. Because of the Indians generosity, the Pilgrims were able to live through winter. Upon the first harvest following the harsh winter, the Pilgrims and Indians sat down together for a grand Thanksgiving feast. Most of the textbooks found in schools today either portray this version of the founding of the United States or they tend to just gloss over it and try to leave it out all together. For the authors of the textbooks know that if the students found out the real truth there would be nothing left of nationalism. For most textbooks leave out the early settlers such as the Spanish and the Dutch. These civilizations settled America long before the Pilgrims arrived and with these civilizations came what was to make it easy for the Pilgrims to settle in America – disease.
Most of the Native Americans had never but subjected to diseases much less the diseases Europeans brought with them. Killing off most of the Natives, the diseases made it easy for the English to come and take over the land. For the English seemed immune to the “plague” that was sweeping the New World and this was the will of God, punishing the Natives so the English could settle. Therefore, when the Pilgrims first arrived at Plymouth, the few Indians that were there were helping only to gain security, for their tribes had become very weakened. It is thought that the land was completely vacated and the Pilgrims only found cleared paths and flowing streams perfect for a settlement.
The Pilgrims did have help though from one Indian named Squanto who is said to have been a slave in Spain and had escaped back to Massachusetts only to find his family dead.
Nathaniel Philbrick tells the story of the Pilgrims, beginning with them breaking away from the Church of England, emigrating to Holland, and eventually to America on the Mayflower. He talks about the relationship they had with the "Strangers" or nonbelievers that accompanied them on their adventure. He tells stories about disease, death, deception, and depression. I had never thought about it, but you know some of those people had to be suffering from depression. He tells of joys but mostly of hardships and as he describes some of the first meetings with the Native Americans. His description of the first Thanksgiving is not the same as the pictures I have seen all of my life.
America is a nation that is often glorified in textbooks as a nation of freedom, yet history shows a different, more radical viewpoint. In Howard Zinn’s A People's History of the United States, we take a look at American history through a different lens, one that is not focused on glorifying our history, but giving us history through the eyes of the people. “This is a nation of inconsistencies”, as so eloquently put by Mary Elizabeth Lease highlights a nation of people who exploited and sought to keep down those who they saw as inferior, reminding us of more than just one view on a nation’s history, especially from people and a gender who have not had an easy ride. In some respects, we can attribute the founding of America and all its subsequent impacts to Christopher Columbus. Columbus, a hero in the United States, has his own holiday and we view him as the one who paved the way for America to be colonized.
Settling into the “New World” was a burden on not only the Pilgrims, but on the adapting Natives as well. In “The Mayflower and the Pilgrims’ New World,” Nathaniel Philbrick writes about much of the Pilgrims history arguing that the basic story does not illustrate the complexity of the relationship between the Native Americans and the Pilgrims. Although, the Pilgrims struggled in the beginning, much of the burden was lifted by the help of the Natives. However, the breaking of the alliance, that aided the Pilgrims in their first years, causes me to point fingers towards the Pilgrims. The Pilgrims’ disrespectful, threatening, and harsh manner puts them to blame for the break down on the good relations between the Natives and the Pilgrims.
Drunk driving accidents are the number one killer of adolescents (Teenagers and peer pressures. (n.d.). Retrieved November 1, 2013, from). Mixing drinking while driving can be deadly. Teenage drunk driving accidents not only affect the person drinking while driving, but it also can kill or harm others (Alcohol problems and solutions. (n.d.). Retrieved November 1, 2013, from) (Teen drinking and driving. (n.d.). Retrieved November 1, 2013, from) . Every single accident provoked by drinking and driving could have been prevented. If underage drinking is illegal, why do young people do it ? Teenagers usually are influenced by their elders (Alcohol problems and solutions. (n.d.). Retrieved November 1, 2013, from). In the United States, one out of ten 12 through 14 year olds have tried alcohol and continue to do so on a regular basis . There is a more than fifty percent of probability that young adults that have tried alcohol at a younger age may become alcoholics in the near future (Alcohol fatalities. (n.d.). Retrieved November 1, 2013, from). So, why do teenagers take so many risks with their health and behind the wheel? The answer is simple teen drivers tend to think they are invincible and more needs to be done to educate teens on the dangers of drinking and driving.
...y reasons why this could have occurred, the most probable one is that Spielberg needed to lengthen Dick’s short story and alter it slightly in order to make it more lengthy and meaningful to his target early 21st Century audience. Lastly, I personally preferred the original version of the story after seeing the film; however, after being given the chance to actually listen to Spielberg’s reasoning behind some of the things he did in his version of the story, the movie adaptation became more intriguing and meaningful to me than it had previously been.
Invisible Man is a story told through the eyes of the narrator, a Black man struggling in a White culture. The narrative starts during his college days where he works hard and earns respect from the administration. Dr. Bledsoe, the prominent Black administrator of his school, becomes his mentor. Dr. Bledsoe has achieved success in the White culture which becomes the goals which the narrator seeks to achieve. The narrator's hard work culminates in him being given the privilege of taking Mr. Norton, a White benefactor to the school, on a car ride around the college area. After much persuasion and against his better judgement, the narrator takes Mr. Norton to a run down Black neighborhood. When Dr. Bledsoe found out about the trip the narrator was kicked out of school because he showed Mr. Norton anything less than the ideal Black man. The narrator is shattered, by having the person he idealizes turn on him. Immediately, he travels to New York where he starts his life anew. He joins the Brotherhood, a group striving for the betterment of the Black race, an ideal he reveres. Upon arrival in the Brotherhood, he meets Brother Tarp and Brother Tod Clifton who give him a chain link and a paper doll, respectively. I choose to write about these items because they are symbolic of his struggle in his community fighting for the black people and of his struggle within himself searching for identity.
1. Define majority group. Describe specifically how the three victims and their communities represent a minority.
And what about the Native Americans? Most people know that they helped the Pilgrims grow crops and also taught them how to survive on this new land, but what about the Native Americans? Who taught them? They depended on their own self-reliance, judgement, or resources. They had no one to tell them which berries were good and which were poisonous, no one taught them how to kill an animal and prepare it to cook. They taught and relied on themselves.
Invisible Man is full of symbols that reinforce the oppressive power of white society. The single ideology he lived by for the majority of the novel kept him from reaching out and attaining true identity. Every black person he encountered was influenced by the marionette metaphor and forced to abide by it in order to gain any semblance of power they thought they had. In the end the Invisible Man slinks back into the underground, where he cannot be controlled, and his thoughts can be unbridled and free from the white man's mold of black society.
In the novel, The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, the narrator of the story, like Siddhartha and Antonius Blok, is on a journey, but he is searching to find himself. This is interesting because the narrator is looking for himself and is not given a name in the book. Like many black people, the narrator of the story faces persecution because of the color of his skin. The journey that the narrator takes has him as a college student as well as a part of the Brotherhood in Harlem. By the end of the book, the narrator decides to hide himself in a cellar, thinking of ways he can get back at the white people. However, in the novel, the man learns that education is very important, he realizes the meaning of his grandfather’s advice, and he sees the importance of his “invisibility.” Through this knowledge that he gains, the narrator gains more of an identity.
In fact, according to Atrocities Against Native Americans, they said that the diseases spread because of the Europeans, cleared out an estimated 90% of the Native American population. Being from different areas, you can probably assume that the immunity of the Native Americans is pretty low against pathogens that came from a different area. Most of them got sick from the animals and ended up with diseases such as the whooping cough, scarlet fever, measles, influenza type B & more. If the Europeans never came over to their land, they wouldn't have gotten so
The most hotly debated of which has been the population of the Native American 's from the time of Columbus through the Revolutionary War. According to our readings of Alfred Crosby 's paper on the “Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America”, he offers the following reasoning behind the debate. “Unfortunately, the documentation of these epidemics, as of the many others of the period, is slight, usually hearsay, sometimes dated years after the events described, and often colored by emotion. Later in his paper, Crosby details how the Native American 's continued to suffer from diseases during the same time that the new settlement of Plymouth was struggling to survive and well into the 19th century. While the exact population of the Native American 's will never be known or completely agreed upon, the common message from all parties is that as more and more Europeans arrived, the Natives suffered and their population decreased. Neal Salisbury, Professor of History at Smith College, agrees with Crosby and our dominant view concerning the impact of diseases afflicting the Native Americans during the Colonial period. He also argues that the “Puritan Colonists were also aware of how the diseases were affecting the tribal populations (Salisbury pg.
In the early days of English settlement in the American colonies, the Indian-European relationship of each area was the determining factor in the survival of the newly established colonies. By working together and exchanging methods of food production and survival, an English colony could maintain its population and continue to support the arrival of new settlers. However, a colony that had trouble maintaining ties with their Indian neighbors had a tough time attracting settlers and adapting to their environment. The role of the Indian helping the white man in North America played an important part in the survival of the American colonies. In the Jamestown colony, very few people survived the disease and sickness which accompanied the low, swampy landscape. In their attempt to survive, they raided Indian villages in search of food and kidnap natives. Because they didn’t see Indians as equal in status, the Jamestown colony’s growth was limited. In fact, as the winter of 1609-1610 arrived, the colony was barricaded by Indians who killed off the wild animals of the woods, leaving virtually nothing for the settlers. The result: fewer than 60 people remained when the next English ship arrived the following year. The reason the Virginia settlement ended up surviving was because of the disease the white man exposed the natives to during contact. Weakening the Indian population was the only way the Jamestown population could grow. Things were a bit different in the northern colonies...
There are quite a few different minority groups in today’s society. Minority groups are all unique in there own way. With groups rapidly growing as well as groups decreasing in size minority groups go through change in areas like discrimination, society, and within the criminal justice system. Discrimination, society, and within the criminal justice system are all unique to different minority groups in their own ways, but most of them all have things in common as well.
...e then affected by hormones which cause the child to begin questioning their assigned gender. Because intersex children are able to understand this process of gender identity as an adolescent, it is selfish of the parent to be assigning the gender of their child. However, there are more effective solutions for both the parents and the child. Within the United States, New Jersey recently passed a new bill that “would grant citizens the right to change the gender on their birth certificate without having gender-reassessment surgery” (Greenhouse). Solutions have also gone beyond the United States. In November of 2013, Germany allowed a “third gender designation: X, for…intersex” (Greenhouse). This bill would then start to refrain doctors from having the parents to force choosing the gender of the child and having the child undergo surgery before their adolescent years.