Semester I Speech

The history of the United States of America is not as long as some others but not less important. In this semester we learned about a time period including 60 years of fast developing history. Beginning with the mess, that was left after the civil war, which was consider as the first war that included strategies for a total war, and continuing through waves of immigrants, with highs to a couple millions every year, to the supremacy of the US economy in the world.

Very interesting to hear was the fact that this – one of the most powerful industry in the world – build up its success on corruption and other arguable ways. Like monopolization. And so it´s not very surprising that millions of people in that period of time starved and lived in most dangerous places in the fast growing cities of the late 18 hundreds. And also not very surprising, that the common knowledge, that six out of the ten richest people of all times are Americans of this time period.

A problem that the USA always had is for example a problem with races. Before the time we´re studied the tension was between black and white and Indians, soon afterwards it spread out to many different ethnic groups to hate. Mexicans, Chinese and Catholics – just to name a few more. And a lot of those problems still exist today. What we can see nearly every day when we take a look into the news.

And also the army! I mean first you have a civil war where the own people fight against each other. Followed by a time where its main task is to hunt natives down. And then after a while just used to break strikes. Strikes for a better live just ran over by soldiers – using the army against your own people. And right now? What country in the world spends more money for military forces that are just used to invade other countries? You may discuss that point but there are millions of people thinking this nation has an army that is way too big.

Naming a period of time is a risky undertaking because you need to support your idea in many different ways. In my research I often had the feeling that this time was characterized by industry, money and technology. And when we look back we see that all this evidence appeared before. In the time of 1750 an era took its beginning: the industrialization. And we can draw the connections between 1750 and 1900 were more and more machines are doing the jobs and social crises are getting more likely. But even when we can draw those pretty strong connections I would like to name this time the poly sided age. Money, post war society, growing industry, upturn                and poverty. Corruption and mistrust everywhere! Including deals like: we take our troops out of your territory if you give us another president. We have crime and disasters everywhere and in the same breath we need to name the rising standards for nearly everyone. We have more new patents then in any previous time and also the most unsafe workplaces in history. We have the two sides of the medal – good and bad – gold and nothing. We can see one of the biggest spectrums in human history happening in these 60 years!

And there is something we will remember in 10 years! Right now we got a couple of political issues in Europe with our parties and I’m not sure how we are going to handle them but then again… it can´t be worse than a hundred and fifty years ago right here with a government that was actually nonexistent. But in the same way it is likely that we will remember empathy and sympathy and the experiment were the Dutch engineer refused to hurt someone due to his own experience.

And also I don´t think it will be a problem to remember the strikes beginning in the “poly sided age” because in the same way they were bad… they are also very good memorable. And if you were interested in the history of Native Americans before like I was then you´re on a good way to remember the story of Sitting Bull or Geronimo for quite a while.

I don´t think that the age of the city was very interesting. Except of all the new invention for building them like steel or the elevator. A police showed up because the situation was so bad. Fire departments were build, after a few cities completely burned down. No I´m sure we won´t remember that.

One thing we really don´t need to remember is the fact that the confederation states were economically behind the north after the war. What actually still hasn´t change! And it’s not likely to change in the next ten years.

But whatever our result for this semester is I´m sure the second one will be even better.