The first week of lecture Professor Blum was constantly talking about how history is all around us, or better yet, how we are “haunted by history.” I was at The Habit for lunch and saw this sign that literally described the history of the restaurant I was in. This is a perfect example of how we are living in parts of history every day without even knowing it. This restaurant didn’t just appear out of thin air, but was carefully planned in the past and has evolved into what it is today. Although it is different from the first Habit, it has the same premise that was put into place over 40 years ago.

“If it were not for this dead lady,  women would not be writing books about other women, or have a say in society.” I hacked a bibliography of Elizabeth Cady Stanton that was co-written by both a man and woman. About 150 years later a book was published glorifying a feminist fighting for what she thought was necessary even when no one was at her side. Without Stanton and her fight for women’s rights in the 1860’s, the 19th Amendment would never have been ratified. If the 19th Amendment was never ratified, who knows what our nation would be based upon today. Elizabeth Cady Stanton jump-started the feminist movement in the 1800’s, and us females have her to thank for taking charge against authority back when that was unheard of.

Group 4 answer

Vietnam being called a mistake cause cynicism and public suspicion because the propoganda leading up to the war was so convincing, that for main media to go back on that, the U.S. Public was caught holding two contradicting beliefs.

These two beliefs were a) it was just for the U.S. to send troops into Vietnam and now b) it was a mistake to send u.s. Troops into Vietnam. This was hard for the public to accept because if they were to go back on what they were told before, what’s stopping them from going back on what they were saying now?

A few classes ago, Professor Blum mentioned Pavlov’s theory which immediately made me think of this episode of The Office. Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov noticed that every time he walked in the room to feed his dogs they would salivate, demonstrating that something that is associated with the event of them being fed triggered the same physical response from them. He took this even further as he conducted an experiment in which he rang a bell every time he gave the dogs food, and found that the dog began to salivate at the ring of the bell. In this clip, Jim conducts the same experiment but replaces the dogs with Dwight, the bell with the sound of his computer starting up, and food with an Altoid mint.

On February 2nd, Professor Blum lectured about the Progressive Age, a time of societal progression including the establishment of organizations and institutions in order to prepare for career fields such as law and medical.  Specifically, during this time period, the rise of colleges was imminent and in 1901, the College Examination Board was established.  This board would go to find the first standardized test, the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) in 1926.

About a week later, as I was sitting in Stats 119 A, the teaching assistant began to talk about the difference in score value from when the SAT was first administered to the value today (we later found the z-scores for two scores given and found that an the first SAT had more value for a certain score).  This got me thinking and since I had learned how the SAT was founded, I started wondering what the history of the evolution of the SAT was.

According to Petersons.com (2014), the SAT at first was a spin-off of the Army Alpha, which was the IQ test given to recruits to test their IQ.  Overall, the SAT has changed in the way it has been administered (time wise) and the way it is divided.  When first administered, the SAT was mainly a 315 question mathematical based standardized test with some language questions mixed in and had a 97 minute time limit.  Since then, the language questions have been growing to the point where to scoring scale was 1600 and then the essay was added in 2005 with a scoring scale of 2400.

As Professor Blum said himself: “We are haunted by history”.  There is a history to everything, even a pre-college aptitude test.

YG showed up in LA this past weekend for as a guest for a show. He started breaking down some song lyrics, specifically “I call my homies not 911” means that YG doesn’t call the cops when he is in a pinch, because they won’t help him out, but his homies will. This shows the ongoing struggle between the black community and police officers

Yg (blue shirt) at the Palladium in Hollywood, CA

So as I was about to watch Nextflix, I looked over and realized there was a TV rating in the description for the show. I thought of the lecture when Linnea was going over the TV and music ratings and Parental Advisory. This shows how history is a part of our day to day lives.

When I was reading Chapter 23 of HIST that was about World War 2, it reminded me a lot of my grandmother. She was born in the Manzanar internment camp when all the Japanese people were sent to different camps. My family and I have visited the camp site, which is now a museum, multiple times, most recently this past summer. It was especially interesting when we went that time because it happened to be on her birthday that we visited her birthplace. This hacking assignment inspired me to talk more with her about that experience. She shared a lot with me about it but something that stuck with me was that following the liberation of the camp, they all received a letter from President Bush that apologized and offered a sum of money. This gesture was appreciated, but the sum of money did not compare to what the families had prior to being ripped away from their homes and jobs. The first image is of the wall that has all of the residents of the camp’s names on it, of which we took a picture of my families names. The second picture is the sign of the camp.