Take Me Through History

I felt very frustrated when we began talking about the Atlantic Slave Trade. I believe that the colonizers had no right to force the African Americans to work for the Europeans without paying them.  They took advantage of the African Americans human rights and dehumanized them in doing so. It is sad to see that that portion of society was so oppressed, and that same oppression is still slightly present in daily life today.  Europeans were the ones that forced people into confined spaces and failed to keep them fed and healthy. Instead they starved them and kept them below deck to sit among the rats with no space to move as they sat shoulder to shoulder with another individual at both side of them. This mistreatment, however, seems to have been forgotten in present day. Instead, our new president has made it his job to talk down about minority groups (in which African Americans are a part of) and make those groups look like criminals.  I think the most shocking ...

During class we discussed the spread of European ideology into the Americas, and how this spread helped the Europeans rationalize the oppression of Native Americans. I could not help but feel extremely frustrated as we continued our conversation. Our society today places a huge emphasis on the idea of African slavery and tend to make there disgust with the matter very clear, but what they fail to mention is that Native Americans were also enslaved. The enslavement of the Native Americans was easily achieved due to the "European Advantage". The Europeans were way more advanced in every aspect than the Native American during the first interaction that they had together. The European explorers had weapons, advanced agriculture, will to conquer, and immunity to behavior. All these aspects were not present in Native American society. Following this was the "Great Dying". This event changed my feeling of frustration into sadness. I could not believe that 90-95% of Nat...

January 14, 2018 I found it surprising to read that in the early modern period society was far from being what is considered modern today. Many of the power relationships were still intact. The Europeans were still run by a monarchy and china was still ruled by a dynasty. When people think of this idea of modernism they commonly associate it with the concepts of change. In my mind, "modern" is seen as women gaining equal rights, slavery being demolished, the power of democracy, and technological discoveries. These ideas are parts of the modern period, but actually only started pretty recently on the timeline.  No one stops to realize that none of the things we have now would have been possible without the creation of settlements, the renaissance period, or even the scientific revolution. People were pushing boundaries and discovering things on their own rather than listening to what was said to be known as true. They separated religious belief from scientific facts...