You are currently browsing the daily archive for July 23, 2008.
Typically, in all 30,000 of the American History classes that I’ve taken, the main theme revolves around the government and how they affect history. My textbooks are all titled The American People, The American Experience, or America in the Global Context. Very rarely do we ever talk about specific people or news that happened on a micro level. Sure, you know, World War II is important, but I’ve learned about that before and I’ve sure that there were things going on during the war that had nothing to do with the war. That’s what I would like to know. Being in a class about Kansas History has done a little to satiate that desire, however we still related major events to how it affected Kansas.
I’m a very creative, authentic, and anti-authority person. I like to create original things or perform things in a way that no one else has. This gets me in trouble a lot of the time because I want to do things my way and not how someone else tells me to do it. In fact, in writing this blog I really tried to avoid talking about things or doing things that everyone else was already doing.
So anyway, while sitting in class stewing over the possible intricacies of learning the things I talked about in the first paragraph I realized something: it’s hard. How can you talk about things that aren’t particularly significant in the wide spectrum of things? What are the things that affect normal people’s lives throughout history? For example, in 40 years, what will people study about the 90s and the 20-otts? Let’s explore this shall we?
I didn’t graduate high school until 2001, so the global events of the 90′s didn’t have a significant impact on me. My dad worked full time, my mom worked part time while me and my brother were at school. My biggest interests were, music(band, choir, oldies, pop), wrestling, learning to drive, video games, learning how to talk to girls, and overcoming oppression by my parents. Times have changed. 10 years later my interests are well, still video games, the internet and how it has changed business and can be used as a tool to make money, traveling, dancing(i like to swing and hip-hop), business in general(you know, how to make money), and learning how to get over my social anxiety and be more open to people. These are all things that I say affect my life the biggest. It wasn’t until probably just this summer that I actually started to pay attention and care about political movements. I think basically, what I’m saying is that I would really like to learn about daily life throughout the time periods. Of course, then we probably wouldn’t get the full picture, god forbid. For now I’ll leave it up to VH1 to inform me about pop culture.
There was a really neat mini-series about the 60′s that came out a few years ago. It had Julia Stiles in it. It had a stereotypical family and then followed them as they got involved and were affected by all the things that happened in the 1960′s. I’m not entirely sure how accurate is was, but it was really neat to watch.
