Final Blog Prompt

Research Proposal Presentations

So day one of presentations went pretty smoothly as we got to hear about Petrarch's Renaissance with contrasts of humanism and Christianity, how war affects Christianity, reality versus delusions, patriarchy in the modern world, birds in literature, and heroes in society. 

This is a huge variety of topics and it was just day one! Each presentation was like a breathe of fresh air and it was interesting observing the different topics people came up with and listening to the reason why they were interested in this topic they've chosen. Everyone pretty much kept the class intrigued and gave plenty of eye contact and side notes that weren't on the slides. It added to the effect of the presentations nicely.

Then came day two with more fresh ideas. It went from the significance of the number seven, Sappho and gender roles,  and Antigone in modern politics, to how religion has changed over time, feminine roles in ancient Greek literature, and the literary exploration of feminism in the Canterbury Tales. 

Such broad areas were explained with lots of detail and pictures and each presentation was livelier and just as interesting as the day before. Nobody had trouble projecting and collecting their thoughts really. And each person answered questions to the best of their abilities which was admirable. 

Brave New World

Brave New World (Blog #6)

Christopher Columbus has a day designated to him. He is well known throughout all American history classes. But do we really know him and what he truly did that faithful day he ran into what he called the "Indies"?

This man that sailed the ocean blue in 1492 is actually not what he seems as we learned from reading "Diario" a story and reading of a mans diary recollecting the tradgedy that happened when they encountered these "Indians" on their own land.

Met with kindness and generosity from the naïve and gullbile natives, Columbus takes advantage and takes all of their valuable trinkets for things of almost no value on his end. He is a truly treacherous man from this point of view. And not only does he take these peoples gold and tobacco, but he then proceeds to try and take them as servants for his king and so that they can be converted to his religion, Christianity. They were no more than objects in his eyes.

I believe that Columbus really just wanted to say that he found something and the natives were in the way of that so he had to get rid of most of them. This is why he used biological warfare to take them out as he realized they weren't immune to smallpox and the sort.

This goes to show that Columbus was actually much more evil than we first anticipated when learning about him in grade school. This shows that we should always look deeper than the history books.