Kitty Pryde-Barton (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
throughaphase) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandomhigh2013-09-15 09:58 pm
throughaphase) wrote in fandomhigh2013-09-15 09:58 pm
Entry tags:
Modern American History- Monday- 2nd period
The Danger Shop today looked like a very quiet battleground. There wasn't any fighting going on, and there wouldn't be, but if the students looked closely they'd see people moving around in the trenches.
And happily, their teacher was a girl again who was totally headed back to her boyfriend's house to celebrate that fact... after she got done talking about World War I. Yeah, she could have planned this better.
"You can probably make a guess at what we're going over today, but for the moment let's focus on the stuff going on at home," Kitty began. "The 1910's had a lot going on, but a lot of the stuff in the States at that time gets a little overshadowed by other stuff. America was becoming heavily industrialized, and our pop culture was really beginning to catch on in other countries. We got the Federal Reserve Act passed, which gave us a Central Bank that gave everyone the same money, because for like eighty years before that, we didn't have the system we do now. Think about what that must have been like for a second. The first American movie,the meta for Oliver Twist, was released in 1912, the same year the Titanic sunk. You may have heard of it. It was a ship on its way from Southhampton in the UK to New York City, only it never made it on account of iceberg. Labor unions were beginning to become a bigger thing due to problems like unsafe working conditions. A super good example of this is the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, which is what killed 146 garment workers who couldn't escape a fire in their building because the doors were locked. Because who cares about things like safety when someone might take an unauthorized break, right? Two of the women who died were fourteen, which also helped to establish state laws for working ages.
"And speaking of things that are insane to think about now, 1919 is when women here finally got the right to vote. I know I'm a big fan of that one, personally. To give you an idea of how long it took to make progress here, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton drafted this forty-one years before Congress finally ratified it, and another year before it became the nineteenth amendment to the Constitution. So, go America.
"When I asked the other week, the wars were what most of you wanted to learn about, so we're mostly going to focus on World War I today," Kitty went on, finally passing out this week's handouts. One was a basic fact sheet of the presidents and the dates important things happened, and the other was one specifically on World War I. "In 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was visiting Serbia when he was assassinated. The region had already been having problems with imperialism and all, meaning that money was basically ruling everything, but that assassination was the last straw, and a month later, Austria-Hungary fired the first shots of the war. After that, more and more countries ended up getting sucked into the conflict, which ended up with the Allies, consisting of places like the UK, France, and the Russian Empire, with Japan joining in later. Then there was the Central Powers, which was Hungary, Germany, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria. And for the four years the war went on, basically everybody just attacked everybody else.
"If you're wondering where the US was in all this, Woodrow Wilson tried to keep us out of it, saying we were too proud to fight. Then in 1917, almost three years after the war began, Germany sank a British ship called the Lusitania, which killed over a hundred Americans. We still weren't getting involved, except to try and put limitations on the Germans to quit attacking passenger ships. Germany said 'Okay, sure, no problem' and then restarted submarine warfare, knowing it would get us involved. So what they did was send a telegram to Mexico asking them to join the Central Powers' side against us, and in exchange Germany would help finance Mexico's war to reclaim Texas, Arizona and New Mexico. The problem was, Britain intercepted this telegram, showed it to us, and between that and the fact that Germany was still sinking our merchant ships by doing the thing they'd specifically agreed not to do, we went to war. Also, Germany thought that they'd be able to cut the US off before we could do any real damage, but ha, that did not happen. The US was never an official part of the Allies, but we did fight on their side, and the fact that we were sending 10,000 troops a day to France did kinda help."
She should have brought water, god. "In 1918 the Allies began the Hundred Days Offensive, where Germany's morale began to crack, and they were losing battles, and Austria and Hungary wouldn't be helping them out anymore, and then the armistices started. The one with Germany came at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month- aka Veterans' Day- and a ceasefire was declared, and in the following years, treaties brought the war to an official end. In the aftermath, more than nine million soldiers were dead, and Europe began breaking up more into what we know now. The German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires were done, with different countries forming in their wake, and the fact that the US became such a power, especially economically, was going to end up as a factor in the Great Depression. Fun stuff all the way around."
And happily, their teacher was a girl again who was totally headed back to her boyfriend's house to celebrate that fact... after she got done talking about World War I. Yeah, she could have planned this better.
"You can probably make a guess at what we're going over today, but for the moment let's focus on the stuff going on at home," Kitty began. "The 1910's had a lot going on, but a lot of the stuff in the States at that time gets a little overshadowed by other stuff. America was becoming heavily industrialized, and our pop culture was really beginning to catch on in other countries. We got the Federal Reserve Act passed, which gave us a Central Bank that gave everyone the same money, because for like eighty years before that, we didn't have the system we do now. Think about what that must have been like for a second. The first American movie,
"And speaking of things that are insane to think about now, 1919 is when women here finally got the right to vote. I know I'm a big fan of that one, personally. To give you an idea of how long it took to make progress here, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton drafted this forty-one years before Congress finally ratified it, and another year before it became the nineteenth amendment to the Constitution. So, go America.
"When I asked the other week, the wars were what most of you wanted to learn about, so we're mostly going to focus on World War I today," Kitty went on, finally passing out this week's handouts. One was a basic fact sheet of the presidents and the dates important things happened, and the other was one specifically on World War I. "In 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was visiting Serbia when he was assassinated. The region had already been having problems with imperialism and all, meaning that money was basically ruling everything, but that assassination was the last straw, and a month later, Austria-Hungary fired the first shots of the war. After that, more and more countries ended up getting sucked into the conflict, which ended up with the Allies, consisting of places like the UK, France, and the Russian Empire, with Japan joining in later. Then there was the Central Powers, which was Hungary, Germany, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria. And for the four years the war went on, basically everybody just attacked everybody else.
"If you're wondering where the US was in all this, Woodrow Wilson tried to keep us out of it, saying we were too proud to fight. Then in 1917, almost three years after the war began, Germany sank a British ship called the Lusitania, which killed over a hundred Americans. We still weren't getting involved, except to try and put limitations on the Germans to quit attacking passenger ships. Germany said 'Okay, sure, no problem' and then restarted submarine warfare, knowing it would get us involved. So what they did was send a telegram to Mexico asking them to join the Central Powers' side against us, and in exchange Germany would help finance Mexico's war to reclaim Texas, Arizona and New Mexico. The problem was, Britain intercepted this telegram, showed it to us, and between that and the fact that Germany was still sinking our merchant ships by doing the thing they'd specifically agreed not to do, we went to war. Also, Germany thought that they'd be able to cut the US off before we could do any real damage, but ha, that did not happen. The US was never an official part of the Allies, but we did fight on their side, and the fact that we were sending 10,000 troops a day to France did kinda help."
She should have brought water, god. "In 1918 the Allies began the Hundred Days Offensive, where Germany's morale began to crack, and they were losing battles, and Austria and Hungary wouldn't be helping them out anymore, and then the armistices started. The one with Germany came at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month- aka Veterans' Day- and a ceasefire was declared, and in the following years, treaties brought the war to an official end. In the aftermath, more than nine million soldiers were dead, and Europe began breaking up more into what we know now. The German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires were done, with different countries forming in their wake, and the fact that the US became such a power, especially economically, was going to end up as a factor in the Great Depression. Fun stuff all the way around."
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"In the first year of the war, on Christmas Day, the two sides declared a truce for the day and played soccer in No Man's Land between the trenches. With the state of war being unlike anything the world had ever seen before, the soldiers were able to put the violence aside for a while and play with their enemies. Why do you think that is? Do you think you could do the same in that situation?"
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He hadn't actually known about this happening. They'd missed that part back home.
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