Author: chihin.lau

05/2/11

War protest songs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBdeCxJmcAo

The song “Feel-like-I’m-Fixin-To-Die” was written by Joe McDonald and originally performed by Country Joe & The Fish in 1967. It was a specfic anti-war protest song about the Vietnam war. McDonald used “What are we fighting for?” to indicate the Vietnam war was totally unnecessary and he also used the word” we’re all gonna die” to show the war was a disappointment and hopelessness.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duTKDlPXCQg

The second song is “21 Guns” by Green Day. It was released in 2009. The song shares the same idea which is anti war. It does not mention what specfic war is and I think it fights for general peace. Some of examples like ” Do you know what’s worth fighting for?”, “Lay down your arms, give up the fight” and ” Throw up your arms into the sky, you and I”, are showing the idea of the song.

War is always exist in the history, even today. I think the protest songs in the past are mainly focused on a specfic issue, like the first song about Vietnam war; but today war protest songs are more general.

04/26/11

The Anti-war movement

The War in Vietnam and the Cold War foreign policy eventually brought the Anti-war movement in the U.S. in 1960s. More than half a million American troops were sent to Vietnam and about 60,000 were dead when U.S. exited the war. Since more and more Americans, specially the young, against to be sent to fight in a foreign country, the anti-war movement was getting strong.  The leader of SDS(Students for a Democartic Society) openly chanlleged the idea of  Cold War thinking and linked Vietnam to a critique of American interventions in Guatemala and Iran. “Martin Luther King Jr. condemned the administration’s Vietnam policy as an unconscionable  use of violence” declared Foner.

Below is the speech of Martin Luther King Jr. “Why I am opposed to the war in Vietnam”

04/26/11

The Golden Age of television

Television was the first audio- visual media that let people watched live events while they were sitting in their living room. According to Foner, “By the end of the 1950s, nearly nine of ten  American families owned a TV set.” Beside the affordable price, tv was a simply entertaining media also. People could choose what they wanted to see by switching different channel. Television also became the most efficient way for advertising. Companies broadcasted their ads through the televisions.

04/4/11

Truman’s Fair deal

The fair deal was a legislation program announced by President Truman in 1945.President Truman called the Congress to increase the minimum wage, expand the public housing, Social Security, national health insurance, and aid to education. The purpose of this legislation aimed the economy from wartime to peacetime.

I think this such of legislation program was a  inevitable result after WWII because the goverment had to do something to help those soldiers. In order to  give them a stable life, the goverment provided them a job, house and education opprturnity.

03/21/11

Old nine vs. New six

The title of this cartoon was “Furnish the Court…Assistant”, which was published on 2/6/37,by Elderman in Washington. This cartoon responded to the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937, also known as Court packing plan. His purpose was to regulate the New Deal legislation that was ruled unconstitutional before. According to the plan, the President could nominate maximum of six Justices to the Supreme Court.

The six people on the top were the Justices that nominated by Roosevelt and those nine people were the old Justices. Those nine Justices looked serious and those six were not. I think the cartoonist tried to imply those six were just listen to President and support every decisions made by Roosevelt. So they were not taking thing serious.

03/14/11

Hard life during the Great Depression

Picture above: Free food was distributed  in some urban centers to large numbers of the unemployed.

Picture on the left: Number of people who were unemployed and looking for a job.

During the Great Depression,the unemployment rate reached a extremely high point. Ten of thousand of people lost their jobs and they were just kept looking for a job. However, it was impossible to satisfy everyone. The amount of unemployed people were so great meanwhile the job opportunity was so less. When the people lost their job, they could not provide food to their families, not even themselves. Therefore, the government provided free meals to those people. The Great Depression made a terrible effect on everyone and it took a more than ten years to recover the society.

03/7/11

Arms race in WWI

The picture on the left indicates variety causes of WWI. Arms Force plays a important role in WWI. Since the alliances was formed after 1871, it led to an armaments race among the powers. The tension was being serious between when Germany passed Navy Laws in 1900.

02/23/11

The Italian Immigrnats

Italian family arriving in NY in 1905.

An Italian woman ‘rag-picker’ in her living space, with her packs of junk, few possessions including her straw hat hung on the wall behind her, and a child in her lap.

Both of the people above are Italian immigrants, but the top one seems like have a better life than the woman at the bottom.During that period of time, if those immigrant can speak English and educated, probably they will have a easier life than the people who do not.

02/7/11

To face the fact

After reading David Blight book, I found that was quite interesting to me because I always doubted that the actuality of history, especially the long past history, someone might falsify the truth but we didn’t know. In David Blight book he revealed the people who were forgotten by us was like discovering the truth, so it was quite interesting to me. Also I think everyone might benefit from reading this because we should learn the right history.

The book review tells me the idea that historical memory can be remembered in different way. The examples from the book review are on page 2, during 1870s, some of the Southern publications described slavery as “faithful servants who protected their masters’ property”. The second example is in 1877 after Reconstruction, most of the Northern and Southern whites accepted the Negro rule.

One of the historical memories which were remembered in different way was Nanjing massacre in1937; approximately 300,000 Chinese people were killed by the Japanese soldiers. However, now what the Japanese government trying to do is putting an invented history in their textbook. I think the reason behind this action is the Japanese government tries to fix their bad image which is “cruel murderer”.

02/1/11

One day you may not have privacy

Since the internet technology was improving, most of the people shared their thought or information on xanga, blog, twitter such kind of network service. However, before you wrote something, had you ever imagined that everyone could see what you posted on your space? From March, 2006, all the tweets were stored at the Library of Congress, which means all the twitter users’ information was stored too. Wikileaks document dump does the same thing, but more than that. It exposed variety of unknown of different countries. For sure the governments don’t want Wikileaks keeps running, and the owner had a lot of troubles from them, but it provides historian some secret information and help them to analyze different events. Therefore, not only for now but future also, historian could easily find information by sitting in front of the computer instead of reading a whole bunch of books.

Undoubtedly archiving tweets and Wikileaks document dump help so much by gathering the information; nevertheless, some may ask what about their privacy? This is a serious issue because some don’t want everyone knows about them. Also is it necessary to archive all the tweets? I doubt because most of the thing people posted on twitter were just meaningless, such as “My cat just scratches me!!” Therefore, this issue should be concerned earnestly.