First Semester Summary Analysis
Jackson Pearson
When this semester of US History Started, I didn’t know what
to think. I didn’t know what I was going to learn and I did not know if I would
be interested in the stuff were going to be taught about. As the first quarter
started I learned many things about the history of the United States. How the
United States dealt with slavery, and how specifically the south dealt with
slavery, was profoundly interesting to me. The brutality intrigued me the most
because I had no idea how inhuman the southern whites were to the blacks until
we learned about it. Out of the sections we studied in the first semester, the
section “Age of the City” was my least favorite of them all. Although it is an
important time period in American History I simply did not find anything about
it that I thought was that eye opening or particularly interesting. Out of the
whole section the only thing that appealed at all to me was the railroad
strikes, and how the other strikes happened, I do find it beneficial to have
learned about the United States’ economy through this time period because it is
good to know how our economy got to where it is today. In ten years I will have
forgotten a lot of the specific details from first semester of US History,
however I feel as if I will remember the section that we studied the Native
Americans. I think it is important to know who was hear before we come to this
continent and what happened to all of the Indians that were here. The issue
that I see that keeps occurring in American History is the how the government
deals with poverty. Even when the economy was booming the poor had horrible
working conditions and were not making very much money at all, they lived in
small rooms that they were crammed into because that’s all that they could
afford. Even today the poor has multiple families living in the same home and
the government has still not been able to find a solution to poverty that
works. After learning about all of the events in US history from 1865 to 1920,
I have decided the name of this period of time should be called the “Booming
Period”. It should be named this because over this period the US went from a
decently small economic country to a country that has a working economic
system, and a flourishing middle class. Based on what we learned, the economy
in the US went from (in today’s terms) a Razor flip phone to an IPhone 6+. It
had improved dramatically, kind of like a boom. Hence the “Booming Period”. In
the earlier part of this time period you would have seen buildings that were
only a few stories tall and stared in awe, but at the end of this period a 30
story building was something that could be seen in the cities with skyscrapers.
