More from Arizona

Well, I have received my first piece of mail while staying here! My brother very graciously offered to let me use his really nice camera while I am here and it arrived last Thursday. So that has been really exciting! I've already had a few opportunities to use it and I'm looking forward to being able to document my trip through photos! Right now I am helping one of the teachers here by downloading audio books for her class, which is quite the extensive process! I don't really have any regular jobs, I help clean up the cafeteria after meals though. But besides that I mostly go around doing what people need to have done and try and make myself useful. The weather has been very interesting, it snows a lot but normally all melts away by the end of the day. At this point what I do most is probably games and puzzles, I've done 3 puzzles in the last 3 days. 300 piece, 300 piece, and 550 piece. Today I'm hoping to get a start on a 1000 piece puzzle!

Margaret Sanger

For school today I was supposed to read a little article about Margaret Sanger and write a blog summary of what I learned.

Margaret Sanger was the woman who founded planned parenthood. People will say that planned parenthood is a good thing to have in today's world with so many difficult situations that aren't fit for a newborn child, and others say that all life is precious and that planned parenthood is a terrible thing. Whatever side of that coin you are on, it would seem that Margaret Sanger was on neither. The main point that the article was getting across was that Margaret Sanger more or less started planned parenthood to get ride of children who were going to be born with defects, she is quoted in a biography saying, "By all means, there should be no children when either mother or father suffers from such diseases as tuberculosis, gonorrhea, syphilis, cancer, epilepsy, insanity, drunkenness and mental disorders. In the case of the mother, heart disease, kidney trouble and pelvic deformities are also a serious bar to childbearing No more children should be born when the parents, though healthy themselves, find that their children are physically or mentally defective.” (“Woman and the New Race,” 1920, Chapter 7)."


The whole article was filled with very interesting points and a fair amount of Margaret Sanger's quotes. I would urge you to read it to at the very least get a different perspective on the ideals that the planned parenthood industry was founded on.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/may/5/grossu-margaret-sanger-eugenicist/

A History of US 1880-1917 Part 1

        While I am in Arizona I am reading a book series called A History of US by Joy Hakim for my history. I brought along two books, the first, An Age of Extremes, is set from 1880 - 1917 and the second, War, Peace, and All That Jazz is 1918 - 1945. Everyone once in awhile I will be posting updates on what I have read from these books.

          The first few chapters of this book were about men who found ways to use the changing ways of America to their benefit and great profit. A well known early American businessman was Andrew Carnegie. Young Andrew Carnegie was born in Scotland, his father was a weaver who was out of a job and his mother was the practical one keeping the family together. It was she who decided that the Carnegie family should pack up and move to America. This decision was a very good one for Andrew Carnegie's welfare. He worked his way up job by job, promotion by promotion and pay raise by pay raise. When he was 33, Andrew Carnegie was a very rich man and he wrote a note that promised himself that he would work for two more years and then help other people. Sadly, it would seem that Andrew Carnegie forgot about that little note, he had become the king of the steel industry and showed no signs of stepping down. Carnegie was making millions, and his workers were living in the slums, they had very poor working conditions and many were injured on the job and left to take care of themselves without any help from the company. The workers of Carnegie's steel factories started to go on strike, very much like Andrew Carnegie's father had done. But that did very little to phase the great Andrew Carnegie, he was on a vacation in Scotland. Then, one fateful day in 1901 a very wealthy banker named J. Pierpont Morgan offered to buy out Carnegie's company. With the money from Morgan, Andrew Carnegie would become the richest man in the world. Maybe it was that prospect that made him take the deal, or maybe it was that little note he had written to himself years before that reminded him to help other people who were less fortunate than him. Whatever the cause, Andrew Carnegie drastically changed his lifestyle. He started donating money wherever he could. By the time he died, Andrew Carnegie had donated $324,657,399. When he learned of that number he is reported to have said, "Good heavens! Where did I get all that money?"

That was just one of the people I read about, so I will continue to post updates on as many people as I can.

Trip to Immanuel Mission

For the next two months I will be living at the Immanuel Mission school in Teec Nos Pos, AZ. A family from my church, the Suns, work there full time and we visited them a few years back. So I decided to go and help out for a little while. I am staying with a very nice family, they have 6 boys under the age of 10 so there is never a dull moment. There is no phone reception here but I am able to have access to a computer once or twice a day. I also get a chance to go into town about once a week to get groceries and other such necessities. The weather hasn't been too amazing, my first day here I was welcomed by 5 inches of snow and once that melted they cancelled school because the dirt roads were too muddy. However the scenery is really quite spectacular! We are surrounded my large mesas and outside of those, depending on the weather you can see some mountain peaks out in the distance. once the weather improves and the ground is less muddy I am very much looking forward to taking long hikes and seeing more of the surrounding area. I'll be posting updates roughly every other week.

The Reconstruction Era

            The Reconstruction was the time period directly following the civil war. It was a time where the meaning of being a citizen of the United States of America was redefined. The slaves had only recently been freed and the north and south had freshly been merged together. There was a lot of conflict between peoples, north and south, black and white, and between different political parties. But despite the conflicts there was incredible growth in the United States. The Reconstruction of America lasted from 1865-1890 it was during those years that the likes of Tomas Edison, Mark Twain, P.T Barnum, Boss Tweed, Ida B. Wells, and many more famous Americans made their name know.

            Immediately following the war, blacks knew a freedom that they had never experienced before. But that freedom quickly turned to oppression that was quite possibly worse than what they had endured during the war. Amendments such as the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments were made to protect the rights of black Americans by giving them the opportunity to vote and legally do anything a white man could do. But even though the amendments had been passed, many people found loopholes to the rule that made it so that they could oppress black people without it technically being because they were black. For example if a store owner had a rule that only people who could read and write were allowed in his store, there was a good chance that would apply to a vast majority of the black Americans as many of them had not ever received formal education. But even still others would attack black people illegally. During the reconstructing there was a sickening amount of black men, women, children that fell victim to the horror of lynching. Some people saw lynching as an act of vigilantism, but in reality they were more or less hate crimes. Killing someone purely because you didn’t like who they were or what they looked like, and in extremely inhuman ways is far from vigilantism.

            But the reconstruction era was not just a time of hardships for black Americans, it was hard from all Americans. There was a lot of confusion on how the government would be run and how laws would be passed and other such things. But despite the confusion and conflict, the reconstruction era was a time that would shape the United States of America into the country it is today.

Jim Crow

There isn't actually a real Jim Crow it was a made up term to represent the policy of segregation. A Jim Crow law was a law that specifically applied to people of color. For example, whether a black man could sit in the front row of a bus would be considered a Jim Crow law. Jim Crow was thought up because so many people had a belief in white supremacy. Not all whites were behind the Jim Crow movement. A newspaper from Charleston, South Carolina said, "The common sense and proper arrangement, in our opinion, is to provide first-class cars for first-class passengers, white and colored....To speak plainly, we need, as everybody knows, separate cars or apartments for rowdy or drunken white passengers far more than Jim Crow cars for colored passengers." There was a lot of conflict on whether Jim Crow laws were constitutional or unconstitutional, I am inclined to think that they were unconstitutional.

Theodore Roosevelt

One of the next people in history that I had to learn about was our 26th President, Theodore Roosevelt. As a boy Roosevelt was commonly referred to as Teedie, he suffered from a fairly severe case of asthma and had to live a very active and strenuous life to combat his natural weakness. He found great interest in animals and different parts of nature. From an early age he would capture animals and collect dead bugs to have a "museum" in his house, much to the dismay of his mother. Roosevelt was a very intelligent boy and would eventually attend Harvard for college. When he was 22 Theodore married Alice Hathaway Lee, together they had a daughter named Alice Lee Roosevelt. But two days after giving birth his wife Alice passed away from kidney failure. I learned in my research that Theodore Roosevelt was originally a Vice President until President William McKinley was assassinated. Roosevelt would be reelected to serve a second term, he was in office from 1901-1909. Before becoming President, Theodore made a name for himself by his actions in the military he was ranked as a colonel. He wanted to be called Colonel Roosevelt or The Colonel, but normally people just called him Teddy. The name that most people know him by today.