Evita's Global Blog

African Independence

2009-05-12T07:10:00.000-07:00

African Independence refers to a time period from 1955 to 1975 when many African nations gained their independence from European countries that previously held political power over them. When the African colonies became nations of their own, they underwent many changes. Citizens of Africa were free to enroll in college, so many young men became educated and a steady middle class began to emerge. When Europe was controlling the African colonies, they were mostly there for the natural resources that come from African land. In turn, when they gained their independence, they were able to use their own resources, make their own merchandise, and sell it to their own people for more fair prices than the Europeans gave.

Film Lesson: "The Right Stuff"

2009-04-08T07:08:00.000-07:00

The Right Stuff is a 1982 production about the competition between the US and the USSR during the time of the Cold War. The US and Russia were allies during WWII, but when that war ended, they went back to hating each other - democrats against communists. There was constant competition between the two nations.

The US was the first country with nuclear weapons, but the USSR was far ahead of the US in terms of space travel. US officials were shocked when they discovered that Russia had been first to send a satellite into space, and afraid that they would be able to drop nuclear bombs from their satellite location. The United States decided they would have to get ahead, so they spent loads of money, time, and energy on building up their space program. However, Russia sent a man into space first -- around the same time that the US sent up a monkey. In the end, the United States ended up sending a man to land on the moon, and we made it before Russia did.

NATO and The Warsaw Pact

2009-04-06T07:12:00.000-07:00

NATO is an organization compiled of countries located in North America and Europe. The name stands for North Atlantic Treaty Organization. NATO was formed because the countries involved wanted a mutual defense alliance so that if one of them were attacked all of the other countries in NATO would come to their aide. NATO was officially established on April 4, 1949.

The Warsaw Pact was an organization of communist states in Central and Eastern Europe. The Treaty was signed in Warsaw, Poland on May 14, 1955, six years after NATO was established. It was formed with the purpose of becoming another mutual defense alliance, but when communism fell, the need for military alliances diminished.

Schindler's List

2009-03-27T07:20:00.000-07:00

Schindler's List is a very powerful film that illustrates the Holocaust from beginning to end. The start of the war is shown--when Jews were put into ghettos, banned from certain commodities, and overall treated differently than other religions, and very unfairly. Then the transition into the concentration camps is shown. Thousands of people are crowded into small trains and taken against their will to a foreign place, and are separated from their families. We see the hardships that take place all throughout World War II, until the very end, when the Russians invade and finally win, and the Jews and other prisoners are liberated from the captivity of the Nazis.

For me as a viewer, the scene that struck me the most powerfully was when the thousands of dead bodies were shown, naked and horribly thin, being thrown, carried, and shoved around carelessly and without any remorse.

Night and Fog

2009-03-26T07:13:00.000-07:00

Night and Fog is a documentary film released in 1995 about the Nazi concentration camps. Compiled mostly of video clips straight from World War II, it truly captures the horror of World War II. I was shocked to see the actual videos that the Nazis filmed themselves of such terrible things that occurred at the camps. It was like the prisoners of the concentration camps were not real people to the Nazis - they carried around their lifeless skeletons and threw them into massive ditches in the ground with ease. The victims were taken from their hometowns and stuffed into trains and driven to unknown destinations for days with almost no air to breathe, water to drink, or even the smallest bits of bread to satisfy their hunger. Most of them died of suffocation, hunger, or thirst on the way to the camps, and the ones that survived had to go through selection. Selection was based on who was fit enough to do slave labor for the Nazis, and more people were killed than passed through to live in the horrible conditions of the concentration camps and do work for free. All in all, the movie was very hard to watch, but was very eye-opening to the truth of the Holocaust. In my opinion, Night and Fog was able to portray the Holocaust better than Schindler's List because there were no paid actors trying to recreate it - it was real footage and we knew that there was no exaggeration.

Film Lesson: Mountains of the Moon

2008-12-14T20:47:00.000-08:00

Mountains of the Moon is a film based on the discovery of the source of the Nile River - a lake now known as Lake Victoria. In the film, John Speke and Richard Burton face many hardships as they travel up the river in search of the source of the great river. On their first voyage, they must stop and return halfway through because they are unprepared. Burton takes a spear through the face at one point, an example of how they were treated by the native African people, who saw them as unwelcome intruders, which technically, they were.

Upon Speke and Burton's 'discovery' of the source of the Nile, it was named Lake Victoria, a tribute to the Queen that ruled England at the time. It's strange that the lake, the third largest in the world, would still be name after an English queen after all this time, especially since it is located in the middle of Africa.

The English conquerors were able to invade and take over so much of Africa so easily because of their technological advances, primarily guns and compasses, as well as other essential tools. The African natives fought only with their primitive weapons, such as bows and arrows and spears, which were obviously no match against machine guns.

Karl Marx and Communism

2008-12-14T18:59:00.000-08:00

Karl Marx created communism to replace the time's current capitalistic society, which consisted of two parts - the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, or the workers who sold their labor to whoever was willing to pay them the most, and the factory owners who offered jobs and paid workers. Of course, the proletariat greatly outnumbered the bourgeoisie, and because of this Marx believed that if the workers united, they obviously would be able to overthrow the landlords.

Marx and a friend who shared his beliefs, Friedrich Engels, distributed pamphlets that introduced the public to their idea of communist society. Many agreed with the idea of communism, and joined Marx and Friedrich in the journey to a "perfect society".

Marx and Engels' idea of a perfect society was one in which everybody lives equally, is paid the same amount of money, and where social classes and private ownership don't exist. Everything belongs to the government, and workers share the wealth, it being distributed according to each person's ability and needs.

Karl Marx and the Industrial Revolution

2008-12-14T17:36:00.000-08:00

Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, political economist, sociologist, humanist, political theorist, and revolutionary who created the political system known as communism. Marx focused on improving the conditions that came about as consequences of the Industrial Revolution -- he was greatly opposed to the theme of the Industrial Revolution and thought it was dehumanizing to workers. Marx predicted that capitalism would fail just as feudalism had, that the poor and rich would just become more so, and that the large companies would all eventually buy out the smaller ones and become monopolies.

After seeing how rough and harsh the factory conditions were all over Europe, Marx concluded that the workers should control workspaces, rather than landlords. He urged "the workers of the world" to unite and start a worldwide revolution.

The Opium Wars

2008-12-10T06:42:00.000-08:00

From 1839 to 1842, China fought against Britain in what we now call "The Opium Wars". When British imperialism reached India, the Europeans found many new and profitable natural resources on the lands, including poppies, a flower from which many very powerful drugs can be extracted. These drugs include some well known substances that are used, legally or illegally, still today, such as morphine, heroin, and codein. Poppy seeds also come from poppies.

When the China was invaded, the British introduced the native people to opium, one of the drugs made from the juice of poppy seeds. It became popular as the drug could treat dysentery, cholera, and diarrhea. Soon, the idea that opium could be mixed with tobacco and smoked was introduced, and very rapidly people became addicted to the drug.

Opium began to cause problems for the Chinese people, and officials demanded for the drug to be removed from the available trades. However, of course, some of China's government officials were corrupt and accepted bribes from the British officials, and contributed to the illegal drug trade. It took very long for something to be done, but finally, in 1839, Lin traveled to Canton, found an Opium warehouse, and publicly destroyed more than 20,000 chests of opium by mixing them with salt and lemon before throwing them into the ocean.

Robespierre and the Reign of Terror

2008-10-10T06:42:00.000-07:00

The Reign of Terror was a period of chaos in France that lasted less than a year and occured fifteen months after the French Revolution. France was in desperate need of a stable government and the Jacobins took advantage of this vulnerability. They began a movement where anyone who disagreed with them would be beheaded. The beheadings were performed in the middle of the town square and the local people would come to watch, like a show; the instrument that was used is called a Guillotine. Record of the deaths were not kept, or were not accurate, but it is estimated that the number of deaths was between 16,000 and 40,000.

On September 6th, 1973, the French created the Commitee of Public Safety, dominated by Maximillion Robespierre, a man who wanted to completely wipe out the idea of monarchy. He took kings, queens, and all monarchesque symbols off of all household items, such as a deck of cards. He was dictator during the Reign of Terror and had a group called the Girondins carry out the executions.

The French Revolution

2008-09-22T06:35:00.001-07:00

The French Revolution was a period in France where the citizens finally got fed up of the unfairness of their government and revolted. There were a number of reasons that the people of France were led to revolt; firstly, they had been inspired by the recent American Revolution, secondly, France was having very serious economic problems (lower classes were paying over 50% of their income in taxes, which wealthy nobles were paying none at all), and thirdly, citizens of France felt that Louis XVI was a weak king, and they no longer wished to be ruled over by someone as incompetent as him.

Questions:

1. Many people in France were critical of the King, the Clergy, and the Nobles because while the Clergy and Nobles were much wealthier and better off than the peasants, they paid no taxes. Peasants paid over 50% of their income to the government that mistreated them! The third estate was also angry that they had practically no say in anything that happened during voting -- each estate was allowed one vote, so even though peasants made up about 97% of the population, their vote was always overruled by the other two estates.

2. A French peasant in 1789 had a lot to be angry about. For example, they must not have liked paying over 50% of their income to the icompetent king, or having nearly no food to feed to their families while the King, Nobles, and the Clergy were having feasts every night.

3. The point the cartoonist was trying to deliver through his art was that the higher estates in France were a burden to the peasants. They sailed through life with ease and luxury and lived off of the taxes the the poor paid to them.

4. The author of the source describe peasant life as a horrible time. They hardly had anything to live off of to start with, let alone after they had to pay all their dues to the King.

5. The poor people in France resented the rich because they did not have to work half as hard as the peasants, yet their income was a hundred times of that of the peasants.

John Locke and the Enlightenment

2008-09-22T06:35:00.000-07:00

The Enlightenment was a time of new thinking and opporunities for the people of Europe, especially France, where the most Enlightenment activity took place. New governments were thought up by the people themselves, and citizens planned to overthrow the current King of France, King Louis XVI (the sixteenth).

John Locke was a very important and influential Enlightenment thinker. His modern view of modern nature included the beliefs that everyone was born equal, everyone should be free, and that everyone had a natural ability to rule themselves, and should never be under the rule of a monarch. He worked hard to make these ideas known and notions possible.

John Locke's ideas heavily influenced Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. Jefferson used Locke's ideas of freedom and equality. Jefferson wrote about three unalienable rights: Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

According to the Declaration of Independence, the government comes from and gets it power from the people. If the people are not happy with their government, or they do not feel safe, they have the right to overthrow it, abolish it, or alter it, and to institute a new government.

Copernicus and the Trial of Galileo

2008-09-12T06:44:00.000-07:00

There have probably been many beliefs and theories as to how the universe is made up, especially before satellites, spaceships, and other instruments that have allowed us to see outside of our earth. The two main theories are known as 'heliocentricism', the belief that the planets, including the earth, all revolve around the sun, and 'ethnocentricism', the belief that the others planets, the sun, the moon, and the stars all revolved around the planet earth.

Ethnocentricism came about first. People did not have the tools to see what the universe was actually like, so they decided, since all they were familiar with was the earth, that everything else revolved around them. For hundreds of years this was what most believed and what schoolchildren were taught.

Heliocentricism was brought about much later. New thinkers and scientists started to think logically about life and the world. During the Scientific Revolution, scientists revisited old ideas and updated them constantly with new knowledge. The clergy opposed these new theories, but many people began to believe them and the church slowly began to lose some power.

Galileo brought forth the new study that the sun was the center of the universe, and not the earth, as the church, clergy, and much of society believed. He was taken to trial for opposing the church and its beliefs. Galileo was forced to kneel in front the inquisition and recite his beliefs regarding the planetary systems. As a punishment, Galileo was condemned to life imprisonment.

The Scientific Revolution & Method

2008-09-11T06:51:00.000-07:00

The Scientific Revolution was a period that began around 1500. Starting then, new ideas and theories began to surface and were introduced all over Europe, proving old beliefs wrong, and also answering some previously unanswered questions.

Before the 1500s, about half of all people looked to the Bible for answers to their questions, while the other half got their ideas from Aristotle and other Greek scientists. Ancient Greeks, as well as Christianity, taught that everything in the universe, including the sun and all of the other planets, revolved around us, the earth. During the Scientific Revolution, it was discovered that that is not so.

Other beliefs were also disproven, such as the theory, introduced again by Aristotle, that stated that heavier objects will fall faster than light objects. In the late 1500s, a young Italian scientist named Galileo conducted an experiment that would prove that objects of different weights fall at the same speed.

The Scientific Method is a set of four steps that state how to properly conduct a scientific experiment. The four steps are observation, formulation of a hypothesis, use of the hypothesis to predict the outcome of the experiment, and lastly, performance of experimental tests to either prove or disprove your original hypothesis.

Evolution vs. Creationism

2008-09-05T06:53:00.000-07:00

Evolution and Creationism are two different persuasions pertaining to the beginning and course of life. While evolution is a scientific theory, creationism is a religious belief.

Evolution is mainly linked with Charles Darwin, and some even refer to 'Darwin' as the theory, rather than the proper name, evolution. The belief behind evolution is that the world began with simple organisms that slowly evolved (hence the name). These organisms began as very simple creatures, over time gaining genetic mutations to their DNA. Each genetic mutation took about a generation, and would occur when a certain attribute was necessary for the organism to survive in its current environment. However, there were many scientifically proven flaws in this argument, that were not familiar to people of Darwin's time.

Creationism is the religious belief that a greater being created life. This belief is solely based on faith, not scientific proof. Stories of how each animal came to be what it is, why humans have some of the traits that they do, and other concepts have been passed down for thousands of years, all contributing to various religious bibles.

I myself am not sure what I believe in, but I guess it's a little mix of both of these theories, and maybe some beliefs I threw in myself or heard from other sources. I actually don't question life or the world; it's pretty pointless as I guess no one will ever know exactly. I don't think it's very important how we came to be, as long as we're here now.