chlorine changed the world.

via chlorine changed the world.

A couple of weeks ago, Professor Blum told us that he didn’t want us to fully read our history book, yet he didn’t want us to skim it either. Instead, he called for us to, “Bite into the text,” and find phrases and ideas that are called upon frequently during the book. I’ve been reading a lot, but only now do I truly understand what he meant at the time. It looks delicious, doesn’t it?

-Brandon Beal

Walking to class I noticed this on the wall of one of our halls. 83 years ago this was built by the United States Works Progress Administration. Later renamed the Works Progress Administration or the WPA it was the largest and most ambitious American New Deal agency, employing millions of unemployed people (mostly unskilled men) to carry out public works projects, including the construction of public buildings and roads. Pretty unbelievable if you ask me.

Walking

This isn’t a hack or assignment or anything, but I just wanted to upload a couple pictures of the history sessions for next Friday and Saturday. It just took me a really long time to find all of the history sessions and I thought that it might be easier if I just put them in one place to save a little time of searching for all of them. I know that there are a few more history sessions than just the ones here, but I figured I would put the ones that were clustered together on here. Hope this helps.

-Yvette F

Today, February 27, 2015, Leonard Nimoy has passed away at the age of 83. As I am sure everybody reading this knows, he played the legendary role of Spock, a half human half Vulcan, in the original Star Trek movies along with William Shatner as Captain Kirk and Nichelle Nichols as Uhura. Nimoy and the character that he played was not only a part of Star Trek and science fiction history, but also real history. African Americans received the right to vote on August 6, 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended all state and local laws requiring segregation just three and two years before Star Trek premiered. Also, one year before the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Star Trek featured Nichelle Nichols, one of the first African American, female characters on American television that did not play a servant when she played Uhura.  In chapter 12 (page 371) of Major Problems there is a picture of the original Star Trek cast showing “ethic diversity and inter-species harmony”. RIP Leonard Nimoy.

Found a pretty interesting map breakdown that explained present day economic inequality in the United States.  I thought it really pertained to what we learned in lecture earlier this week.

Professor Blum showed us this picture in class this week and taught us that durring the 20’s this was a negative view of how women should dress durring this time because they were showing “too much skin”. This was women rebelling against the societal norms durring the 1920″s.

Over this week, my friend and i were watching movies created by studio ghibli. This particular movie named The Wind Rises struck my fancy for more than one reason, for one it was unlike anything they’ve done before, and the second reason is because it told the story of Jiro Horikoshi in a fictitious biographical way. Before watching this movie i didnt know who he was, but after watching it and looking up information about him. I learned that he was a japanese aircraft engineer during World War II, most known for the Mitsubishi A6M Zero. While the movie wasnt 100% biographical, it did have enough biographical information to show some insight as to the person, the time, and the place.

-Nick Thips-

We were talking about the economy and also a little bit about the inequality. I like this picture because it contains important information about a wide spread issue in our society. Furthermore, there should be more focus on this topic, as it influenced a lot of people and their standard of living,  and thats why the kitten is there to catch your attention.

The wage gap is sadly something that has put women in a career long dis-advantage. It is incredible to see that we are able to make such drastic changed in our society but yet something so crucial has not changed in over 50 years!