Lies my teacher told me Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words

Lies my teacher told me - Essay Example Gone with the Wind focuses not on the hardships of slavery, but the injustices of the Union Army and Reconstruction. This is very misleading. Did the South face hardships at the hands of the Union Army? Of course they did, they lost the war. However slaves also faced injustices. In Gone with the Wind only one slave was whipped for not taking care of a hot horse (Mitchell 51). In Bullwhip days: The slaves remember: An oral history (Mellon 2002:39) a slave recounts numerous whippings with blood and blisters all over a slave’s back. This is what happened according to a witness. However all races of students would be uncomfortable with this image. That is why history has to be smoothed over for children. Is it right that teachers lie to students? No, it is not right. One human trait is to separate people, events, and history into a good and evil category. The truth is not all slaves were beaten by their white masters, but many were. Not all white people owned or even believed in s lavery, but many did. History needs to treat events as humanly as possible. That means judgment does not need to be passed, but history needs to be presented through facts not emotion. Slavery was not a clear cut issue. It is difficult, but needs to be addressed by all races. Bibliography Loewen, J. W. (1996). Lies my teacher told me. New York: Touchstone. Mellon, J. (2002).

Industrial Revolution in Britain Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

Industrial Revolution in Britain - Essay Example England, having a profuse supply of laborers to mine coal and iron, meaning a good supply of industrial fuel, possessing colonies that serve as her sources of raw materials and as her markets, achieved a head start over its European equals in the phenomenon of Industrial Revolution. Most importantly, England's isolation kept her from wars bombarding other European countries, and allowed her to continue industrializing without disruption (Rempel). Industrial Revolution induced the widespread use of machineries for manufacturing. England went through the phenomenon beginning in18th Century. Soon, more things could be done quicker and labor costs became cheaper. The process changed England from an agrarian, handicraft economy into a machine-dominated manufacturing industry. This bought for England greater economic potentialities and urbanization. Urbanization as an effect of industrializing made England evidenced an increase in population, as well as the emergence of several new social classes (Rempel). An advent of factories in places where palpable resources of coal and other essential materials could be found was set up in the process of rapid industrializing and urbanizing. Concentration of work forces in these locations was then called for. Eventually, these areas were developed to great cities with established political centers. The problem was that these so called "factory" and "mining" towns became so crowded and swamped that no good living conditions were experienced. Sanitary provisions are found lacking, and diseases spread across these swamped areas. "The dreadful living conditions in these new towns can be attributed to lack of good bricks, absences of building codes, and the lack of machinery for public sanitation. Yet the more tenable cause was the fact that factory owners offered little regard to the laborers as they treat them as commodities and not as actually human beings with important needs" (Rempel). These towns then sprouted new categories of British social classes. Factory owners became the new bourgeoisie and the men, women and children became categorized as the new working class. The more alarming incident here was that women and child labor emerged prominently in this period. Yet, more and more people moved to these cities in search of the higher profits that was seem guaranteed in working for these industries. Unfortunately, the industry workers were not to become well-off despite having jobs. This is so because they play second fiddle to the sophisticated machines, and were often degraded to routine process laborers, working long hours yet receiving low compensations under quite inauspicious conditions (Rempel). Longer hours meant reduced leisure time even though their material consumption did not increased. It was apparent that the workers become concentrated on factories and mines, and less on agriculture, where half of the population was in a century earlier. Employment in agriculture as a percentage of the population declined rapidly. By 1850, only one in four British could be said to be working the land and as had been said, employment growth at this point in time took place mostly in traditional manufacturing service industries (Voth, 2003). Therefore, wage increases that would have been expected from