Which is the Real America?

The first cohort of Liger Leadership Academy is going to take SAT in the 6th of October, and since the history and literature sections of SAT are closely tied with American history, Literacy Round One has focused on the theme of America.

In this class, we were given six American-history texts from CommonLit to read and analysis each week: Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death, Excerpts from Thomas Jefferson’s Writing on American Indians, Causes of the American Civil War, America’s Shifting Views on Immigration, Excerpt from The Jungle, and The Great Depression. To further understand these oppressive issues, we also read additional articles from Newsela and watched videos and part of a documentary series.

Within each text, we had to read, annotate, answer multiple choice and writing prompt questions, research the meaning(s) and part of speech of each vocabulary and write a sentence for each part of speech as well as discuss the text and related topics with our friends and learning facilitator. To better manage our time, we usually talked about the text and any word that we struggled to understand on Monday, discussed about multiple choice questions and writing prompt(s) on Tuesday and Wednesday respectively, and worked independently on our “Vocabulary Exploration” and answered the questions on CommonLit on Thursday.

Personally, I am always eager to learn about world history because it helped me to understand the past events that affect each country today. For instance, when I read and discussed about Causes of the American Civil War, I now fully understand why racism is still a reality in America. Hundreds of years ago, black people were considered an “inferior” species until the point that they were used as “property.” Even though that we now in the 21st century, many Americans still suffer from discrimination, injustices, and exploitation.

In addition to the importance of learning history, these texts has taught me that the America that I used to think of is not always the truth. I used to believe that America is a land that fills with amazing opportunities and happiness; however, after reading these texts, that is not always the case: America has suffered and currently face with many atrocious issues. So, which one do you believe is the real America?

Causes of the American Civil War

Question: Analyze how the differing views on slavery between the North and South resulted in the Civil War.

As the Constitutional Convention of 1787 called both the North and the South to form “a single federal government,” there was a dispute among the two colonies: they had different perspectives on slavery. The North viewed slavery as a sin and therefore should be eradicated; whereas the South, they believed that slavery is “the basis of Southern life”‒ therefore ending it will threaten the Southern way of life ‒ and declared that it is ”ordained by God.” Because of these opposite stances, they had lead to virulence and violence. To abolish slavery, the North “volunteers patrolled streets to rescue fugitive blacks from the slave catchers.” This action has caused the southerners to respond “with an increasingly virulent hateful attacks on their critics.” This shows that the South really did detest the North’s effort to free the slaves. In addition to the adverse effect of their views, two days later after a “scathing speech” was delivered in June 1856, a Southern congressmen “severely beat the abolitionist with a gold walking cane.” This reflects the antagonism that the southerners had toward the abolitionists. These heterogeneous viewpoints on slavery demonstrate how they contributed to the cause of the Civil War.

Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death

Excerpts from Thomas Jefferson’s Writing on American Indians

America’s Shifting Views on Immigration

Excerpt from the Jungle

The Great Depression