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History of the United States

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MingLee On August 05, 2009

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Anaheim, California
#16New Post! Jun 02, 2009 @ 06:13:01
Eleventh Word: Declaration of Independence
Category: Foundation

Short Answer -- A document published by the American patriots when they declared the colonies independent from the British Empire. It is sometime called the birth certificate of the United States.

Ming's Answer

The American Declaration of Independence might be the most important Enlightenment document. One part is a list of complaints about the British king, but most people don't read that part. The slogans, All men are created equal etc, echo in other famous American documents. For example, Lincoln's speech at Gettysburg . . . a new nation, dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. And King's dream speech, I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.

The slogan about all men being created equal has influenced political discourse in other countries. For example: It's one of the first lines in the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence.
MingLee On August 05, 2009

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Anaheim, California
#17New Post! Jun 02, 2009 @ 06:26:59
Twenty-Fifth Word: Enlightenment
Category: Foundation

Short Answer -- The word, Enlightenment refers to a period of time that is the end of the Renaissance and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Many Enlightenment philosophers, Hobbes, Locke, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rousseau, and Paine wrote about the nature of government, and the American founders read their books.
MingLee On August 05, 2009

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Anaheim, California
#18New Post! Jun 02, 2009 @ 06:45:30
Fifth Word: Reformation
Category: Democracy

The Reformation is a word that historians use to describe how the Catholic Church split into two groups. Splitting, a phenomena known to the Catholic Church as schism, happens periodically among Christians. The schism known as the Reformation is important to American History because it resulted in the formation of various kinds of Christianity known as Protestantism. Just like Christianity was formed by Jews; Protestantism was formed by Catholics. Most of the British colonies that became the United States were formed by various of these new kinds of Catholics.

Some people think that in England, the Reformation promoted freedom of speech, another subject dear to the American heart. For reasons of his own, Henry VIII, an English King, decided that he would no longer be a Catholic. That made criticizing Catholicism a safe thing to do, and that led to a tradition of criticizing authority. During Henry?s reign, criticizing Henry might have gotten one?s head lopped off, but it lead to a tradition of open discussion.
MingLee On August 05, 2009

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Anaheim, California
#19New Post! Jun 02, 2009 @ 06:52:01
First Word: Romans
Category: Democracy

More than 2000 years ago, the Romans lived in what is now Italy. They may have even used the word, Italy, or the Latin equivalent to refer the peninsula that modern geographers call Italy. A Roman author, Virgil, wrote a poem, The Aeniad, which refers to Italy as Italy, even though several cultural groups, Etruscan, Roman, and Greek shared the land. Americans admire how the Romans, who initially were dominated by the Etruscans, threw off the Etruscan yoke.

The American government takes some of its forms from the Romans, who had a written law code, two legislative branches, and they called themselves a republic.

Americans are sticklers for written law, the idea of which goes back before Rome, but maybe at the time, written law codes were less common. It would be a point to study.

Americans call one of their legislative branches, the Senate, just like the Romans, and for a little over one hundred years, Americans called their government a republic. For reasons that are unclear to me, during The Great War, sometimes called the First World War, Americans began saying democracy instead of republic.
MingLee On August 05, 2009

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Anaheim, California
#20New Post! Jun 02, 2009 @ 13:59:31
???? Word: oops
MingLee On August 05, 2009

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Anaheim, California
#21New Post! Jun 02, 2009 @ 14:03:36
Tenth Word: Senate
Category: Democracy

One hundred people, elected by the American people, are the Senate, which is one part of the Federal legislature. The word, Senate, probably came from the Roman senate. The founders debated about having one house or two in the legislature. Some, like maybe Thomas Paine(?), thought one house would be more democratic. Some, like John Adams, agreed that one house is more democratic, but thought that in this case less democracy is better.
MingLee On August 05, 2009

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Anaheim, California
#22New Post! Jun 02, 2009 @ 14:25:17
Thirtieth Word: Greeks
Category: Democracy

Democracy, a word that Americans use to mean majority rule comes from the Greeks, who like Judaism and the Romans, contributed to the American theory of government by supplying the vocabulary. Voting to elect leaders must have been common in all Indoeuropean people, but the Greeks did it on a large scale.
Nullzone On October 28, 2010




London, United Kingdom
#23New Post! Jun 03, 2009 @ 13:21:39
@MingLee Said

Voting to elect leaders must have been common in all Indoeuropean people, but the Greeks did it on a large scale.



Not quite.

Athens had a true democracy of adult male citizens but this form of government only lasted for a very short period of time. Other city states had voting of a very limted franchise but it's not something that wa widespread and was in all likelyhood an import od mesopotanian practices.
MingLee On August 05, 2009

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Anaheim, California
#24New Post! Jun 03, 2009 @ 21:23:57
@Nullzone Said

Not quite.

Athens had a true democracy of adult male citizens but this form of government only lasted for a very short period of time. Other city states had voting of a very limited franchise, but it's not something that was widespread and was in all likelihood an import of Mesopotamian practices.


When I typed the words, large scale, I wondered how large might be large. My guess is that the notion that the Greeks governed themselves by democracy may come less from historical information, like voting lists and population records, but more from archaeological digs which have found places with marble seats where people could debate or vote.
MingLee On August 05, 2009

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Anaheim, California
#25New Post! Jun 04, 2009 @ 23:19:42
First Word: Jamestown, Virgina
Category: Foundations

What would happen if you poke a hontas? Well for one thing, she might poke you back. Or her husband, John Rolfe, might poke you. On the other hand, Pocahontas might have been one the non-belligerent previous residents of Virginia when the three Virginia Company ships arrived in 1607, so maybe you could avoid being the pokee. A United States coin, the Virginia quarter, shows the three ships landing at Jamestown. If you look closely, you can see Pocahontas waving from the shore as the ships land. Of course, she skedaddled almost immediately because a group of hostile residents attacked the colonists. As near as I can tell, historians have no clue as to the motive of the attack. My best guess is that the residents knew that white people had iron weapons, which would provide an advantage over other tribes in the area with whom they were probably in constant warfare.

Jamestown became the first capital of the British colony, Virginia (until 1699?). For a short time, Virginia included the Bahamas, but almost immediately they became a separate colony. The British had had other colonies in the America?s, one in the Carolinas and one in South America. American school textbooks don?t say much about them except that they were not financially successful. Another possible colony was located in Nova Scotia, but it is part of Canada; and while it was successful as an exporter of fish and whale oil, maybe it didn?t have any permanent residents until after Jamestown.

Some books mention a list of commodities, like iron ore and lumber, which colonists exported, but they must have been relatively minor after Mr Pocahontas, John Rolfe, began exporting tobacco. The Virginia Company did explore for minerals, but I think Powhatan copper jewelry might have been the only mineral discovers. A colonist had a lead mine from which he smelted lead to make musket balls. He kept the location secret, and when he was killed, the location was lost. Tobacco continued to be the major crop until after the invention of the cotton gin, but other crops were exported. George Washington grew corn, (maybe?) hemp, indigo, rice, and tobacco, and he experimented some with cotton. After he left government service; he distilled whiskey, which over the next hundred years replaced rum as the American drink.

John Rolfe says in his diary that in 1619 he bought African laborers. Historians disagree about whether they were slaves or indentured servants. How African laborers became different that European laborers seems to be a mystery. One version the story suggests that Africans had a tradition of living as slaves. Also, they may have borrowed money for which they pledges more years, and the tradition of Africans as permanent slaves in Spanish colonies might have arrived first in the Carolinas when British colonists from Barbados began planting rice. However it happened, the African labor made possible Virginia?s success. Virginia?s economy must have been almost all agriculture until manufacturing began in Wheeling after the construction of the Cumberland Road.

Virginia is a birthplace of presidents, Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Harrison, Tyler, Taylor, Wilson.
MingLee On August 05, 2009

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Anaheim, California
#26New Post! Jun 05, 2009 @ 04:38:49
Second Word: Frederick Douglass
Category: Foundation

In California, school children sometimes compete in fund raisers to raise money for the school or the Parent Teachers? Association. They sell things like magazines subscriptions, candy, or restaurant discount coupons. My grandfather delights in confronting them. If they look Asian, he says, ?Tell me about Kung Tz." To girls like maybe girl scouts, he says, ?Tell me about Susan B. Anthony.? For Black children, he wants to know about Frederick Douglass. Ninety-nine percent of the time, the children have no clue about how to answer. I?m always interested in the parents? reaction, especially Black parents who respond to the child with a look of incredulity, ?What? Chile? You don know ?bout Douglas??

Even though Douglas has become as nonperson, even to Black people, he must have been one of the most famous talking heads of the nineteen century. Before the Civil War he worked as an abolitionist. After the Civil War, he was a Republican apparatchik and an Ambassador to Haiti. The National Park Service owns his home in Washington DC, which they operate as a museum. Probably for me, the most interesting exhibit is his copy of a book, the title of which could be ?The Columbian Orator, ? which he like Abraham Lincoln, he read and used to polish speaking ability. While I googled to find the title, I learned that he had other books which Lincoln also read to hone his speaking and writing skills, books like the Bible, Aesop?s Fables, and works by Shakespeare, Lord Byron, and Robert Burns.

Considering how well known Douglass had been in the nineteenth century, his obscurity seems odd. This Douglass is not Stephen Douglas, the Senator from Illinois. Even Google has trouble knowing the difference.

Douglass began life as a slave. In his book, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, he describes his lack of clothes, one new set per year, no bed but the ground, and being beaten by slave overseers for insufficient effort at work. While working for his master in Maryland, he escaped to New York by pretending to be somebody else. In New York he met William Lloyd Garrison, maybe the most prominent abolitionist of the time. He traveled in Europe as a talking head. When he returned to the United States, he began publishing a newspaper, The North Star. After the Civil War he worked as a government bureaucrat.

He doesn?t appear to me to have been bitter. Considering the grim nature of his early life, one wonders how he managed to avoid the view espoused by Malcolm X, a view which involved contempt and hatred of white people.
MingLee On August 05, 2009

Deleted



Anaheim, California
#27New Post! Jun 05, 2009 @ 05:39:55
Third Word: Nat Turner
Category: Foundation

Do gangbangers ever bag groceries or work at a car wash? I have no scientific survey on which to base an opinion, but I think the answer is, ?no,? because their tattoos make them unacceptable in public. With that in mind, I always wonder if Nat Turner had tattoos.

Nat Turner led what history books call a slave rebellion, but maybe riot might be a better category. A rebellion should have some kind of objective. If Turner had an objective, we may never know it because he was killed before he could publish it. I suppose he might have known about other slave rebellions, like the one which led to the expulsion of the French from Haiti. The Haitian rebellion might have led him to believe that he could be successful. If he knew about the one in New York in the early eighteenth century or the one led by Spartacus against Rome, both of which ended in death for the slaves, he might have been less bold.

Turner?s Rebellion preceded the Civil War. It must of terrified white people in all parts of the nation, and it must have hardened people?s opinions, both for and against slavery. The abolitionists opposed slavery and supported emancipation because of their belief in its immorality. Slave holders in the South and people who expected to become slave holders supported slavery because it was the way to wealth. My guess is that ordinary people in both the North and the South either supported or opposed slavery because they were terrified of Black people. People in the North opposed slavery mostly because they didn?t want slaves and their associated violence to come to the North. People in the South opposed emancipation because of the expected associated violence.

Looking from a twenty-first century perspective, such views might be hard to understand. An archaeological dig in New York City can give us an idea of how Africans might have terrified the white population. The dig appears to be the remains of the slaves who were killed in the early nineteenth century slave rebellion in New York. The bodies have tattoos and filed teeth, something like modern gangbangers, the kind of people who would be too scary to bag groceries or work in a car wash.
Bloodshot On November 17, 2010

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in your mind, Mongolia
#28New Post! Jun 05, 2009 @ 05:45:33
what is the point of this thread excactly ??, and if there is one where are you going with it ??
MingLee On August 05, 2009

Deleted



Anaheim, California
#29New Post! Jun 05, 2009 @ 12:19:26
Initially, like I said in the first post, a boy I know wanted help studying for his history final. He has changed his mind, so that reason is gone. However, he gave me his study guide, so I decided to define the words on the study guide. If anything I post is incorrect, I would like to know that.
xtreme On April 05, 2012




dirty south,
#30New Post! Jun 05, 2009 @ 12:59:51
@MingLee Said

Second Word: Judaism
Category: Democracy

So vats a Jew? My grandfather delights in telling a story about how two white boys come into a Chinese restaurant. They ask the waiter, ?Are there any Chinese Jews?? The waiter says, ?We got orange juice and apple juice, but no Chinese juice.?

Metaphorically, that suggests the idea that Jews are all over the world, even China, just like every city has a Chinese restaurant. People that read about World War Two may read about the Jews of Nanking.

Americans study about Judaism because initially Americans were mostly Christians, and a group of Jews were the first Christians. The Jewish holy book is a part of The Bible, the Christian holy book. The idea of a written comes from the Jewish holy book. The idea of written law predates the Bible, but the American founders probably didn?t know that, a point to maybe study further.

Equality before the law and even the king must follow the law are two ideas, which are central to American law, and they may have a biblical origin.


wow minglee i just learned some stuff there that goes to show you
that you are never to old to learn thank you young lady
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