ELECTRICITY

Electricity is a very important thing for life today. There are very few people that can live without it. Imagine for just one minute that there were no lights, no computer, no phone, no nothing. What would you do honestly? Many people would say that they wouldn’t care but that’s not true. Most people would start to freak out.
Electricity hasn’t always been around. It was invented in New York in the late 1800’s. Could you imagine the excitement and fear all at once when Thomas Edison introduced it to the city of New York? Life was completely transformed. Mechanization was transformed.
Another thing that was completely transformed was consumer invention. There was an inventing school where many inventions were discovered but few were actually introduced to the public. As more inventions were made at the school people were making more money. There were more jobs offered. All this because of the discovery of electricity.
There were many up sides to electrical power. One big one was that it was safer then gas lighting. Mrs. Roosevelt at first didn’t want to switch to electricity because she thought it was more dangerous then gas lighting. Little did she know that gas lighting was way more dangerous then electric. Gas lighting would and still does cause way more fires then electric.
So next time you lose power in your house don’t freak out just because you don’t have TV. Look at it as an experiment. See if you can live for a few minutes or hours even like people did before electricity was ever introduced or invented. Do you think you can do it? Try it! I dare you!

to the west we go

Towards the end of the civil war people started to move west. This was a long hard trip. They had many obstacles that they had to overcome. Some of the obstacles were weather, lack of water, lack of food, and mountains. There were many mountain ranges that they had to cross or go around. Most families chose to go around because it was safer.
There were many reasons people moved west. One of the reasons was money. This included land acts such as the Homestead Act and Merrill land grant act. Agribusiness was another big role in moving west. They would irrigate the hot dry land, they also made technical improvements. Gold and silver also played a big part. There were many gold rushes in the west. Some of them were in California, Colorado, and Alaska. But very few of them actually produced a good amount of useable gold.
Religion was another reason that people moved west. Most people that moved west were either Methodist or Mormons. The ones that were Methodist usually went to Oregon. The Mormons had other things that determined them. Mormons practiced prosecution in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois. Mormons also liked to practice polygamy. (How they had more then one wife I will never know).
The biggest reason they moved west though was for personal and political freedoms. In the west women and African Americans got more freedom then in the east. African Americans didn’t get freedoms in all states in the west though. Some states that gave African Americans rights were Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, and Colorado.
If you were to ask me I would say that I think people moved west were pretty smart. They got a lot more rights. And they had better opportunities for money. And better religious opportunities.

CIVIL WAR

When I first heard that we were going to be learning about the civil war in history the first thing that popped into my head was “here we go learning about slavery. There is only so much they can teach us about this boring war”. Well I was wrong. I learned so much more then I ever thought I could about the civil war.
For example I learned that slavery was just a minor part of the civil war. The biggest part of it was that states were succeeding. I didn’t know that states trying to leave the us were a part of it. One of the states that tried to succeed was Texas. That was how we got the 6 flags thing. (More flags= more war).
Even though the south fought hard they didn’t win many battles. The reason they didn’t win was because they had less resources then the north. For example they had more land but the north had more weapons, crops, goods, and capital. One of the causes for outbreak during the civil war was the 3/5 clause. Another was the famous case of Dred Scott v. Sanford.
The north had many strengths. Some of their biggest strengths were population, industrialization, and money. The reason that population was strength was because even though the north lost the most people they still won the war because they had the people to lose. Whereas the south didn’t have as many people fighting as the north did.
The most known battle is Gettysburg. The battle lasted 3 days and it was the bloodiest battle in the civil war. At first the confederates were doing well but then the union developed a good defense and won the battle. Gettysburg is also one of the most important battles of the civil war. After Gettysburg ended there were thousands and thousands of bodies lying around and they started to stink up the whole city because of the rain and hot weather and them decaying. So they dug big holes in the ground and just stuck a bunch of bodies in each which is where the little hills in Gettysburg came from.
Another famous battle was the battle of Vicksburg. General Hooker refused to attack the confederates head on. This in turn helped them win this battle. The word hooker comes from general hooker who would get hookers to entertain his troops when they weren’t in battle.