July 24, 2008

In class today, we briefly discussed governor Kathleen Sebelius, and I decided to find out more about her. Kathleen Sebelius was originally named Kathleen Gillian and was raised catholic in Cincinnati, Ohio. She didn’t live in Kansas till 1974. She was a representative in the Kansas Legislature and eight years as insurance commissioner then was elected governor. Her father was a governor of Ohio, making her the first father and daughter governor pair ever. Her husband is K. Gary Sebelius and is a federal magistrate judge. The couple has two sons, one is a law student and the other a design student.

She was in the Kansas House of Representatives in 1986. Her winning state insurance commissioner was the first time a Democrat won in Kansas in over 100 years. Yay Democrats! She won against a Republican, Tim Shallenburger in the 2002 election. She is thought of as one of the most popular governors in the country.

In the governer’s personal column, she states, “This week I have the honor to promote Kansas’ growing economy and our role in the global aerospace market at the Farnborough Air Show in England.” She goes further on to praise Kansas for continuing to set records in exports, and for making over 50 percent of the airplanes that are flown in the world! She assure’s that we’ll remain leaders in this field by doing things like attending the Farnborough Air show.

As I browsed through her website, I found her to be a very busy woman! In fact, she last updated her website today the 24^th! In her biography I found her core concerns for Kansas very admirable. One can tell she has the greater good of Kansas in mind as she is concerned with our economy and creating jobs, children’s education, our families and communities, and improving our health care and renewable energy assets.  I always love seeing women holding positions of power.  It really shows how much progress we’ve made since womens suffrage.

Source: (Kathleene Sebelius’ website) http://www.governor.ks.gov/default.htm

Ingorance! July 20, 2008

 

I came across the letter shown above, and found it to be a good example of how some Kansan’s viewed the entire Brown vs. Board of Education case.  The letter is 8 pages long, and the first page is what is shown above.  Basically, this is a letter of appeal by J. J. Cummings to the state attorney general Harold Fatzer to not desegregate public schools.  Cummings argues that it is huge violation to his rights to be forced to live and learn with people of a different race. 

In the letter he says, “I deeply believe the colored man is happiest among his own people.”  Just this one line illustrates the belief that just because we have different skin color, we are not all equal as humans. 

Similarly, toward the end of the letter he states that, “The minorities enjoy the liberties and many freedoms, because of the generosity of the majorities, and cannot be placed up in special favor causing impositions upon the liberties in which we all desire.” This just shows how Cummings and many others truly believed that their lives were worsened by having to desegregate and “share” everything with other fellow Americans because of their skin color.

 

To everyday people this seems incredibly silly, but he was definitely not alone in his racist attitude.  I like to think that I would not be racist if I had lived during that time, but the truth is I just don’t know.  I look up to my parents more than anyone, and believe everything they tell me.  No matter how stupid it was, those people were taught from a young age that African Americans were inferior to them. 

Although racism is still very apparent in our society today, it is so much better than how it used to be, and is getting better every day.  Looking at letters like this one makes me ashamed to have ancestors so ignorant, but at the same time I feel lucky to be born at a time where equality among gender and all races is something that I’ve been taught to believe in my whole life.

 

Source: http://www.kansasmemory.org/item/211843 

Beth Bailey July 19, 2008

 

After reading Sex in the Heartland, I wanted to find out more about the author, Beth Bailey.  I enjoyed her book and thought she did a great job at writing about history without making it boring.  After browsing around on the internet I found that she also wrote another book called, From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in 20th century America. 

 

After reading short reviews about this book, I got a good idea of what the book covers.  Basically, Bailey gives a detailed account of the evolution of dating, or “courting”, through the 20^th century.  Bailey discusses the things that changed social behaviors and conventions, one of them being the car and the new windows it opened in dating.  This book obviously contains very different information than Sex in the Heartland, but the two are similar in that they both discuss the changes in sexuality in the 20^th century. 

 

After reading some of the different quotes from the book, I found this one to be a good clip to get the reader interested, “Dating moved courtship into the public world, relocating it from family parlors and community events to restaurants, theaters, and dance halls. At the same time, it removed couples from the implied supervision of the private sphere— from the watchful eyes of family and local community— to the anonymity of the public sphere.”

  

I looked further in the book by previewing it on this website: http://books.google.com/books?id=fqVre9_N2gkC.  And in the preview I noticed that Bailey’s writing is very clear, and the information is quite fascinating.  It’s funny to me to think about how dating was so different back then, especially when I get first hand accounts from my parents!  I could definitely see myself reading and enjoying this book, just as I did with Sex in the Heartland.

My Grandpa’s Dust Bowl Experience July 10, 2008

 

          While learning about the Dust Bowl in our selected reading, I began to wonder about my own grandparents and where they were during all of this, so I asked my parents.  My father’s dad came to the United States in 1928 from Sweden.  He was only 8 when he came over and spoke no English!  Although he has told me many stories of his childhood, they do not pertain to the rest of my blog because he grew up in New York.  My mother’s dad, however, grew up in a small town called Coffeyville, Kansas.  Coffeyville is in the southeast corner of Kansas, and from what I found, it did not get hit quite as hard by the Dust Bowl as the southwest corner.  My grandpa unfortunately could not tell me his stories himself because of his current state, but my mother and aunt told me what life was life for him in the 1930’s. 
          Kendall Jackson, my grandpa, lived in a city(name unknown) in Kansas in 1930.  When the Dust Bowl began, Ken was only 10 years old.  His family made the decision to move to a farm when the dust storms hit, so that they could grow their own food to survive.  When his family moved to the farm, they left running water and electricity.  Basically, they had to survive the hot summers, cold winters, and Dust Bowl affects with no outside help.  They had to slaughter their own food and then either salt and store it for winter or can them.  When I say “can them”, I mean exactly that.  My grandpa and his family would grow as many vegetables as they could and then pickle and can them to preserve them for winter.  Their refrigerator was a huge hole they dug in the ground and somehow kept isolated.
          One story that I found amusing was what my mom and aunt call the “snake story.”  Because they had no running water, they drank water from a well.  After drinking the water for a while, it began to taste horrible.  They went down in it and didn’t find anything at first, but soon found that there was a dead, rotting snake in the water.  Basically, their only source of water had been tainted by rotting snake carcass for days!  This is only one of the many stories of the hardships they had to endure while trying to survive on their own.   

          This story is so interesting to me because it really shows how incredibly different the life of a teenager was in the 1930’s from the life of a teenager in the 21^st century.  My grandpa and his peers weren’t concerned with “self esteem” and “expressing themselves”, he was merely concerned with getting food and shelter for him and his family.  After hearing this and many other entertaining stories of my grandpa’s childhood,  I have grown a newfound respect for him.

Iron Jawed Angels July 3, 2008

             When we were discussing the womans suffrage movement in class, it brought to mind a movie I saw a while ago.  The movie is an HBO film called Iron Jawed Angels, and it is about a group of women who fought long and hard for womens suffrage.  It stars Hilary Swank and Frances O’Connor who play the two main feminists that revolutionize the feminist movement to grant women the right to vote. 
             The film basically follows these two main feminists, Alice Paul and Lucy Burns as they fight for womens right to vote.  They first join the American Woman Sufferage Association (NAWSA) and after a while they realize that their ideas were way too radical for them.  So they end up creating their own group of activists, the National Woman’s Party (NWP).  The movie clearly illustrates the differences in the two groups as the NWP is way more intense and not afraid to use force in their fight for women’s rights.
            Throughout the movie, the NAWSA and NWP groups argue about the way they should be fighting for women’s rights.  In the movie, the NWP does things like picketing and shouting on the streets, and burning books to get their message across.  The NWP women often get arrested and sometimes physically hurt by men viewing their protests.  The NAWSA scolds the NWP, saying that they are only hurting the cause toward women’s rights and making it harder for women everywhere.
            By the end of the movie, the NWA women (specifically Alice Paul and Lacy Burns) get send to jail for one of their protests even though they were only using their right to free speech.  In jail they end up fasting and then being force fed by people there and end up almost dying.  Their story gets out and President Wilson ends up ordering them out of jail and deems their imprisonment unconstitutional.  Shortly after, women are granted the right to vote.
            I found this movie to be very intriguing.  It really showed me what it was like for women in the early 1900’s.  More importantly, it showed me what women had to go through just for the right to vote.  I loved this movie and recommend it to everyone!

Grasshopper Plague of 1874 June 26, 2008

A little while ago we discussed the Grasshopper Plague of 1874 in class as we looked at a few pictures and talked about the Mr.Hopper cartoon.  The cartoon is grasshopper that has been mangled from all of the ruckus and the backround depicts the dead, eaten crops and trees.  I found this grasshopper plague very interesting and decided to look further into it.

The bugs that everyone were calling grasshoppers were actually Rocky Mountain locusts that descended on the prairies from the Dakota’s to Texas.  In late July of 1874 millions of these locusts came without warning to Kansas crops and began their destruction.  There were so many locusts in swarms so huge that they blocked out the sun and sounded like a loud rainstorm.  The swarms were so big that when they landed, the locusts would almost completely demolish the entire crop. 

 

 

 

The locusts would even eat things like the wool from live sheep, clothing off peoples backs, paper, tree bark and even wooden tool handles!  The citizens referred to them as “hoppers” and reported them to be so deep on the ground that the locomotives couldn’t get traction because the locusts made the rail too slippery.  The areas that were hit the worst were the ones that were least prepared like Kansas.  To deal with the hoppers, settlers would rake them into piles and then burn them, but this didn’t solve the problem at all.  Some of the people built things they called hopper dozers or grasshopper harvesters to fight any further swarms of them. 

 

 

Source: http://www.kshs.org/portraits/grasshopper_plague.htm

 

 

 

 

Father of the Exodus June 19, 2008

Benjamin “Pap” Singleton was born in 1809 as a slave in Nashville, Tennessee until he escaped to Canada to gain his freedom.  After the Civil War he came back to Tennessee, started working, and soon realized that there needed to be a change in the way that the blacks lived.  He first tried to buy land in Tennessee for blacks to farm, but it was too expensive so he turned to Kansas.  He traveled all through the South organizing parties to colonize in Kansas. One of the ways we went about doing this was by creating widespread advertisements. 

“In 1873, nearly 300 Blacks followed him to Cherokee County and founded Singleton’s Colony, while others settled in Wyandotte, Topeka’s Tennessee Town, and in Dunlap Colony, Morris County. Singleton advocated the organized colonization of African Americans in communities like Nicodemus, first settled in 1877. Between 1879 and 1881, however, the organized movement gave way to an “Exodus” in which tens of thousands of oppressed and impoverished Southern Blacks fled to Kansas and other Northern states.”(http://www.kansasmemory.org/item/209198)

 As a former slave himself, Benjamin “Pap” Singleton is responsible for taking the lead in organizing and encouraging emigration Kansas. Singleton and other emigrants believed that former slaves would be able to lead happier lives in a northern state such as Kansas.

 

Below is a photograph of a steamboat that holds Exodusters in Nashville, Tennessee.  Benjamin “Pap” Singleton and S. A. McClure are superimposed in the foreground.  McClure was another advocate of emigration as well as one of Singletons close associates.  This picture shows only a small amount of the thousands of former slaves that were eager to leave the Jim Crow South.

 

The following two pictures are two examples of the advertisements that Benjamin “Pap” Singleton created in order to spread the word of emigration to Kansas.  The advertisements that he created are a large part of the reason that he is so famous.

  

The advertisement on the left simply promises a better life in Kansas.  The pamphlet on the right was sold by Benjamin “Pap” Singleton as another advertisement to black Southerners telling them to emigrate to Kansas.  The first song, “The Land that Gives Birth to Freedom,” tells about all the hardships of life in Tennessee as well as a better life in Kansas. The second song, “Extending Our Voices to Heaven,” is a farewell message to those left behind.

Was the Indian Removal Act a display of American Nationalism? June 12, 2008

 

 

 

QUESTION:

According to www.thefreedictionary.com, nationalism is defined as: “1. Devotion to the interests or culture of one’s nation, 2. The belief that nations will benefit from acting independently rather than collectively, emphasizing national rather than international goals, 3. Aspirations for national independence in a country under foreign domination.” Based on this definition, is the government’s policy on Indian removal an example of American nationalism? If so, why?

 

ANSWER:

My answer will be a response to the first definition stated above.  If passing the Indian Removal Act was an attempt at being devoted to the interests and culture of ones nation, then America was successful in the business sense.  This sounds harsh, but if we hadn’t attempted to assimilate the Native Americans into our way of life, then the life we enjoy so much today would not be possible.  Realistically thinking, if the Native Americans had continued to live as they were, America would not exist as it does today.  America’s existence requires vast lands to farm and develop on.  Because the Native Americans did not have permanent dwellings or livestock, they would have impeded upon any plans of future expansion and utilization of resources.  So in this sense, the Indian Removal Act was a demonstration of devotion to the interests or culture of our nation because it paved the way for further expansion.  Unfortunately, America’s culture historically regards native people’s ways of life as being savage, primitive, and overall insignificant.  This brings me to my next point of why The Indian Removal Act was also not entirely a demonstration of American Nationalism.

 

 

 

The way we went about implementing Indian removal negatively impacted our nation because it desensitized Americans to the ideas of ethnocide and strengthened our ethnocentric way of thinking.  In the Indian Removal Act, Andrew Jackson regarded the Native Americans as lesser peoples than the American citizens, and demonstrated no respect or understanding for the Native American culture.  American culture was therefore tainted by this ubiquitous way of thinking, causing an intensified racist stigma that carried on for decades to come. 

 

The Indian Removal Act displays devotion to the negative aspects of the culture of America in those times, but despite all the horrible atrocities against humanity that we committed it was also an example of nationalism. 

Hello world! June 12, 2008

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