Slavery, Expansion and the Civil War + the impact of the civil war

Today we had to work in groups of four. We had to read three pages in our English book about the sivil war and slavery in America at the time. After reading theese pages we wrote a summery of the text, and here it is:

Slavery

There was another group of people that suffered a terrible fate theese years, the slave that was kidnapped from Africa and transported to North America. Slavery was part of the Amercian society, but slavery gradually died out in the Noth because of growing trade, industry and selv-sufficiency in agriculture. The slavery grew in the south because of the devolpment of huge cotton and tobacco plantations, and the south and north developed in different diractions. However, they were both expanding west-wards, and this led to an increasing conflict between them.

Expansion and Civil War

The basic issue between the North and the South was which part of the country would control the new lands opening up in the west. The result was compromises with limited slavery to territories in 1850. In 1854, it was decided by law that slavery was allowed to expand westward. To keep this from happening, a new political party was formed; the Republican Party. Republican Abraham Lincoln fought for the slaves rights, and he became President in 1861.

When Abraham Lincoln became American president, civil war broke out between North and South. Eleven Southern states left the Union and formed the Confederate States of America. The North was the strongest part with a population of twenty two million (to the South's five and a half million) and most of the industry and railroads. The South's, on the other hand, fought next to home and they had better generals.

The civil war lasted for four long years. It ended in 1865 with victory won by the North. 600 000 Americans had lost their lives in the war.

The Impact of the civil war:

The South were occupied by Northern troops for a time, and efforts were made to provide blacks with skills, give them their civil rights, and protect them from their former owners. But after a time, the North grew tired of "babysitting" the South, so they pulled their troops out, and Southern states regained self-government. The southerns gradually took away the civil rights of the blacks and separated the races. It would take almost a hundred years for blacks to regain their legal and political rights.

The war ruined the South economiclly, politically and culturally. Even though it regained some of its former strength, it remained poor in relation to the rest of the country for the next century. While the North and West experienced a rapid industrial development, the South turned inwards. It remained an agricultural economy

The battle of Britain and the blitz

A few weeks ago we learned about the WW1 and Britain's role in the war. In groups of four we were to make a presentation to show for the rest of the class about the Battle of Britain. I wanned to post what I talked about in my blog, and that was why the battle of Britain happened, and how:

To invade Britain Hitler had to wipe out the Royal Air Force, which would otherwise attack German vessels as they crossed the Channel. Things looked bad for the RAF: they had 650 fighter aircraft, while the Germans had 1,300. Between July and September 1940 there was dogfight after dogfight , and the British planes proved superior to the Germans. The royal air force suffered heavy losses, but the Germans lost twice as many men and aircraft. This was the first major battle of the war the German force lost.

Maria, another girl on my group, talked about the Blitz:

After the lost of the battle of Britain, Hitler was very frustrated and in August 1940 he sent German bombers to attack the big cities in England. Hitler believed that by targeting civilians he could force the British to surrender. Hitler started his daily bombing campaign, but after just a few weeks he started the bombing raids at night to increase the “fear factor” and also make people weaker and not letting them sleep at night. In May 1941 the Blitz was finally over when Hitler moved his air force east to the Soviet Union. 43 000 civilians had been killed, and thousands of others had become homeless.The word “Blitz” came from the German word Blitzkrieg or “lightning war” in English.

Queen Elizabeth 1

The homework for today was to write a summary about the first settlement to Queen Elizabeth 1:

The very first Britons were hunters and gatherers who left no written records. We know of the earliest Celtic inhabitants through archeology and the written records of the first literate people to settle in Britain, the Romans. Britain was a Roman province for several hundred years, until 401 AD. By the 6th century England's present territory was divided into a patchwork of small kingdoms with a Celtic rim to the west and north, and the time that came after this was affected by, among other things, Vikings that invaded the coast. The turning point came in 866, when the Anglo-Saxon king Alfred of Wessex defeated a great Viking army. The Anglo-Saxon kings managed to unite all of England by 905.

Between the 9th century and the 1500 a lot of historical things happened, but I will short it down to two paragraphs, and jump straight to the time when Elisabeth 1 came to the throne. She was the daughter of king Edward V1, who died only fifteen years old, after two years at the throne. Her reign, the Elizabethan age, became flowering of arts and literature, this was the era of for example William Shakespeare. She was a very intelligent women, she maintained peace at home and strength abroad, but one fight she could not avoid was with Spain. The king of Spain found he could neither marry her, as she declined that, nor change her policies, as she ignored his threats. In 1588 he sent a fleet of 130 ships to invade England, but England defeated the Spanish Armanda. The win over Spain marked the beginning of England's great power and was the start of what would eventually become the British Empire.

The documentary about Siegfried Sassoon (sum up):

The world war 1 poets were brought up in a romantic era. They had the image of wars being fought with dignity. But things weren't like expected when the soldiers came to fight the war. Millions of young men were sent out to the trenches and died in the battlefield. The soldiers weren't prepared for the new guns and machinery that they had prepared for the WWI, plus; the war was fought on foreign ground in France.

Sigfried Sassoon wrote poems and articles in the Times that were critical against the war. He wrote that at the beginning, the war was about protecting the country, but at the end, it was about conquering and aggression.

The government put him in a mental hospital because of his opinions. The reason they chose a mental hospital instead of a jail was that they simply couldn't lock up a well known Marshall from the war in jail for no specific reason. That would have caused massive riots and antagonism among the people.

Does it matter?

DOES it matter?--losing your legs?...
For people will always be kind,
And you need not show that you mind
When the others come in after hunting
To gobble their muffins and eggs.

Does it matter?--losing your sight?...
There's such splendid work for the blind;
And people will always be kind,
As you sit on the terrace remembering
And turning your face to the light.

Do they matter?--those dreams from the pit?...
You can drink and forget and be glad,
And people won't say that you're mad;
For they'll know you've fought for your country
And no one will worry a bit.



1.Losing your legs, losing your sight and losing your dreams is the three effects of the war on a soldier this poem touch on.

2.The poem reflects on the attitude that great wars were fought by working-class men on both sides and that the people they were fighting for, were often more the enemy than the people they were fighting against. This is shown in the repeating sentence: “people will always be kind” as long as you fought for you country. The poem says that the people who didn't fight in the war themselves goes on living their lives, while the soldiers have lost big parts of their lives in the war, like their dreams, legs or their sight.

3.Our theory on why this poem has become so popular now is: it was a big honer to fight in a war for your country before, and most young boys had a dream about becoming a soldier, but now more people understand what it contains to be a soldier in a real war, and how it changes a lot of people to face death and loose so much of their life as brutal as in a war.

About me..

My name is Camilla, I live in Norway and I am a student at Sandvika high school. One of the subjects I chose to have this year was English social studies. Last year I studied a subject called international Enligsh, where we learnd about English as a multicultural language. This year we will learn more about British and American history. All of the students in my class got the assignment to make a blog, where we can post our homework and other things related to this subject.

My hometown in Norway is Lommedalen, in Bærum. Bærum is about 30 minutes from Oslo, the capital of Norway. Lommedalen is a small place, with a lot of great nature and nice people. More and more people have moved there the last years, it has become a very popular place to live. I have to take the bus for about half an hour every day to get to school, but that's OK because almost all of my friends live nearby or in Lommedalen as well.