Bill Gates, Andrew Carnegie, and Leonardo da Vinci

We recently learned about Andrew Carnegie.  Carnegie wrote an article about what he called the "Gospel of Wealth".  He believed that anyone who wealth like he did had the moral obligation to give it back to the community in hopes that it will further advance the society.  I personally think that this idea is incredible.  I can also think of a circumstance that it still exists today.  Bill gates bought the Codex Leicester.  This was a 72 page document that Leonardo da Vinci had written.  It basically just recorded all of his various thoughts throughout time accompanied by diagrams and self drawn pictures.  Nevertheless, this codex is a huge part of history and a connection to one of the most brilliant minds of history.  This extremely valuable document was auctioned off where it was sold for just south of 31 million dollars to Bill Gates.  Bill Gates has since made available to the public.  He has published it online after having it translated from Italian.  This to me resembles the Gospel of Wealth that Andrew Carnegie tried to upkeep.  Carnegie also had the brilliant idea of not leaving his kids any money because he thought that they should be able to earn their own money.  Mr. Gates also has the same idea in mind with his immense fortune.  Bill gates also made the Leicester Codex available for view around the world.  He lets it be displayed at various museums around the world changing museums from time to time.  I wish I could see other collectors of vast wealth give back to the community of the world as Bill Gates and Andrew Carnegie did.

Who Really Won the War?

Recently, we finished the documentary we had been watching for a few weeks in class. The ending of the documentary greatly surprised me.  The Civil War ended and with that I expected the documentary to come to a close but this documentary was about slavery and not the Civil War and apparently discrimination against black people greatly endured past the Civil War.  It got so bad, that the north just decided they no longer even cared about the south and they could do anything they wanted to do to free black Americans.  Organizations emerged that people wanted to shut down.  I now have an explanation to how there was so much discrimination in the sixties, for example, even though it took time much after the Civil War.  I always wondered if slavery was ended during the Civil War how do we find so much discrimination so long after the war.  What also interests me, is how the north were just as guilty in the sixties as the south but during the after period of the war they were the ones trying to stop the discrimination.  Did the north actually win the war?  The south ended up brainwashing the whole country into thinking that black people were inferior to us and henceforth created discrimination far worse than anything seen in our country's history.  Congratulations to general Robert E. Lee the true victor of the Civil War.

Source C and D

The test we took seemed relatively easy to me.  The lack of any matching, or multiple choice section greatly changed my opinion on the difficulty of the test.  The fact that the whole test was writing perturbed me but also sort of relieved me of the stress received from multiple choice questions.  I remember replying to one of the questions saying that the two men writing in source C and D were deliberately bashing the white people who upheld the rights of the Deceleration of Independence.  They both had different approaches to the matter.  David Walker called told the men that they were not simply following what they wrote and that they needed to therefore justify their claims of liberty.  The other author declared that the document was more suggestive of the apparent matter that white people obviously viewed slaves as property and not people.   I think David Walker was still under the impression that if he wrote this letter and people read it; they would immediately assume that there was in fact something done very wrong in the United States of America.  Source D was more correct in pointing out that any American would pick up this document, read it, and then laugh because they see a slave claiming to be an actual human being and not just a piece of property that is sold and bartered.

It's Not All The White Guy's Fault

Through the very interesting documentary that we have witnessed in class, quite a few interesting and profound subjects come up.  In my American Literature class, we have just read the short passage about certain slaves being upon a slave ship and the absolutely terrible horrors they had to endure while spending time on the ship.  However, from the reading, I now understand that it was not only the fault of the white men for the enslavement of many of the Africans.  Indeed the white people conjured up the idea and without them even coming to Africa the Africans could still be at peace in their homes in Africa today.  The white people were the ones who treated the Africans like dirt or even less then dirt and it still remains their entire responsibility to what actions they took so many years ago.  The Africans, however, played a great deal in the slave trade as well.  The king in the passage we read was selling Africans willingly to the Europeans for different goods.  The Europeans probably did not want a fight with the slaves and they did not want to lose some of their own "product" so they went to the king and offered him goods in exchange for strong young men and women.  In conclusion, it still strongly remains the fault of the white people for enslaving these Africans but not all of the blame rests on the shoulders of the white people.  As I have said before, it definitely could never happened if the white people had not gone to such lengths, but the Africans did in fact play a part in the enslavement of their own people.

Ms. Adams was Strong

We have learned about the liberties that certain colonialists had to encounter and wished that they could encounter while in the early United States.  Ms. Adams talked of how she thought of liberties so that she could just sustain herself and her children.  Ms Adams also mentioned in a letter to her husband of the importance of women's rights.  I think Ms. Adams was a strong women for having the tenacity to stand up to men and ask for her own rights and the rights of her gender.  She was obviously a very caring person if she risked the chance of infection of her children while giving them inoculation.  My essay is now basically formed on the same principals that I originally hoped it would be.  Now, however, I am building my road map on judging too quickly, savagery, and conformity.  This meaning that Rowlandson and Equiano thought that their captors were savages, they judged them too quickly and the only way for Rowlandson of the white men to accept anyone was for those people to conform to their way of life.  This essay then suggests the American ideal that if someone does something American does not like their whole civilization is shunned.  This is basically true for all human nature in my opinion but that does not mean it cannot be an American ideal.

Equiano and War and Captavity the same?

Alex Cvercko
American Studies
Hoffman 4A



In the reading we received on War and Captivity, we noticed how a woman with a family was abducted and she lived with the native Indians of the area.  Throughout here kidnapping she would commonly refer to the Indians as savage like creatures or refer to their actions to be of savage like nature.  She says the way that they eat and fight depict them as savages.  In the reading of Equiano, we see how a young African boy is deported from his home land and enslaved by white men.  At first he is very scared by the white men and even thinks that they will try to eat him.  His approach on these Europeans was almost the exact same as in War and Captivity.  Equiano saw these white men as savages who used magic and would easily eat him if they became low on food.  These two separate accounts show how the people in these situations are just so ignorant of each other and immediately hone onto the word savage.  The individuals in these stories were quick to judge without much to go on.  The stories mirror each other almost.  In both stories, the main character is stolen from his\her home land and thrown into many different new people who did not spake their language and who they instantly supposed as savage like people or capable of savage like actions.