The Roaring '20s

As Sarah said in her blog, everyone knows that the twenties were a time when everyone had fun. Everyone partied all the time, organized crime sprung up as a result of the prohibition, and at the end of the decade the stock market crashed and our country entered the Great Depression. However, what I wanted to know about the twenties was how far in advance did the people in charge of money (i.e. the government, banks, etc.) know that we were in trouble? It seems like governments often keep things on the DL until they have no choice, or until something happens; I want to know if they had some advance warning this time and tried to prevent it in secret, and if so, how far before the stock market crash did they know something was going to happen?

Book Report Thoughts

I rather enjoyed this assignment, although I probably would've enjoyed it more if I had done it sooner...but that's ok, it was still interesting. I read Night by Elie Wiesel, as I know a couple other people in the class did. The book is Wiesel's memoir about the Holocaust. I felt particularly affected by this book, and it's definitely one of those books I'll never forget reading. When we learn about the Holocaust, we learn about the statistics of it - that 6 million Jews and a total of 11 million minorities were killed during the Holocaust. We are told that the conditions of the concentration camps were terrible. We learn facts. However, Wiesel gives it from the perspective of someone who actually went through the Holocaust. And he doesn't leave anything out - he doesn't skip over those ugly details that none of us want to hear. I think he has several reasons for doing this; for one thing, I think he simply wants to tell it like it is. For another thing, I think he wants us to remember his story, so we don't forget what has happened and what could happen in the future; he doesn't want us to forget what humans are capable of doing to each other. It's those graphic, heart-wrenching, awful things he relates in the story that makes you remember the rest of it. Although infants being used for target practice is something I would rather not picture or have to think about, it's details like that that will make me remember this book forever.

Pages 124-137 in our lovely space-themed textbook

I was a little confused about the first question - "What is it about the interwar years that tell us that WWI was a terrible tragedy?" I was confused because there were a lot of things mentioned in the text book that this could be referring to, and depending on your personal viewpoint, you could say these things were either good or bad, or both - the harnessing of the power in the atom, the communication developments, the technological advancements, etc. My first thought as to the answer to this question was that this was the first war in which armies were made of millions, not thousands; the technological developements allowed a lot more people to be killed at once; and the affect of the war lasted a lot longer than previous wars. However, the text book never really said this directly; it mostly talked about individual aspects, not one specific thing that made the war a terrible tragedy. Of course the war was a tragedy; millions of people were killed, many for no reason since the majority of the war was a stalemate and therefore killing people on enemy sides wouldn't weaken them any more than it would weaken your allies. The question just makes it sound like there was one specific thing that made the war a tragedy, not a bunch of things. So my question to everyone is, what was this one specific thing?